My heart needs a valve grind

Hello folks,

I've been a bit crook lately.
It seems my heart is wanting to go on long service but as the very small business I am it's hard to give the poor bugger time off.

My heart keeps coming to me with catalogues with glossy pictures of paddocks where you can pat friendly horses or float along striped beach in solar hammocks.
I often wake to find little cut out pictures of setting sun's in Sicily or spring mornings, crisp with croissants from Croatia, sticky taped over my ribs.
I see my heart with his ear lodged in spiral shells listening to the swishing sound of loved ones on long distance lines.
He still (God Bless) video tapes Getaway and sings along with the jingle.
Sometimes I'll spot him with little grass skirt cut from discount flight coupons tied around his beating waist, having a little dance to old hula albums during coffee breaks.

Even we have have knock off beers on Friday my heart always manages to turn the conversation, in a very amusing and genial way, to topics of tropics.
We fill our glasses and talk of plane tickets, the strange customs of customs and how you can happily ignore a stranger for a 20 hr flight and excuse yourself for the professional rudeness of it all. (My heart says that the worse way to start a friendship is to be forced on each other. He reckons real friends always know when to piss off. I, it seems, am a lucky exception).

We will both laugh, look off into the pokie playing distance and speak a few words of our crap German that we learnt while sipping wine on the Rhine (way back in 1999) to our local Austrian born bar maid Esther.
Esther (who says that Australians would gladly give you the shirt off their backs and beam happily at you as they peeled off a cotton blend garment stinking of armpit and daytime telly. Germans, she says, would just buy you a new shirt) smiles at the two idiots trying to Lego together a foreign language for fun and tell us that as long as we only want to say "Attention! I beer! Sausage? Yes! Thanks sausage for you!" we will live like Prussian kings in the land of the well made train time table.

My heart and I laugh at such efficient humour and wish we were younger, that the bar maid's fella was brighter and nicer to her, then we both look at the Haig Whiskey clock and decide it's time for dinner and for another week to be documented under "over" in the ever expanding file of time and space.
My heart and I will then shake hands and thank each for another week of working together, another week of being baffled by brutal efficiency and mad octopus drum style therapies toted by leaders to fix up the messes made by the last crazy octopus we voted in.
Then he goes back to his chesty flat and I wander back to mine, sniffing at whatever flowers are having a quiet busk to the bees.

My heart is a good bloke. A real mate.
Whenever the chips have been down and the poop has been flung into the fan of destiny, my heart has always been there looking for the good things in life, lighting little kindling fires of compassion. (Especially after we've both had the Love Gas cut off by some character who slammed the door and clacked off in a high heeled huff to God knows where).

Lord knows I've taken my heart for granted for more years than I can remember.
I've put that poor bugger through some terrible stuff, things that laid the poor bastard on his back so he could only breath in small unbelieving gasps and barely cycle around his plasma route on the red cell bicycle we found in the paper.
I've put in him in some positions where all he could do was hang on to my ribcage with one hearty hand, dangling over an abyss of bad moves like some mad parody of Indiana Jones in that great Hollywood love story "Idiot goes bung again".
We both had times where we sat around bus stops, sipping at puddles in order not to pass out and offered to dance, sing, tell jokes what ever it took for the bus driver to cram us in amongst the crumpled luggage and get us the hell out of Dodge City before the Sheriff finds out we were sleeping with the Deputy.

But I've never heard a word of complaint from him.
He just smiles and says things like "Ahhh well mate. We live and learn don't we?" and puts on old blues music.
It seems as long as he has an old black dead dude having a electric whinge at him he's back on top by the third "My baby gone" lamentation. Amazing.

Good God...I've nearly choked the poor bastard with cheese, nearly snapped him in half trying to get fit, nearly made him explode with chemical dabblings.
I've taken him completely for granted, growled at him when he missed a beat, kept him in conditions that you wouldn't let a dog fart in.
Yet he's always there, pumping away, morning noon and night, adjusting the valves and regulating the curly tubes to keep me going, ever diligent, not asking for much other than an occasional affection, a funny movie and a chance to do his best.

I've even looked into going on life support so the poor bugger can have a bit of time away but my heart always smiles like a workaday Saint and says "I'll go next year when we can go together, mate. I'd miss you too much".

To be honest I think my heart is at the stage in his life where he has to share things in order to enjoy them.
We used to be able to do separate things. I used to just hand the reigns over to him and say "Go hard son!".
My Lord....you could write a million dollar book filled with our shenanigans, a marvellous film about the times when I'd just let my heart take me where he wanted to go.
We had some crazy times allright. Waking up in married in Italy. Dancing with our balls out in France. Hitchhiking to S.A in 1990 to see if you could falls asleep in the trees for a living. Sleeping in the car in Melbourne because we'd forgotten to get a house. Wandering up backwater creek systems and not daring to breath while a platypus Mum made her scurrying burrow three feet from us.

Great fun. I'm not sure if he missies it as much as I do. I suspect so. He's careful with his words my heart.
"Actions are the thing mate" he'll often say when caught in a fix "If you can't do it, ya mustn't really mean it".

I'd love to be able to shout my heart a Summer in Europe.
I'd love to buy him a flash velvet suit and let him wander up and down the canals, doing little show off drum solos for girls, being caught in wide eyed wonder as the people of foreign lands welcomed him in and made small nests of happiness for him to turn around and lie down in.
I'd love to be able to take him to some strange place, where language is long staccato music and music has no singing.
I'd love to row him out on the moon spotted lakes of some countries where people think thinking is better than drinking and dancing is nicer than drugs.

Maybe I will.
He's a hard bugger to surprise but, if I can one day at knock off drinks, I'll just slip him a couple tix for front row seats to life and let him go like a terrier after a tennis ball.

Mean while.....well.... we just need to sort of this gas bill and get our cholesterol down so we don't need to sit down and wait for the spinning got stop on our way back from the letter box.
Ahhhh.....Summer............


Mick "My heart goes boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom boom boom" Dog.

Is it wrong to brew tea in a moccasin?

Hello friends,

I'm sitting here at Dog central watching the elves having a fairy bong, trying not to breathe in the heady brew of mushrooms and tinsel that they pack in their tiny silver cones.
I don't really mind that its a bit cramped in the smokey, curly booted office where I work or that the place is lit with glow worms (although replacing them with those curly, energy efficient worms was a bit of a pain in the arse) as the elves are generally a good hearted bunch who refuse to carry mobile phones.

There is just one phone here, quietly resting in the corner. It is a large thing with a proper dial and no hash key.
If there's someone here when it bo-jangles, it gets answered. If not, it just rings it's tin tits off to the sky.
No answering machine either.
"Just another pain in the arse " say the elves .

And they are right.
Mobile phones turn you into a horrible parasitic creature that lives on miscommunication and suckles on battery life.
To add insult to insolvency you then work twenty-eleven hours a day to pay for the inconvenience of being harassed by every ning nong who forgets which end of the pencil makes the writing happen and rings you up to ask where the gear box on the kettle is.
It now takes 14 finger draining calls to meet with someone to have a cup of coffee.
You pay $104.50 a minute to say nothings like "I'm at the tram stop wearing a hat" and "I'll be ten minutes late. Order me a Foamachino and a slice of Lo Fat treacle spam".

"Humans are dickheads too stupid to realise it" say the elves "They love shooting themselves in the foot and then complaining about uncomfortable shoes". Once again, can't argue.
But they seem to think I'm ok and treat me with the same respect circus audiences treat Orang-utans who can ride a small motorbike and blow insouciant raspberries on cue.

I looked at the calendar the other day and realised that before too long I'll be cranking over the big 40.
It's that time of life where your body starts to give you the shits and you are in the free floating zone where young people's taste in everything is still ear blisteringly awful and yet you still can't quite admit to yourself you've become a conservative, multi chinned curmudgeon who thinks people with loud motor cars should be beaten to death with their own missing mufflers.

I think they call it middle age because everything seems to be in the philosophical mid ground.
Your passions have been tempered by insistent hangovers, you shop at IKEA for your dreams because they are easier to assemble and love becomes a dog that was cute as a puppy but now tends to wheeze a bit when it's on the job and unfailingly drops it's romantic guts at the dinner table.

You suddenly become your own micro barometer, able to detect draughts four rooms away and scurry about like a mad Breeze Goblin to stuff towels up things, marvelling at your own ingenuity but fretting about extra washing.

You see adds for full length wedding scarves and admire the forethought, chucking to yourself about how many chilly receptions you been privy to.
Spacious underpants become a small oasis of calm after years of squeezing your gooligans into censorious pants designed to take a foot hopping hour to get out of when you finally manage to wrangle a live one back to your flat.

( How many years off my life have I spend ruining the "Vibe, man..." by trying to unlace a sneaker, remove a pair of Houdini designed trap daks and take my jocks off over my head all at the same time? That bizarre, frugging barn dance you do when you try to get naked at the speed of sound. The way everything in your room can be smashed to erotic smithereens by a falling horny idiot because you decided that lace up chaps would pull the chicks and, now they have, they have left you springing around the broken room, tugging at buckles and braces as your nads turns blue and she reads a book. I wonder....)

You see, not so long ago I was a vibrant and brassy young bastard I could live in denuded tree and piss on my own foot to keep warm.
I seemed to be like a marvellous ape who could live on pan scrapings and still dance all night like a jigging Ferris wheel.
I remember one Summer where I walked nude through the Simpson desert because i thought some chick on the other side would give up her charming groceries when I arrived, even if I was burnt to a heroic crisp and my doodle was aflame with butane desire.

I lived in share houses in the 90's where the roof was often optional.
I remember one place where it blew off completely during a Liberal Government induced hurricane and we were too stoned to notice.
I was rained on repeatedly and all I did was shout out that God was a pussy and if that's all He had in store for me He could go suck a fart.
One year on the dole I think I lived on beer and lawn clippings. I also made a garish humpy out of floorboards and steam and lived there, happy as a millionaire clam.

Now, as I approach my trenchant 4th decade, I find I desperately own an electric blanket made from synthetic kitten fur and often get buzzing cramps in my ear holes if I hop in the shower too soon.
My knees mangle at me like bruised accordions. My neck will suddenly lock if I look to the left too quickly on frigid mornings when I ramble to the coffee shop.
The kind and beautiful girls there take pity on me and pour frothed milk on my head until my vertebrae thaws.
This means I don't have to spend the day walking around like a jazz crab that shuffles sideways and makes be-bop screams when It trips over things.

I look at old photos of myself, practically living in the bins and yodelling with joy.
I found an old snapshot the other day where I'd burnt my hair off with a toaster to protest the high price of hair cuts.
Another showed me doing a wheelie on a motorbike down the dairy aisle in Coles because I thought the cheese looked lonely.
I find old curled bits of news paper with "Local artist does Macbeth with dick" and "Man eats cloud" adorned with black and white shots of me, my wing wang pushed through a Scottish castle drawn in texta or hanging upside down from a biplane with my mouth open wearing a provocative t-shirt reading "Fuck you gravity!"

"Who was this screaming rascal?" I think as I measure my Milo-lite into my "Yay for Talk Back Radio! " cup, with the free teaspoon I won after being able to name all the characters in Dad's Army during an ABC lunchtime quiz.
Where has this mad beast of a man gone? What's on television? Did I put the bins out? Maybe I should turn the heater up? Who are you people and what are doing in my house???????

"I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled".
T.S Elliot wrote that and it's still a beaut line.

I do like the idea there's some dude who looks in the mirror one day realises he's now officially an elder citizen and says "Bugger it! I'm bringing the ankles out!" and so he does, rolling up the breeches until his knobbly shanks pop out like really budget fireworks.
I imagine him strutting down to the post office the day he realises that it's all over, the terrible pressure that evolution puts on you to root and achieve and go like the clappers and have moderns opinions and to dress in fashions you didn't make yourself out of curtains, all of that vibrant nonsense passed on to somebody else.

I like to see him walking past pretty girls and just being happy such lovely things exist, his ankles gleaming in the morning sun, dogs sniffing them in furry headed amiability as if his whole legs were dandy newspapers.

I see this venerable cat, a body replete with much panel beating and re-sprays, his joints needing regular WD40'ing, his eyes on permanent low beam, rolling through the day like a stately old Kingswood, scratching his arse at will and parking for long periods of time in warm spots where the grass has perfumed itself with mower fumes, while birds conduct their trilling choruses about rooting and bees, wondering how he got here and thinking about making soup for lunch.


Til next time

Mick "Get that helicopter off my lawn you goddamn kids!" Dog

Why doesn't money have a better sense of humour?

Let me start this blog by saying I am the World's most perpetually broke human being.
It seems like I have some sort of lactose intolerance for cash and when ever I get a sniff of the folding stuff I start dry heaving like a fat wrestler with a turpentine hangover and my skin breaks out in oily exploding hives.

i don't know what it is. I quite like money. I find it quite useful. I like it's jingly sound and the lovely way it stops you freezing to death in Winter.
I like the color scheme, the size is quite carry friendly and The Bank doesn't seems to ring me up at odd hours of the night to say Big Herbert is coming round for my liver when my account is in the black.
I don't seem to have anything against money, other than it avoids me like bald ducks in Peking avoid those bird baths full of orange basting sauce restaurants put out in order to cut down on prep time.

It's not even like I'm a hopeless muggins who can't do anything worth exchanging currency for (stop that sniggering up the back).
I can teach, play guitar, write, remove thistles, say comforting things to loved ones, organise shin digs and be generally quite helpful.
I've had a number of very interesting jobs in which I did quite well at. (Except for that burning restaurant thing. Oh well......)

But it does seem like my Mother told some Gypsy midwife to "put out that stinking fuckin' incense and stop playing yer fucking horrible guitar" during my birth and thus caused me to be cursed with some sort of Romanian evil eye that causes money to cross the road whenever it sees me.

All of my friends seem to be cashed up the yin yang. I really don't know what they do or how they do it to be honest.
Most of them seem to sit at computers and push buttons.
I picture then like some sort of Russian submarine person with a rubber tune that bellows orders out in a digital language that only computer people understand.
Stuff like "Full steam to Java! Hoist the upload to full micro dot! All motherboards on deck! Set Mp3's to propellor!" and stuff like that.
I don't know what that means in proper words. I suppose that's the point. If everyone could "RAM something up a gigabyte" they'd all be out of jobs.

A friend of mine told me recently that his job is to make the space in the non existent world where people put up web sites.
From what I gathered, there is a giant computer turtle floating through the endless phone lines on which four elephants stand and on the back of these elephants is the Internet.
My friend apparently goes there in a magic boat made out of old keyboards, fights off indigenous 1's and 0's with a flat screen six gun, then plants a flag where web designers can go and form a covered wagon train.
These wagon trains eventually get turned into houses where you can digitally nail up posters selling anything from real turtles to frozen sperm and people pay him thousands and thousands of real people's dollars to do this.
He has enormous amounts of cash. He is ten years younger than me and could buy my spine without my permission if he wanted.

Another friend of mine has a job where he makes dick heads sound plausible. It works like this:
People apparently buy things now to simply stop you annoying them so the people with crap to sell go to radio stations where they keep all the truly annoying dick heads in a box.
The man at the radio station then shows the person with crap to sell all the boxes with dick heads in them and tells them that the more annoying the dickhead, the more money it will cost to get the dickhead out of the box and poke it with a stick to make it say things.
They agree on a price (and a dickhead) and then they poke the dickhead with a microphone until it says the most annoying things it can about the crap needed to be sold.
The dickhead will rave about anything. Cheap hats, exploding bedspreads, festive jam. The dickhead doesn't care. It just opens up it's dickhead yap and starts yabbering on like a terrier with a clothes peg on it's balls.

My friend is the person who pushes the brightly colored button on the magic tape recorder at the other end of the microphoned dickhead.
My friend has told me the secret to dickheads successfully selling crap is that (as part of a American Presidential campaign in the 50s) scientists invented a fabulous button which they named "Credibility X" .
This button changed the world due to the fact that it can make dick heads sound very important.
The recorded music industry, radio and television would explode like a balloon having a heart attack if they didn't have this button.
I am led to believe this happens all over the World now. This button manipulation involves a finger to depress it and then the sprightly removal of the finger.
My friend gets paid a lot of money for doing this job.

A third friend has the oddest job I've ever heard of. Her job is to complicate things until people give up. It works like this-
People who do cool things like paint pictures or write plays or sing songs about fuzzy felt boyfriends in the wide eyed hope of making the world a generally nicer, shinier experience go to her and ask her advice.

She then nods politely and hands them a huge pile of paper written in a language that was made up by one of those Russian monkeys that came back from space in the 60's.
It asks questions like "Will mad people get better when they see your painting?" or "What do you think a complete stranger from another Planet might get out of your play?" or even "If we give you money will you spend it on hiring spoons? If so, what type of spoons? Does your spoon hire take into account people with no fingers? What do you think a finger-less person would get out of a spoon encounter?"

This sort of gibberish makes people who just wanted to paint a picture of a horse with an umbrella enjoying itself at the beach or write a play about a happy pepper grinder who becomes a disco king give up wanting to do these marvellous things..
They stop being creative people because this pile of crazy paper seems a grim and forbidding Matron of horrible rules and pointy finger pokery that drills at your brain belly.
The people who make creative things leaf through these piles of rustling nonsense and then give up, as they are baffled by this answerless paper interrogation, just as an elderly Clydesdale would be if you asked him to play Abyssinian scrabble.
Some little spark snuffs out in their sparkley souls.
They get drunk and go on the internet to see if they can't trade themselves in for something useful, like mowing goat lawns or bringing fat people more dinner.

My friend, whose job is to confuse and dispirit people with bad fonts, gets paid a huge amount of money for doing this from the Government.
They think she is tremendous because they are convinced that beautiful things make people wonder why tax doesn't come with better lyrics, causing difficult questions for all involved.


I do things like play relaxing music and say funny things to cheer people up.
Apparently, even though my jars of home made funny are very good and my macaroni and glue concerts do make people feel better, I am often chortled at by racy types for my humble road side stand operation where my marketing strategy is to give stuff away to people I like.

I even went so far as to rectify this by doing a 8 week course in how to make a proper business.
I had brightly colored cards with my name on it made and everything. I bought folders and a lamp.
I paid some invisible notice board $80 dollars so I could be called "Mr Awesome's Rag Time Coolness Business Groove o-Mart" and then watched as about $3000 of bits of paper arrived in the mailbox explaining the more money I paid, the more legitimate I would be.

It was baffling.

In truth I'd be quite happy to cut out the cash thing all together and just go around and play concerts for the people at the Gas Company.
I figure that as I'm quite good at playing the guitar I could just knock out a gig every three months and we'd be cool.

In fact I think it would switch things around so I would start looking forward to my gas bill. I'd get to see old friends. I could bake something.
The people at the gas company could stop typing out notices to various court officials and just sit back and listen to lovely music.
I wouldn't mind if they wanted to dance. Or even had a little snooze.
We could exchange gossip and miss each other during the not-gas-bill-paying times.
I could even go in and do a gig just to say thanks. Maybe they would just be happy to have some nice music in the tea room.
I wouldn't mind. Gas is cool.

Or write maybe I could write a funny story in exchange for toast. Surely bakers must like to be amused.
Or maybe pay my rego in listening to people. Give out positive advice.
Maybe I could be the guy who helps single women in Insurance agencies decide if their bottom looks big in things.
I I could have a go at that.
It's actually a very tricky job because if if you say "Yes" in the wrong way you could end up in casualty.
(I talked to an old guy once who said he went back to blowing up things in Chinese mines deep underground rather than endure another freeziod stare from a big bottomed lady whose bottom, unfortunately, did look big in everything. "It was a big bum" he said.)

There should be a form you can fill out when you leave school that says "Are you very good at making money out of jobs?" and if you tick "No" you should be able to do something else.
Honesty I'd be happy just sit on a street corner and play snappy tunes. In fact that's my dream job.
I'm no good at money. I spend it all on lollies and fun.


'Til next time

Mick "Happy to be adopted by rich relatives" Dog

Now is the Winter of our discount tent.

Hello and howdy, pull up a chaise lounge, help yourself to the muffins etc.

Winter!
Yup...there's no escaping it. Sure..... we're technically in Autumn and yes... I know the skidoo doesn't crank over until the 1st of June but I'm just not the sort that says a blow job isn't cheating and that Gorillas shouldn't get the dole on a technicality.

As far as I'm concerned Winter starts when you wake up in the morning and run series of brainiac ruses and strategies worthy of The Great Escape that would allow you to stay in bed all day without losing your job or being carted to crematorium when your bladder explodes.

Winter is here when the day starts with 15 to 20 minutes of eyebrow smouldering schemes, involving Hawking like calculations where Y= sick days x gas bills + needing to do a wee and you make small sketches on the pillow case deviously connecting a name change in Thailand and a hose that could possibly drain out of the window before it becomes horribly apparent that you will have to take part in the day and thus leave your magnificently warm bed.

You girdle your loins (or line up your girdles) and leap into action, sprinting like a fat panther with a pace maker to the bathroom.
A heater is smashed on with a desperate fist and razzed up to the point where you could smelt copper.

You then perform the legendary Nudie Doodle Dance (or the Crispy Nipple Strut as other's would have it) as you shamelessly (some would say indulgently) expose frosted body parts to to the heater (which is pumping out so much blast furnace warmth scientists in Madrid are tapping on barometers and making phone calls to Presidents) as you hop from foot to foot like a naked, desperate line dancing Gibbon with hot sauce on it's doobries, while the shower performs whatever mad magic is involved to heat water.

You leap in, your skin jazzed and fried by the delightful drops. You are Mawson on Elephant Island.
You perform ablutions worthy of a Hindu Priest with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Every part of you is burnished with five flavours of unguent and defoliant.
Dark thoughts of drought cross your mind as the midday news comes on and your are scaldingly reminded you've been in the shower for some five hours.
You don't care. So what if the water bill is equivalent to the national debt? It's sooooo nice in here.
You wash your arse again for the 26th time. One can't be too careful.........

You steel yourself again and contemplate going back to bed.
You think of St Caffeine and the miracle of the Big Cup.
A burst of heroic joy comes over you and you stand in the shower for another half hour congratulating yourself on what a wonderful person you are. Evolution was on fire that day it came up with you allright!
You turn the shower off and try not to electrocute yourself on the heater which is now causing atoms to split near the medicine cupboard.

A towels fluffs hope into you.
The ghost of Herb Elliot spurs you on as you run around the house, the furniture waving brightly colored pennants at your buttocks and watching you with cushion-like joy, as you try to get as many warm clothes on as you possibly can before your desperate cotton layering makes you look like an opp shop golliwog.
(Or in my case a sort of Bedouin hobo drawn by a crayon wielding Gorilla trying to fill in it's dole from).

This is the true start of Winter I tells ya.
Stuff your gilded leafery, pungent marsupials rooting around the clock and your smug isobar pointing weather folk.

Winter starts for me when you look around (with your fuzzy sloping brow and animal hide tea towels) for some cave to crawl into.
(Assuming of course you can afford a three chambered cave for $560 a week with cold and colder running water and a delightful creaking noise that suggests you could be crushed into a squeaking paste by 20,000 tonnes of unstable rock just as you've got the coat hanger antenna in the right spot to watch the spatula gannets on Masterchef make Anzac bikkies and Turkish delight on National Cross Demographic Day.)

Winter is here when you emerge from your domicile with your padded pantery tucked into your Velcro dungarees, your personal person carefully sealed up like a snappy Tupperware bowl of downy fashion, only to be thwarted by trenchant Wind of the Antichrist which still manages to find the gap between your sleeved doona and your thermo-reactic pinafore and blows, with NASA like accuracy, straight up the crack of your arse, leaving you gasping in crystallised ring horror, bleating for mercy at the bus stop and performing a strange (yet very amusing) Shamanic dance that implores the eternal spirits of the Blue Sky to pour hot coffee over your harassed Siberian crack.

(While we are on the subject of dressing up to leave the house, why do people working at home dress up for work? What is it about snapping on bright new elastic underpants and a crisp lettuce pressed shirt that makes us feel as if we can go like the wonderful clappers? Is there a correlation between trakky daks and interest rates? Would the Dow Jones collapse if we just showed up in a saggy T-shirt with some Milo stains on the front? What part does ironing play in world commerce? Maybe we should organise World Shithouse Outfit day where you just show up at work in baggy comfortable flannels, drink cuppa soups all day and politely lose the remote to see if a Volcano explodes or if the Sea turns purple)

Anyway.....I've lived here in Ballafornia, home of the impertinent and impotent alike, enduring the long slow Senate session of Winter more times than I can remember.
Although far from the World's most icy eyeball popping Hell , Ballarat's Winter just sinks your soul (like an old cowboy's even older horse) into a quicksandy mire of grey, uncomfortable mither where the town's inhabitants become clag goldfish in a gelatinous tank of lethargy and beanies.

Thoughts become long exhalations of smoggy repetition, movement becomes a dire, muscle grinding imposition, joy gets put in a tinder box full of shredded Christmas cracker gags with stalwart families appointing someone (usually a gifted child or a ribald uncle) to gently blow on the smouldering embers of happiness through the long dark months, listening tensely to the wet creaking of the heathens who burn cheap scotch in lonely underpants fires by the letter box, until their souls can afford sunny kindling again and we can light the bonfires of giggle again.

We (The Ballafornians) become penniless, gout ridden, rubes huddling around bank accounts, people at the End of the Days, building our strange Mad Max 2 style relationships in our skidding deserts of Blue Bland ice, pumping the precious bill paying cash juice from our snake eating jobs at the Gyrocopter factories, painting "Ohm's not Bombs" on our battered buses of love and pretending that activity will save us from the Humungous and his Dainty Ice Wolves who now have one of those annoyingly catchy Top Ten hits out that gets flogged to death after it wins the "Are you Gunna Be My Girl?" award for most overplayed song in history.

We sprint hopelessly around, workaday squirrels in a nut barren muesli town, fluffily hopping hither and thither, planning, crafting, not talking to much in fear of our words will freeze like cheap cochineal colored icing and drop from out lips in snarly gobs to shatter like pungent gossip and thus stain the parquetry with petty allegations that no spraying or wiping can ever remove.

Those horrible monsters of the Anglophile Boomer People (often in the form of sexless lesbian Aunty types or elder Gents who seem to eat tweed and expel model airplanes) start strutting about in shorts, loudly decrying the joys of having your tits shatter of a morning, talking about "best time of year" and the like, dragging fat Labrador dogs (whose hearts are full of happy panting and whose bowels full of terrible Pal) down frost smattered nature strips, both of them snuffling around and laying steaming piles of modern art about the place with both their hardy opinions and shaggy bums alike.

(Not being a violent man, I would gladly do hard time in order to ram their cheery, cold loving bespectacled heads through a Mr Whippy van window and choke them with amusing ice creams. Their horrible Winterphile opinions grind at my Summery soul. It's like being sprayed with a snow maker that squirts cold nylon casseroles in your face)

I despise Winter.
My arse aches, my opinions rust and my slim reserve of tolerance evaporates like an asthmatic child's breath on the eyeballs of a rat.
I have three to four filthy months in which I turn from an ebullient bon vivant and glittering raconteur into a sour monster who shamelessly dry humps heaters and skulks about looking for chocatley treats in order to make the damnable cold go away.

I adore Summer. I'm always sad when she sets off on the Northern hemisphere tour with her warm woodeny guitar and her songs about thongs.
I miss her. I miss my raggedy shorts and swimming in Pine smelling lakes. I miss intravenous beer. I miss being unthoughtfully warm.

Goddamn Norwegians. Goddamn Hemispheres. Goddamn Cycle of Life. You'll all pay.


Till next time,

Mick "I wish they made electric plug in trousers" Dog.