tuesday 1am, victoria st nite and day

christchurch with nothing but a used bus transfer,
two bottle caps, and a muddy head full of defeated thoughts.
ducking passing conversations about how
what we're writing can't be plagiarism
because 'the Beats' died with our falling enthusiasm for life.
still stuck on forever's problem;
the space between reality and late night schemes.
still trying to reconcile
the unfulfilled promises of modern life.
degrees in 'sales and marketing'
tuesday night punk rock shows.
full nude striptease.
full nude striptease.
the far off sounds of street-lit vomitting, and
drunks asking 'what're the cheapest smokes you sell'
to a school aged fuck up who 'gets it'.
spilled cans of Diesel and Carter Lager
leaking like the wounds of wartime.
surrounded by humming signs and hostile footpaths,
empty land guarded by barbed fences
and twenty four slash seven security signs.
still shouting songs of revenge at the moon.
our one chance
wasted on these streets
take no prisoners
take no prisoners
take no prisoners (x ∞)

doing my bit (broken glass as community action pt. 2)

i walked home with a brick in my hand
and broke every motion sensing light
that lit me up.
doing my bit for crime deterrence deterrence.

a numbers guy

This is the start of a longer short story I started writing. Not sure if it will ever get finished. Enjoy it going nowhere, for now.

June 12, 1990 was an unremarkable day in a relatively straight forward year. On this day, free from major air disasters or stock market crashes, Mark Smith entered the World. He was neither early nor late, and neither kicking nor screaming – just another unremarkable soul joining the procession of millions of other unremarkable souls who wind up seventy years down the track wondering where it all went wrong.

Throughout childhood, Mark maintained his steadfast commitment to the ordinary - role playing Dragon Ball Z at school with his four friends until a respectable age, and tossing his uneaten peanut butter sandwiches in the bin daily. His parents separated and his father moved to Australia, as was par for the course in those days. Later in life Mark would wonder if this event hadn't played maybe just a small part in how it all turned out. At the time, though, it had just seemed so, well, normal. All his friends got two Christmas presents too. Mark's mother Sharon had been back working since he started school, and so they were never poor or anything. And so, life marched on, each day inevitable as the planet's revolution, every week punctuated by Simpsons re-runs and Friday night fish and chips.

Adolescence, with its bursting hormones and the accompanying government-sanctioned sex-ed classes, proved the turning point. The point where Mark Smith, for reasons that would remain unknown to him, realised that he was Different. At first, it was just 'different'. The capital D came later in life. And not just different in that boring and cliched 'I'm a unique and wonderful snowflake and will dye my hair green and shout obscenities at authority figures' kinda way that was almost expected of teenage dirtbags at the time. Different in a different way.

By the time he was in High School, Mark was moving in the second-tier popular crowd. Not the top rugby players crowd, but only one step below, on the grand High School scheme of things. Sure, at 14 he wasn't attending all the parents-outta-town parties, but he still did okay for himself. This second tier friend group had corresponding second-tier friend groups at at least two of the girls schools around town at any given point, which was pretty good.

When the 4^th form school dance came around, Mark bowed to the pressure of his friends and asked Christina from the Catholic girls school (with the eternal reputation for teenage pregnancy) to come with him. Leading up to the dance, Mark and his friends spent more than a few hours talking about 'how mean the dance was gonna be', and 'who was gonna pash and/or finger who'. Despite this undefeatable young man bravado , Mark was becoming increasingly nervous. He'd never even kissed a girl before. Mostly, he messed up talking to them. Didn't know what to say. Sweaty hands preceded nervous laughter, which itself was the harbinger of impending failure. These pressures teamed up with a catalog of imagined inadequacies to weigh heavy on Mark's mind on the Friday of the dance. He almost threw up on the skill saw during last period woodwork.

the battle of adrianople

Through his father's connections (specifically- the production company which owed him a favour for sorting out the whole Next Top Plus Sized Model fiasco), he'd got a shot at it. At 'the big time'. Thirteen half hour episodes, commissioned after the pilot's entirely ambivalent test screening.

“It's essentially a show about nothing, y'know, like Seinfeld” he'd proclaimed to all the adoring young girls, who'd taken to ringing his long-term table at the bar, hoping for some sort of 'big break'. He left out the part about how it was like Seinfeld, minus the jokes. And how he enjoyed most television about as much as the general public enjoyed watching 'curvy, natural' behemoths heft themselves self-righteously across the screen each night to empowering messages about being 'real women'. That is to say, he knew fuck all about television, and even less about how to make it. What he did know, though, was how much television meant to these vapid martini drinkers. To have your own TV series, though, meant you'd made it.

“It's kind of like this conceptual, hard realist take on young peoples' lives, I guess. Like Skins, but funnier. And grittier. A realistic take on drug use”. He didn't even know about this part- it was mainly conversational filler really. Or maybe he would throw in some more drugs. Glam things up a bit with some thick white lines off of porcelain in 'pumping clubs'. Tired old cliches. It had to be nose drugs. The pilot had consisted almost entirely of the 'funniest' of his friends, smoking weed and talking about 'buzzy shit'. But really, no one wanted a 'realistic take' on weed. 6.5 hours of some doss cunts sitting on second hand couches watching Spongebob slightly paranoid and not wanting to talk heaps didn't exactly sound like Emmy material. And what else was there? Some old man, half-grey mustache waving as he rides helmetless on a stolen bike across wide ghetto avenues with pockets full of meth? Pockmarked depraved ex-private school girls slurping on the bulbous, diseased penii of grey faced and lecherous finance company directors? It had to be 'cocaina'.

“But yeah, we're gonna be casting next week, probably, if any of you are interested? I could run through some lines before hand too?”