Hi.
Anyway, Sunday was fucking weird. I got up whenever, acted out my
subconscious violent fantasies on the playstation for a while, then
phoned Pete because I wanted someone to smoke pot with and had a vague
inkling that he'd be keen. Deliberate understatement is a subtle form
of sarcasm. Scootered over to 156 Beaumont in a mist of rain, stopping
on the way to buy the ISO 9000 Standard Munchies Remedy (one strawberry
milk, one chocolate bar) and walked in to find him watching cricket
with a ton of Voyager videos stacked on the floor. He doesn't like
cricket, so we watched it for ages. He's got a new stereo, it's very
stylish; just a minimalist box with little cubish speakers that look
wimpier than they sound, and a transparent remote control. He was
listening to Bowie. He told me Shaun rang him from the US earlier that day.
I chopped and rolled and licked and stuck and we smoked it. I, of course,
transformed into my probably dull potself, fully believing that I was
stringing impressive words together more fluidly and lucidly than any
man alive, and probably confusing or boring Pete along the way. We
talked shit for a while, then played Bond and Mario Kart Battle.
Matt rang to say that he'd be at Hamilton station soonish to see Kate
off, did I want to come? (Kate was catching a bus up north, she's
working at Hamilton Island for a while before going back to England.)
Scooting along the wrong side of Beaumont, I see PC (affectionate name
for Emma's car, adopted from its numberplate) coming towards me: Matt
pulls over and I jump in to hear that the station was empty of both
buses and passengers and Kate. We drive to Broadmeadow station, ditto.
With minutes left, we head up to Newcastle station, just in time to see
the coach pull off with Kate and Amanda in the frontmost seat. Fuck.
We'd sort of promised we'd say goodbye, and were just seconds too late.
Apparently both the girls are accustomed to riding in a bus while a
crazy dickhead hangs out the passenger window of the car in front of
them waving like a frantic shark victim, because it's the best part
of an hour before they notice me. (I didn't say it was nearly a whole
hour, but it was the best part of that hour.) Eventually they start
waving back and blowing kisses, just before Matt's skills at tailing a
vehicle from a position in front of it fail him, and the bus makes an
unexpected turn behind us. Cars go faster than buses though, so for the
next twenty minutes we went on a crazy journey where we intercepted the
bus several times and attempted stupid pseudo-mime communication
through the window at the girls. Down Maitland Rd Matt matched speed
with the bus and sat just to the left of it for a minute or two. I saw
a Jaguar parked at the kerb flash by millimetres from the passenger
window; Matt was like a cat whose whiskers are singed off, so that
thereafter he can't accurately judge which narrow gaps he can safely
squeeze through.
Went home, had a bath, played more Quake on the PSX, got pissed off
with it and put High Fidelity in the VCR. One of the things I love
most about that movie is how very accurately it captures the essence
of what nerds are like; those guys who work with John Cusack in the
shop are carbon copies of every computer geek I've ever met, except
they're obsessed with music instead. When John Cusack asks Dick how
his weekend was, and Dick immediately starts talking about the
obscure vinyl he managed to track down, it sounded exactly like Monday
morning in the office when the nerds recount their weekend adventures
of video card reconfiguration or operating system performance tuning.
Mel got home, we went to get videos and food, and through the miracle
of commercial radio (I think she secretly listens to it all the time
while driving alone) heard that tickets to Jebediah and Magic Dirt
were, surprisingly, still available at the door. So we went to Fanny's
and drank and sang the wrong words loudly and jumped up and down on
the spot and others' toes. It was only when the encore finished that I
realised how sweaty and breathless I was. ALTERNATIVE MUSIC REDUCES
HEART DISEASE.
Mel slept soon after we arrived home. I sat up with Matt and smoked
another joint and somehow got into an hour-long argument about the
definitions of simple words like "no" and "everything" and "anything"
and "and" and "or". It all started when I quoted Moe Szyslak: "Old
people are no good at everything". Now, my interpretation of that
sentence is this: "no good at everything" is grammatically incorrect,
because "everything" is a plural whereas "no good at..." should
pertain to a singular. But colloquially, "no good" can just mean "bad";
so given the singular-plural mixup, we're forced to interpret the
sentence as "old people are bad at everything". This is different to
saying "old people are no good at anything", which just means that
there's nothing they're good at, but not necessarily that they're _bad_
at everything. What do you think? Do the sentences "I am no good at
anything" and "I am no good at everything" mean slightly different
things? Matt thinks they don't. But then, he ain't no good at nothing.