Driving home I was a passenger, like someone else has the wheel. I watched the sun come up on the longest day and the longest night, and I knew sleep could not come quick enough. At some point, in the middle of some long, straight stretch of tarmac I asked myself what day it was. Friday? Saturday? The white lines raced by reflected in the rear-view mirror, and the rising sun burned the low grey cloud a dull orange. Something had changed. They say it happens the first time those eyes look at you. They have no colour, and everything they see is unknown… yet you recognise them.

You see yourself in them.

Tags: general, looking back by generalboy
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In the next stage of the movie of my life I plunge myself into moto-x racing, obviously to help me forget Sandy. My parents are excited when I win my first club race, and there’s another montage of me going to bigger and bigger race meetings, pulling wheelies as I cross the finish line in first place, and holding trophies aloft on podiums. I’m doing really well until the accident ( you knew that was coming, right? ). The scene is horrible - I get mud flicked up on my goggles and suddenly can’t see. As I work frantically to get them off someone hits me from behind ( slow-mo ) and I go down… and then about 15 bikes run me over. They stop the race and my mum runs onto the track where I am lying in agony… my last memory before the scene fades to black is of her face above me… and I wake up in hospital.

While I am lying there feeling sorry for myself in my sick bed, I get a visitor. He’s the local service station owner and a friend of the family, and he tells me I better get well soon because he wants to sponsor me. He hands me a contract and I sign on the dotted line and everyone drinks Coca Cola ( product placement ) to celebrate. Before long I am back into racing and winning again, but soon I come up against the factory sponsored riders in A-grade. They make fun of me in the pits and call me “Caltex cowboy”, laughing because they all have 3 bikes and factory gear while I have old gear and one bike. In typical Hollywood fashion there’s an underdog showdown where I beat them all, and they are forced to respect me. The Suzuki team rider shakes my hand after the race and says something cheesy like “you can really ride man”, a phrase no-one in the sport would ever use. The audience thinks I am content… but there’s a quiet scene where I am going to bed, and I pull out a crinkled old photo of Sandy and stare at it for a long time.

The ski trip cheers me up, and I meet up with my best friend Chris, who the writers have renamed “Joey”. Joey and I ski all day and race each other down black diamond runs. One night I meet a girl and we play music on my ghetto blaster all night, and I go toboganning with her the next day. There’s a long scene set to music where we throw snow at each other and I chase her around. It’s only a matter of time before we fall over, inevitably lock lips, and are overcome by holiday romance. Joey gets jealous and storms off, but we have a reconcilliation later. The girl has to leave early and we share a lingering kiss goodbye, then she is gone forever. This device is supposed to indicate I have gotten over Sandy. Some time later I meet a pretty girl at the railway station who dares me to kiss her. I accept her challenge in front of my friends, and they are dumbfounded. This scene seems totally out of place in the film and is inexplicable.

Fast forward to my late teens, and cars and girls and parties and drinking. Several signs tell the audience I am starting to go off the rails. You see me playing drinking games, getting into fights, and later vomiting. Then there’s a scene where I have some girl in the car screaming at me while I drag race somebody. There’s a close up of the speedometer showing 220km/h. Things look like going from bad to worse… then I meet her.

I spot her across a party crowd, she’s talking to someone and I look all distracted. “Who’s she?” I ask one of my friends. She has long, alpine blonde hair and fine, high cheekbones, with sparkling blue eyes. For a second she looks my way… before returning to her conversation. She is the one. I finally summon up the courage to talk to her, but as I get within arm’s length some other guy muscles in… and I am forced to retreat. You think it’s all over until I hail a taxi to get home. As I open the door and get in, someone opens the door on the other side and gets in at the same time, and we both say to the driver where we want to go at the same time. Of course, it’s her, and this breaks the ice. We laugh and end up sharing a cab, and by the time we stop at her place it’s like we’ve known each other forever. I say “I feel like I’ve met you before… maybe in a past life”. She says “you never know”. She pays the driver, gets out and pushes the door closed. I tell the driver “wait!”, and I roll down the window and call after her. “What’s you’re name?” I yell. She stops and turns back, and yells “Louise!”. I then yell back, “Soo… Louise… what are you doing tomorrow night?”. She pauses and smiles, tilting her head as if she’s considering something. She walks back to the cab and pulls a shopping docket out of her purse, pressing it up against the glass and writing something on it. She hands it to me and says “ask me tomorrow”.

As she retreats I unfold the piece of paper. There’s a close up of the phone number. I smile whimsically, and the cab drives away…

( …to be continued )

Tags: about GB, general, looking back by generalboy
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I’d be born with only a midwife and no doctor, on some run down farm in the middle of nowhere. At age 2 I’d have some horrible accident, and end up in hospital, my life in the balance for several days. My parents would hold hands a cry a lot. I’d pull through, and become strong and healthy, and soon have a little sister to play with. At age 5 I’d run away from home because I was jealous of the attention she got, carrying a stick over my shoulder with a tied up handkerchief of food on one end. Once again my parents would be worried sick, but I’d be found hiding in my cubbyhouse, hugging my teddy. I’d say “I wuv you mummy”, and they’d melt, cue uplifting orchestral piece with lots of strings.

At 7 years old I would walk past a motorbike shop and tell my dad I wanted a motorbike, and dad would say “when you’re older, son”. There’d be a nice montage of me catching tadpoles and lizards, and making kites with my dad, and riding ponies, to illustrate the passage of time. At 8 years old there’d be another scene out front ot the motorbike shop with me peering inside, and telling dad “I’m older now!”. But the next two years there would be a dreadful drought, and by the time the rain came my parents would be virtually broke.

At 10 I would meet my first love, the writers would call her Sandy because of her sunny complexion and honey blonde hair. Sandy would live in a big house on the hill, and her family would be rich - to contrast my family’s poverty. Her father would be a tyrant who would banish common stock like me from their property - so Sandy and I would have to meet in secret.

One day Dad would take me to a motocross race, and I’d never be the same. I’d become obsessed with getting the motorbike, but with mum and dad so poor I would have to work for it. There’s another montage of me doing all sorts of backbreaking farm work with close up shots of sweat on my forehead, and toward the end, my hands bleeding. The next scene is where I walk into the bike shop and dump $550 on the counter. Of course I have messed up and I am one dollar short. The bikeshop owner winks at my dad and pretends I can’t have it until I work an extra week… and I look crushed. Then he says “tell ya what kid… clean the showroom window and it’s yours”. As soon as I get the bike home, I ride over to meet Sandy and show her. She jumps on the back and we ride off down by the river. It’s all shot in soft focus with music and close ups us smiling and laughing, her arms wrapped tightly around my waist. When we get home she’s in big trouble. Her father forbids her to see me ever again.

I am devastated because I love Sandy, but I never tell her this. Through school she meets Larry, who is from a rich Italian familly. He is handsome and funny, and her father approves. My heart is broken. Plenty of footage of me crying follows.

( …to be continued )

Tags: about GB, general, looking back by generalboy
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Many times in our youth we are reminded, more often than not by our parents, that we are living “the best years of our lives”.

All things being considered, at that stage in your life it’s hard to deny that things are pretty sweet. You don’t have to work for food, don’t have to pay a crippling mortgage, and most importantly, you don’t have a couple of kids to serve as constant reminders that youth is wasted on the young.

But in your teens it can all seem so deadly serious, so painful, so tentative and difficult. Like so many other teenagers ever since the phrase was coined, my early teen years were plagued with insecurity and uncertainty. While I was lucky to have loving parents, I often faced violence and threats at school. While I wasn’t a target of bullying, I recall feeling like I was living in a war zone - that every day when I arrived at school, something very, very bad would happen. The constant stress and confrontation quite literally gave me the shits. I remember thinking at the time, that “if these are the best years of my life, then the rest of my life must be pretty fucked up”.

Even in my formative years I spent a lot of time in day care and with sitters, and while I have never begrudged mum and dad their careers, it took a toll. I was hospitalised a few times from various illnesses ( one that almost did me in ), and also had my collar bone busted by a sitter’s kid ( and my folks never sued??? Man… I could be living on easy street now if they did!! ). Additionally, I developed weird eating habits from all the awful day care meals and would vomit up most “normal” food. It made life pretty difficult and stressful for me, and no doubt will keep some therapist’s fleet of classic sports cars running in years to come.

I also got pretty messed up in my late teens, but I won’t bore you with that story… just assume the usual suspects of unrequited love, partying too hard and hiding behind a thick fog of bong smoke. Then I inevitably got ill, physically, and just a tad mentally, and that saw almost another two less than jolly years of my life slip by. Then just to make things really bloody hard, I moved out of home and went back to full time study after working for 4 years. I spent the next 4 years eating rice bubbles and canned spaghetti, and arguing with various student related bureaucracies. Needless to say, I really found it hard to believe that those were the best years of my life.

Things got onto a more even footing by the time I took the first baby steps in my second career, but even then things were far from easy. In my first post-diploma job we lived under the constant threat of random sackings, and all manner of bullshit prevented me from having a normal life. Because we were all on contracts, no bank would lend me the money I needed to get a half decent car or non-rental property. So I lived in noisy shitholes and drove with a toolbox in the boot - so I could fix the car myself whenever it broke down. Meanwhile, all my friends bought houses and shiny new cars.

While I had no “best years”, there are little bubbles in my life that I like to think of as “best times”. Rather than look at a year as a whole, I can grab these little snapshots and open them up like a photo album in my mind. My 18th year, and the start of my love affair with the ocean, backpacking through Europe, my Vicco surf trip with Towelly in 2006, and the magic summer I met the girl I’d one day marry. These are but a small sample.

But sitting here with the gentle roar of the surf drifting over the clifftop, a (tin) roof over my head, and the most beautiful beach bathed in blue and gold just seconds from my door, it’s hard not to see the glass half full. While I’m healthy, happy, more financially secure, and still in love, it’s not hard to believe that maybe the best years of my life are right now.

Tags: general, looking back by generalboy
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Seeing Lake Eyre in flood is a once in a lifetime opportunity. A few years back, a group of us all set out across the salt flats in the desert heat, in search of an inland sea. But somewhere around 2km we came to a sudden halt, and we looked back to see the windshields of our cars through the heat haze. With no sign of “the sea” in sight, most of the party decided to turn back - but Miss R and I decided to keep going. I was convinced I could see water off in the distance. So on we trudged for a km or so, until we reached a high point - from there I could see wading birds and water only half a km away. I half ran there, until I met the water’s edge - upon whence I threw off my shoes, and sprinted through the salty water, laughing and screaming.

*      *      *

2007 really was a mixed bag, with so many hightlights, and some deep, dark lowlights.

I started out optimistically, then hit a real low point around the middle of the year - the lowest in quite a while. But good freinds and support from loved ones got us through, and yes… my bloggy freinds were definitely part of that. It forced me to reassess how I wanted things to go, and think about what was important. I started re-building through the last quarter, and hoping the new foundations lead to bigger and better things in 2008.

Business
Things really started to pick up pace in the last quarter, and I’m pretty pumped for the new year. Got some exciting plans… might be spectacularly successes or dismal failures… but the best part is that both businesses are basically debt free. I don’t expect we’ll get the six digit offer I dream of in ‘08, but a hell of a lot more people will know our name. That’s pretty exciting.

Events
The Goodies Almost Live cracked us up, but we didn’t see a single event involving fast cars this year. We hope to rectify that next year. An interstate wedding in Feb was a blast!

Machines
My 1986 classic finally croaked one morning on the way to work, but its replacement has proven to be a pearler. I built to Linux web servers only to decom them weeks later. I cursed my stupid Motorolla phone but refused to buy a new one. I bough a new one for the business. To date I have not made one call with it! I am still stuck with my aging desktop, but hope to remedy that in Q1 2008.

Music
I reckon 2007 was a killer year for follow up records. Big hitters like the Kaiser Chiefs, Maximo Park and Editors pushed out some belters, along with a pretty good follow up from Grand National to their debut record ( my fave CD of 2006 ). But what will stick in my mind most are the women of 2007. Regina Spektor absolutely blew me away, along with Feist, but New Young Pony Club’s pop / funk assault left my toes tapping and my fingers drumming out rhythms. Late entries from Kate Nash and Claire Bowditch also brought a smile to my face.

Health
Pretty good now, although sleep is still a problem on and off ( exercise is helping though! ). Having had a pretty thorough going over mid year I am much less concerned about any of the “biggies” being a problem. Now all I need to do is just eat more fruit!

Fitness
I dropped the ball early in the year and never really picked it up again until September. But I’m slowly building the km back up and will probably even do an event in a few weeks. Probably not as fit as I started the year, but at least I am advancing… not retreating!

*      *      *

Looking back at our cars across the salt flat was sensible - it reminded us how far we’d walked. But to me giving up at that point was stupid, and I knew I would regret it. Granted, we really didn’t have enough water for the return trip but people knew where we were, and we were both fairly fit at the time. I took lots of photos and video, and when we got back I showed the others. They were pretty disappointed they didn’t go the extra distance with us.

I kept going because even though I couldn’t see what was out there, I sensed it was brilliant and had to be found. It was almost like it was calling me over the next rise, whispering “I’m here… just a little bit further”.

So look over your shoulder by all means… but keep going.

Don’t stop.

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Next week it’ll be back to reality - a new 3 month contract in the city. The money will certainly be nice… but I hope this is the last time I ever have to do it…

From my old ( deleted ) blog, Wednesday, May 18 2005.

Tags: general, looking back by admin
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At age 11, I had a vivid dream. That in itself was nothing unusual for me, I had a pretty lively and active imagination as a kid - but it was very specific and has stayed with me. In the dream, I am standing behind a cricket stump, and I look up to see a bowler running toward me from the other end of the pitch. As his arm swings to launch the ball, the slo-mo kicks in, and as I watch the ball tumble in the air I hear nothing but a gentle breeze in my ears. The ball strikes the pitch halfway down it’s length and bounces, spinning off slightly to my right as it does so. As I get ready to field it, the batsman just in front of me nears the end of his backswing… and suddenly I feel a heavy blow to the left side of my face. It stuns me for a moment and I am not sure what has happened, but I feel my vision and balance going, as burning pain starts to radiate out from my upper lip. I hold my hand up to my mouth, and pat it - then hold my open palm in front of my eyes and see that it’s covered in blood. I then spit out what looks like a white tooth, and it lands on the ground in front of me. It’s bloody but I can clearly see the white colour. The batsman turns around, but I cannot see his face - but I suddenly become aware of his shock. I can actually feel his dread, as if I am now him looking at me. He throws the bat to the ground, and I wake up.

At the risk of alienating a few people who are a little more esoterically inclined than I am, I feel the urge to somewhat reluctantly reveal my absolute skepticism toward the so-called paranormal.  In spite of that, something happened the next day that even I still struggle to explain.

In the morning before school a bunch of kids, me included, were out in the playground. I remember a guy named Paul came up to me, and he had a baseball in one hand, and a wooden baseball bat in the other, propped over his shoulder. Baseball wasn’t particularly popular at that time, but Paul’s family had moved to Australia from Canada, and he was fanatical about it. We stood and talked for a moment, before Paul turned side on to me, so I was standing on his right. Then he asked, in his thick Canadian accent, “hey, wanna play baseball?”, and as he did so, he threw the ball into the air with his left hand. Suddenly I had the oddest feeling, and time slowed down, and I focused on the ball tumbling in the air, and there was no sound. And then there was a blur of tan… and an impact. I felt my field of view starting to close in, and then , sure enough, the searing pain kicked in in the exact location it had in my dream. I was stunned for a moment before I spat out the boiled peppermint sweet - given to me by one of the kids earlier. As it landed on the ground, I recall the bright white of the sweet against the brown dirt and gum nuts, and I could see the splash of blood on it. A girl standing close by screamed “eeeeeewwwwww! it’s his tooth!”. I needn’t have held my left hand up to my face… I knew what it would look like… and as I drew it away from my mouth and into my field of view it was exactly as it had looked in my dream. I looked up, and Paul was aghast - his hand over his mouth, which was wide open. He threw the bat to the ground, and ran to get a teacher.

*      *      *

Years on, all I have to show for my week of pain and drinking through a straw is a small, pale scar on my upper left lip from the 9 stitches, and a deep seated dislike of anything related to cricket. No teeth knocked out, no concussion - just dissolving stitches and the bonus of a week off school. All up I was actually pretty happy about it. As for Paul, well, we were never close friends before the accident, and I didn’t have a great deal to do with him after. I’d later discover that his father beat him upon finding out what happened, and then took to the bat with a circular saw. Years later he found my profile on one of those lost friend websites and sent me a message, and while he joked about the incident, I sensed that it may have been on his mind ever since. I even wondered if perhaps his therapist had suggested he try and contact me to get some sort of closure - to know that he hadn’t destroyed my life.

Maybe he just wanted to reminisce, or maybe he wanted more from me. I typed the first sentence of a reply, then thought about it some more. I closed the browser, got up, and walked away…

Tags: general, looking back by admin
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