Mentalechoes

I bought this half kilo bag of kitkat minis at the supermarket yesterday for 1.99 euro. They were in front of the register I was going through as one of those impulse purchase specials, specifically placed there to be picked up by hungry shoppers before reaching the checkout. I was hungry at the time I saw them and when I picked them up there was a little voice inside of me that said, put those down you fat bastard or you’ll be sorry, but I ignored him!

Now for most of the afternoon I have been munching away on mini kitkats without regard for amount of chocolatey sugar I have been ingesting. I think I’ve eaten three quarters of the bag and god I feel sick! Now that little voice is saying to me, I told you so… I soooo told you so!

I can’t believe they put warnings on cigarette packets but not big bags of kitkat minis! They should warn you about the dangers of eating nearly the whole packet over an afternoon! This is seriously bad for your health. If I had some cigarettes I’d smoke one just so I wouldn’t feel hungry and be tempted to eat more kitkat minis!

I think I’m going to be sick!

Padwanna!

I am starting to understand that the art of writing is perfected through the practice of the craft. Like any skill, styles must be experimented with to understand the concepts of a particular form. If you don’t undertake a process of learning through experimentation, you won’t attain a mastery of technique.

I think this blog has undergone an evolution; it is now a place of experimentation where I can practice styles of writing so I can perfect my craft and become a literary artist.

I don’t think it’s a blog anymore. I don’t really know what it is now.

Padwanna!

Popular writing!

It’s something I’ve been turning over in my head for a while now. I want to write something – a short novel – but I want it to be something that will have some impact; be something that will make people choke with disgust, or bellow in laugher at the things I tell them. The problem really is how to do this. Anyone can write; a smaller number can write well; yet only a few can write stuff that captivates an audience and compells them to read page after page.

Two of my favourite writers are Charles Bukowski, and Hunter S. Thompson. Both of these guys were icons of their generations, they wrote raw gritty contemporary stories that eviscerated mainstream culture and exemplified the low life scumbag. Women by Bukowski is a particular favourite that I keep coming back to. It’s almost autobiographical in it’s style, telling about a series of events based centrally around Bukowksi himself between two periods of time. Basically it’s about the women in his life; how he finds them, how he treats them, and how he loses them. The man himself is a bastard alcoholic drug user who treats women with great tenderness and complete disdain all at the same time. How someone can be such a fucking prick and yet keep attracting women, albiet ones with no self esteem, is totally beyond me, but he does, and he writes about it. The story itself though is brilliantly written because it illustrates low life culture with a sharp magnifying glass, capturing all the details and emotions in a raw and unapologetic manner.

Both of these guys had that talent; that ability to write raw stuff that keeps you turning the pages because you get sucked into the life they are talking about, that they lived! To a lesser extent two Aussie guys write in a style that imitates these two, though it seems tame by comparison. I’m talking about Andrew McGahan, and John Birmingham. If you haven’t read anything by them, I would suggest getting a hold of “Praise” (McGahan) and “He Died With A Falafel In His Hand” (Birmingham). Excellent books!

It seems though if you want to write stuff like this then you have to live the life that goes with it. I’m wondering if that means I should go back to having a serious cocaine habit coupled with an habitual drinking problem. Sure mainstream society and the surgeon general look at such things with utter contempt, yet the truth of it is there is also a morbid fascination with such lives. How else can you explain the cult popularity that such writers enjoy? It’s exactly the same reason why pornography is so popular; because the masses who live such sanitised lives become voyeurs to explore lifestyles which they themselves have quite safely removed themselves from any chance of experiencing!

Voyeurism! The more outrageous or taboo something is, the more interesting it becomes. There is a directly porportional relationship between the two!

So now I wonder really if any great writing project can be done by someone who hasn’t touched the darker side of life. After all how can someone who hasn’t done anything more interesting in their own lives than take a two week package vacation to Casa Del Crapo resort in Tourist Town, tell a story that will make me hunger for every word? On the other hand, surrendering your life to your obsessive self indulgent, self destructive nature seems ultimately to lead to a tragic end. Thompson blew his head off with a shotgun. He wrote these final words as his last legacy.

“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax—This won’t hurt.”

Bukowski died of Lukemia, surely aided by – probably not caused by – years of uncontrolled drinking and substance abuse.

I suppose in the end it makes you question what you want to leave behind; a life of mediocrity and anonymity, or a legend.

Padwanna!

Yesterday I decided to turn the tables on this spanish lottery fiasco mob which have been making my life so interesting over the last week. Through some detective work I found out that any business or trading organisation in Spain needs to have a thing called a CIF number, which in plain english is a corporate tax identification number, issued by the government, and which is needed for any legitimate business to trade. Well I called up the lottery scam guys and asked them for this number, and not so strangely they gave me a lot of grief about why they couldn’t do it, and then promptly hung up on me! All of which I took as him screaming at me that they are a scam and could I now please fuck off as I was becoming annoying.

The thing is, it’s become such an interesting side plot in my day to day life that I don’t really want to stop playing the game now that we’ve got into the swing of things, so I’ve concoted a whole bunch of little scams of my own to keep this thing going. I’ve found the name of a legitimate lawyers office in the same area as the scam guys with a simple web search, and I will call the scam guys and apologise profusely at being so rude as to ask for their CIF number, and of course I understand their need for confidentiality. Which is why I have contacted the other lawyers office to take the case on my behalf and talk to the scam guys directly. I’ll call scam central up every day for the next week or so and see if I can really annoy and piss them off with this! If this doesn’t work I’ll start sending them faxes with hugely piss-taking fake names, details and addresses, and see what kind of reactions I get.

As for the letter these dodgy fuckers sent me, well tomorrow – being Monday – I will take it the local police station and hand it over to them, as I have found out that the Netherlands takes scams like this very seriously and will prosecute to the full extent of the law. Though I’m actually hoping to become such a pain in the arse that being taken to court will be a welcome change from being hassled by me!

Ahh the things we do to keep ourselves amused!

Padwanna!

Well today is Australia Day! Or a couple of hours over, and I’ve been celebrating with one of my best mates, Marko the mongo, at his place which is just up the road from me by about 10 minutes. I’ve known Marko since we were horny young bastard kids together of about 21 in Bris-vegas at the Griffith University in Queensland. Now, over two decades later (and a bit) we are still getting together, getting drunk, taking the piss out of everything in true Aussie style. Tonight it was in his fine 3-story home in Amsterdam South; though we’ve done this many times before in places that we’ve lived in together back in Brissy. Especially in the Milton Hilton, which still to this day is famous for the chicks, the bands, the weed, and the day about 30 of us were nearly busted by the cops for marijuana possesion because of the wrong address on some guys speeding ticket fine! Ahhh… those were the days my friends! )

I’d arranged with Mark to come over to his place after work and settle into an Australia Day afternoon with a lot of strong drinks and a good meal, followed by a movie. I decided to go home first and drop off my daypack which I didn’t need because it was full of crap, and a tin of lip balm to keep my lips feeling tender and soft. When I opened up the front door, on the stairwell there was an inconspicuous letter with my name on it. I opened it up as I was walking up the stairs, and the first paragraph made me miss a step and nearly fall down backwarks in shock. It read like this:

Your name is attached to ticket number (bunch of numbers) with serial number (a bunch of numbers) which consequently won the lottery in the third category. You are therefore approved for a lump sum payout of EUR$825,000.39c (eight hundred and twenty five thousand euro and thirty nine cents) in cash… blah blah blah

Holy fuckin jezuz… 800 fuckin grand! Lord mother mary and all that’s holy… that’s every single financial problem I’ve ever had solved in a heartbeat, and then some! I couldn’t even make it in the front door for about 2 minutes. I could only sit on the last step and read it again and again.

I can tell you now, that when you get a letter like this, there is a part of your brain that doesn’t want to accept that this could possibly be a scam, and there is another part that doesn’t want to accept that it could possibly be true; and the two of them war within yourself violently vying for possession of your reality!

Honestly I can tell you that I have never had emotions like this before. The thought of being rich, and being freed of all the shackles of my material world was wonderful beyond description. It was like an orgasm that would wrack your body and mind for long minutes at a time as your wildest dreams would come true in a movie before your very eyes. But then slowly the rational side of my mind asserted itself through the euphoria and I began to question whether or not this was real!

I called up one of my best mates in London, Glen, to tell him of the news only minutes after I had read the letter, and he said to me that while he was very happy, I should keep my head on my shoulders and just stay sharp for any irregularities and bullshit that might mean I was going to get fucked! After all, everyone has seen scams like the Nigerian bank transfer that everyone with an email address receives at some time or another. Then when I took it to Mark’s place and showed him, he started to say the same thing (albiet after he showed signs of having an orgasm too after reading the letter).

For the next couple of hours at Mark’s, him and I had a fucking fantastic dinner of vego lasagne, red wine, Jack Daniels, vodka and a couple of beers; all the while talking about how we would spend the cash if by some miracle it turned out to be something legit.

Well as it turns out, it all looks like a crock of bullshit (as we say back home)! I found this link which is almost the same letter I received, except there was no email address specified in mine.

Well easy come, easy go, as they say! If nothing else, it provided a fine peice of conversation between Marko and me over a couple of hours, and a fantasy about how I would spend 800 grand if it was mine. One thing I know is, if I really did win this money, I know that at this stage of my life I wouldn’t lose my head, and I wouldn’t lose my friends! I really feel like I know what’s important and what’s bullshit in life!

Having said that, man it would be some party! And youse would all be invited! )

Padwanna!

It’s payday in a day or so, and I’m broke again for another month after bills and house payments and taxes and the credit card have been paid off for this month. God I am just so sick of being broke!

Whoever said, money doesn’t buy happiness, obviously never had any! Because while it doesn’t buy true happiness, it sure does make life a damn sight easier when you have shitloads of it. As much as we in the west like to believe that money doesn’t make you happy, I am sure when you’re rich, it’s a hell of a lot easier to endure being unhappy than if you were poor as a street beggar.

After the christmas / new year period my credit cards are suffering from some abuse I gave them buying some new clothes and some new luxury items. Having said that, I didn’t go totally crazy or anything, and I didn’t go close to maxing them out. On top of that I am still paying off some old bills that got carried through to this year. It just seems so much of the time that life is about working to earn money to pay off bills. Man, there has got to be a better way than this.

I remember being in Nepal a few years back on a trekking trip through the Himalayas. Our small group stayed a night at a place called Gandruk village which was 3000 years old. The people there lived very hard lives; everything had to be done by hand, there were almost no first world luxuries because the only electricity came from generators that were run for only a few hours at a time. But everyone seemed happy and content. The villagers all came together in a long hall of an evening and the adults talked and smoked and sang, while the kids all watched the one television in the whole place and ran around laughing as kids do. They shared everything they had, and noone worried about insurance payments, or car payments, or house payments, or buying endless consumer items that we in the first world believe are so centrally important to our lives. It was a hard life, and they all seemed much older for their age than the westerners who guested with them. But for all that, in so many ways they seemed to live much more fulfilling and happy lives than many of us do here in the West. I often think of Gandruk village when I am struggling to make ends meet financially; getting up and grinding a job I do not really like, all so I can keep up with life in the fast lane!

Yeah I think time has come to try to reevaluate how to make a living. Because this mindless day to day grind to just keep up with the bills is totally fucking soul destroying. Well other people do it, change their lives and livelihood to become financial successes. I won’t say rich, because everyone has their own opinion on rich, but a financial success everyone can understand. So if other people can do it, I figure I can, and it has to be worth trying.

Right, so how do you become financially successful? Anyone got any ideas?

Gonna start looking into this I think. Somehow there has to be a way.

Padwanna!

I was doing some heavy proscrastinating from a badly needed kitchen cleanup when I came across this site where you can buy slankets! Let me tell you, before I actually opened this up in a browser my mind was absolutely racing with all the possibilities of what it could have been.

Was it some spanky new sex toy? Was it a genetically engineered furry snake? A new cocktail? A Jamie Oliver recipe? I really thought it couldn’t have anything to do with blankets! Nah, no way! It couldn’t be that easy!

Well, actually it was. Turns out the slanket is a blanket with sleeves. Which goes to show that not everything has to be complicated and high tech in the 21st century to be geek cool. Sure, I thought it was stupid too when I first saw it. But hearing that the cold front that was responsible for turning Moscow into a frozen artic wasteland with temperatures around -45 degrees centigrade is headed our way, I suddenly saw the slankets true potential!

Imagine being able to lay on the couch with your arms and upper body totally covered as you read a book, whilst flipping telly channels with the remote, and maybe writing… stuff. All because you can, and staying totally toasty warm! If you’re lucky enough to have someone with you, you can even share the arms, one each, and have fun playing clapping games, or slapping games! (Whatever turns your knobs I guess) Truly the fun never stops with a slanket.

Seeing as how it looks something fairly simple in design I think I am going to try making one for myself. How hard can it be? I never actually have sewn anything in my life, but you know, I say never let that stop you! Hell no! If you never did anything you didn’t do before, you wouldn’t do anything at all! So making my very own slanket will also be my first foray into the world of sewing!

Wow, it’s not just an blanket with sleeves, it’s an fantastic adventure! Where will the craziness end?!

I just hope I can get it finished in time before the Russian cold front turns Amsterdam into a frozen artic wasteland too!

Padwanna!

It’s late on sunday night, or early monday morning, whatever you call 1.40am, and I really should be in bed since I am going back to work tomorrow after being sick but I can’t sleep, I’ve got a bad case of insomnia. So of course what do all internet geeks do when they have insomnia? They sit in front of the computer and look at stuff on the internet.

Out of curiousity I put in my real name, into Google to see whether I was there. Of course who comes up but the other Andy [hrrm hrrm], the famous actress and mobile Chanel nerve gas cloud. She was pretty much the first and second page. Even sifting through the 42 billion results that came back, I wasn’t in there anywhere. Then I put in my online identity, Padwanna, and the very first link is this very blog! My blog!

Do you know what that means?

No, so stop arseing about and just tell us!

It means that I have a secret identity just like my superhero in City of Heroes I can post anything here on my blog and not at all risk the reputation of my real world self because noone at work knows my secret online identity! It also means I can choose who I tell in the real world about my secret online identity, thus only giving it to people that I know will be able to handle it! How fucking cool is that!? ) I think I’ll call it the S.O.I for short. How would you pronounce that anyway? SOY-EE! Well that’s just dumb, so maybe I won’t call it that!

One of the things I was always a bit worried about was if people at my work or casual aquantainces ever read my blog, or found some of the forums that I write in, what kind of problems that could cause. There is even a term for it now – dooced – to describe losing your job because of your website (it was actually coined for a blog). Now though it seems that to the average person, there really isn’t a way to connect me to my blog. Of course the other way from my blog to me is pretty damn easy, and anyone who wanted to can found out my real name, address and phone number in 5 minutes flat. (Is that like an invitation to be stalked, or what?) Fortunately the chances of me working with someone who reads my blog are pretty small, so I’m not worried about that.

The upshot of all this means that I can actually start writing about some of my more underground activities, and not worry about getting dooced!

I’m so impressed, I can’t wait to tell someone… only I can’t… because it won’t be a secret if I do! Arrggghh… how fucking frustrating! You know, I can totally understand how Batman feels now! This is going to drive me crazy!

Padwanna!

PS: Editors Note: I actually had to take out that actresses real name cause it actually caused a hit in MSN search, which totally blows my cover! Who would have thought in MSN search! Wonders never cease!

This year I’ve decided is the year that I want to make my break into the film and television industry as a screenwriter. I don’t doubt that I can write a screenplay that would be “good”, because I feel I’ve got lots of talent as a writer. Maybe that’s arrogant to say that, but nonetheless I reckon it’s true, and let’s face it, self confidence is a big part of success; if don’t believe in yourself, your defeated before you even start. But so is discipline! And honestly this is where I’m fucked! I am one of the laziest people on the planet! Seriously I wish some scientist would discover that there is a gene for laziness because then I could at least blame it on my parents instead of me. I’ve always been one of these people who works really obsessively at something for short periods of time. I’m really shit at sustained effort over a long period of time. To get anywhere with something though you need to work over the long term, and that’s what you need discipline for.

I was watching on MTV this afternoon The Rise and Rise of Beyonce Knowles. Now, I don’t like R&B music at all, truth be told I would rather smash my toes with a hammer than listen to it, but you have to respect how hard this chick worked to make her dream come true. She may have been born beautiful and with the potential to sing great, but that girl worked hard every day for a decade before she even got noticed by anyone in the music industry. I mean, from the time she was 8 years old, she used to get up at 6am, monday to friday, to practice singing and dancing before going to school, and then attend singing and dancing lessons after school. Then when she got to 16 she went full time on getting Destiny’s Child off the ground, working 14 hours a day with a producer for 2 years to get to the point where they were good enough to get signed. The girl really impressed me with her intensity and work ethic, and she deserves the success she has because she worked for it! It wasn’t given to her, she comes from a working class family, no that girl did it all herself.

Which got me thinking, how is it some people make it (in whatever they want to do), an others don’t? You know it’s not always the most talented person who makes it either. In fact I think I read a quote or saying about that exact thing somewhere to. Fucks me where, but basically it’s hard work that wins out over talent. But hard work requires discipline, as discipline is what provides you the lifestyle to be able to work continuously at something until a goal is reached. To understand this, I would recommend you all watch a movie called Gattaca, as it perfectly illustrates this concept. Fantastic movie too!

The New Penguin English Dictionary (the much cheaper alternative to the Oxford English Dictionary) describes discipline (noun) as: (1a) order obtained by enforcing obedience, (1b) self control, (2) training of the mind and character to produce obedience and self control.

My thought after reading this was, I’m totally fucked! Obedience! I got told by an Australian Navy psychologist that he didn’t even understand why I applied for an officer training position after university when I so obviously had a problem with authority (and obedience)! No kidding. I wouldn’t lie about my problem with authority… I’m proud of it!

I would like part 2 of that definition better if they just took out the obedience bit. Okay, maybe there is something there I can work with. Hmmm…

Padwanna’s New Definition of the (noun) discipline for those people who are shit at – and don’t like – obedience: training of the mind and character to produce self control.

That makes sense to me to look at discipline as training. I do lots of different kinds of training; running training for fitness and races; gym training for body conditioning; educational training to obtain different intellectual skills. Training is fine and I like training. You can use training to learn something you don’t know, or you can’t do right now. Maybe there is a path here then for a self confessed slacker to learn discipline. If we understand discipline as training of the mind and character then I think that makes sense enough to me to develop.

It’s funny though how having lots of motivation for something is not enough on it’s own to acheive it. I mean I think there are a lot of people in the world who wanted to acheive a goal really badly but failed because they didn’t know how to make it happen. Is that related to discipline? Maybe indirectly. There are a lot more factors involved in success than just discipline, but I do know that discipline is the foundation upon which success is built. I can thank Beyonce for that small peice of knowledge.

For me, I have reached a time in a my life when I am highly, intensely, massively (how many more nouns can I use?) incredibly motivated to reach for a dream that I have had for years and years now. But to realistically acheive it, there has to be consistent effort now from here on in where all my energy is channelled towards a set of goals. This will be something new for me because I have always been someone who drifts rather than steers. Drifting doesn’t get you where you want to go, it gets you to unexpected places; sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but it’s not much for taking you in a direction of your own choosing.

I’ve always thought of discipline as being a bad thing. Something contrary to a free spirit and creative person. But now I can see that these two things don’t need to mutually exclusive. They can be harmonised to produce an effect in a person where they maximise their potential, and give them the best chance they have of doing something worthwhile and fulfilling. And really, the happiest life you can have is one where you have fulfilled your own potential.

Padwanna!

Since I’ve been confined to my house with some kind of mutant strain of flu and bronchitus – a christmas present from one of the mates who stayed over during the new year break – I’ve been filling in the endless hours of snot filled days by playing a game called City of Heroes.

This is another one of these games commonly known as a MMORPG (pronounced MORE-PUH) to the utter computer game nerds that play them. (Sadly I would have to put myself in this category on a part-time/partly full-time basis). For those of you who don’t know, this is a game where you play online with lots of other people at the same time, so it’s very social actually. I’ve written about MMORPG’s in another post so I won’t go into detail here. I’ll get right to the main meat of this entry.

Basically, I’m a superhero!

Which reminds me of a funny story I will tell you. I remember I was about 10 at the time The Bionic Man was a current TV series being played in the country town where my family was living. I used to be totally fascinated with his bionic powers, and being the sort of kid that had a really big imagination, I started to believe that I could do all that stuff he did in the show. So one day while my mums careful eye had wandered, I stacked up a whole bunch of furniture with my bionic arm to make a platform for myself for a bionic jump. As I stood at the top of the pile, I hummed really loudly the bionic powers noise, and made a leap for the other side of the living room. As I did, my crappily stacked launch pad just toppled underneath me and I half leapt, half collapsed about 10 centimeters forward from where I started, with all this shit underneath me. A bionic scream of pain brought my mum running, where she found me tangled up in leg rests, kitchen chairs, cushions and a deck chair, much to her total and utter bewilderment. As it turns out, I was unhurt apart from the manhandling mum used to extract me from the rubble. I was banned from watching the bionic man for two weeks which hurt much more than the bruises of my super leap attempt. I feel sorry for mum now because what can you do with a kid that just gets totally sucked in to whatever he gets fascinated with. After that I stopped believing I was bionic, but after a few episodes of The Man From Atlantis, I believed I could breathe under water. I won’t go into the details here, but suffice to say, I’ve tried as a 10 year old, and you can’t (and that turning blue in the face is a sign that things are going fucked). Doesn’t matter what you see on TV!

So now as a grown up (there are some of you who are laughing at my saying that I bet) but still having that little boys imagination, after several days immersion in a city of heroes, I am totally convinced I am a super hero. Sure on some forwardly conscious level I know that myself I can’t leap from the top of a highrise. But the alter ego I play can, and he is me, as he is a persona inside of me! It’s kind of a double personalities syndrome, but in a cool way! Now when I wander around the house I find myself thinking like my alter ego, pondering what I would do if 25 villians lept out of my fridge to drag me away to the evil lord villian’s stronghold for some insidious plot!

Now before youse all start thinking, this guy is just a fucking fruitcake, I would say that every single one of us fantasises. It the nature of an imagination to do so. Maybe mine and the other MMORPG gamers fantasies are more nerdy and comical and commercial, but I would say all people fantasise in an attempt to live out a reality that just isn’t open them in the real world. Be it sex fantasies with an object of our lust; fantasies about adventuring as a spy in exotic locations; fantasies about being someone rich/famous/powerful. Doesn’t really matter. Now more than at any time in our cultural history whole industries are dedicated to the fulfilment of our fantasies.

It’s really ironic when you think about it; that so much effort and expense is spent in the real world to help people escape the real world! Is it because real life sucks for so many that there is such a market for fantasy fulfilling products? Or is it because we are more sophisticated technologically that we can mass produce more sophisticated fantasy entertainment, hence we do because we can? Well the answer is probably a big mix of these and a lot more. Either way I find it interesting that we have reached a point in society where no matter what you’re into, somewhere someone is catering for it. Maybe at some point in the future, you won’t even need to live a real world life, you can just live your fantasies 24/7 in some virtual place.

That is both an exciting, and scarey thought all at the same time!

Padwanna!