Gragaggagaaghhgahagah.

Well, there’s a lesson that I will take away from what just happened; never, ever, ever use Nina’s crappy half-dead laptop for writing things you care about. I was writing this Journal, and, as per usual, the stupid thing decides to switch off. Having reaccessed this Journal – which is currently sat patiently on my external hard drive – it turns out that it’s erased everything after my thing about Are You as Cunning as Rasputin?.

Okay, so the next entry is online, and I’m confident I only wrote one another entry before the one I was already typing… but geez, that’s irritating. This is currently a new document too, because the Journal I have on the hard drive is defective.

Yes, I know, it’s impossible for you to really sympathise, and of course when I look back I won’t give a shit either. “You think that’s bad, Dom…” Well, true. But god, it’s annoying.

Yes, I should stop doing variations on that. But hell, it’s tempting.

Right. The last entry noted something vaguely important; at least, vaguely important if you honestly give a fuck about my life. Which is of course understandable – no, preferable – if you don’t. Nevertheless, selfish self-promoter that I am, I wrote about it.

You know how I’ve been whinging on about losing bits of myself because thoughts can just wither away? The irony of me losing the bloody Journal entry about that isn’t lost on me – so it’s the only thing I haven’t lost out of this whole ordeal, then – but either way, yes, that’s what I talked about. And stupidly, I’ve somehow neglected, until now (well, yesterday) to paste in here something I wrote called The Story of Dom.

I’d genuinely forgotten I’d written it, see. It covers a bit of my childhood, and isn’t exactly comprehensive. In fact, it was written when Liam was writing Schoel’s Out, his own exaggerated-life-story thing, so I decided to top him by being more brutally honest and whiny.

Also, I was going to change the name. There’s no way I would have released it as “The Story of Dom”. Or at least… I hope I wasn’t.

Bear with me, I just have to switch on the defective computer just to get the bloody thing.

Okay, here we go. I’ll inevitably say things at certain points, this time with a signifying [ or ] symbol.

The Story of Dom

Disclaimer: Not every name contained within these pages is true - I'm protecting the innocent. Actually, I'm protecting the guilty, because I'm sure they don't want to be reminded of bad things they might have done in the past. The events recalled within are prone to possible exaggeration, but I've tried to keep things as true as possible. Really.

[Obviously though there’s a bit of dramatic licence. Not the same thing, really, but still a bit of a cheat.]

Chapter One: Pre-School and Pre-Memory

Ahh, the memories.
If I had any.
Well, actually, I can indeed remember chunks of the past, but nowhere near all of it. Remembering chunks as opposed to the whole meal makes it seem as if you only experienced those chunks, though family and friends will tell you otherwise. Like eating mixed dog foods and only recalling the vegetable variety. And, just like dog food, these chunks of memory exist because of their bad taste.
Which isn’t to say I’ve had a bad life, or a particularly sad one – in fact, there’s barely any sadness involved. There were a couple of tears and some disappointments, but nothing out of the ordinary. And that’s rather bizarre, considering what I turned out like.

[Hmm, what have I turned out like? I never gave a definitive conclusion to that question in this thing.]

How’s this for patchy memory? One of my earliest memories has nothing to do with life itself: it’s Liam’s mother, Aunty Ann, complimenting me on the admittedly stupid idea of transforming the song ‘Monster Mash’ into Monster Bat for a cartoon series when I was bloody young. Psychologists may say I was creating and living in these alternate worlds and figments of my imagination to protect myself from the pains of real life... perhaps, but I didn’t really have a life. Nothing interesting. I didn’t have parents that abused me, or abusive friends (except one kid, later), or abusive enemies (I had less abusive enemies than friends!). So I had no life to escape. I was creating something that wasn’t so mundane. That was why I tended to ignore the real world. A pity, because I missed so much, even though I was doing things that I’m sure many would envy. In a lot of ways I envy them for living their simple lives, whilst I had one but refused to live it.
My life was boring. So why am I writing about it?
Because I feel like it. Because it’s time to grow up and stop living in these fantasy worlds, at least for a while. Even reality itself was shaped into a fantasy for me, where I ignored most facts of life and spun my own devious tales on them.
Pre-school is the one part of my life that I really cannot call a period of my life, because as I said before, only chunks exist in my memory to prove I ever went there. For all I know, piecing together the evidence, I went there for three days, or less. But in actual fact I went for three years. I started out in Newcastle and went to Holy Family. From kinder to year 2, these years exist in my memory as occasional stabs at the mind. As they will with all people. To this extent then I’ve got no idea what shaped the person I am today, and there’s so many bloody inconsistencies that it barely matters.
I’m going to relate the memories I have of these three years now, and I’m going to be completely and utterly honest about all of it.
I have a distinct snapshot of my first day at school. This is the entire memory: I was in the playground, I saw a girl that was all tits and teeth, and I thought, “they’re so big in Year 6.”
I’ve got no idea if she really was in Year 6, though I’m pretty sure she was in uniform. Possibly very well developed for her age. The odd thing was though, I was the picture of innocence then, and even though reading that now made it seem as if I was lusting from my kinder days, I in fact wasn’t. I’ve no idea why that memory stays with me, but it does.
My sexuality was a very odd occurrence for a long time in my life, because I never had any idea where I was going. I don’t necessarily mean that I wondered if I was straight or gay either, I mean that I didn’t really know at the time what was supposed to happen and what wasn’t. Evidently I completely and utterly missed out on the sex ed classes in Year 6 (I assume), but then again I knew what erections and that were.
The most confusing aspect in retrospect was the relationship I had with my then best friend, Alex Blackie. Since I’ve resigned to be completely honest, I do remember that I used to kiss him on the cheek from time to time. It’s rather bizarre thinking about it now, and the confusion is not “am I gay?” but “why on earth did I do that?” Because I’m not actually gay... it just seems like it was a picture of childish innocence to me. I wonder what everyone else thought, though. Blackie too was the picture of innocence I think, because he never told me to step off and we remained good friends. I have no idea what we had in common now, but we did play and all that. I also had a friend named James Walsh who I ended up remeeting at Pius much later, but to be honest I don’t remember him at all. I was also friends, though I think more in an “out of school” basis, with my second cousin Thomas Dougherty. My other second cousin Jess Dunn I don’t remember at all, so I’ve no idea if we were friends. Maybe they could tell me one day...
The second rather disturbing thing was pure fantasy and conjecture. Before I relate it, let me just say that I didn’t like the prospect that I was imagining, but it just seemed to me to be correct and how the world worked. So anyway, I imagined that one of my teachers (my kinder teacher I think) and my Uncle Craig were having an affair.

[Liam laughed when he heard this. So I’d advise that anyone who’s shocked… well actually, that’s understandable. But I was naïve. “Affair” was probably just something I’d heard recently in a movie I’d seen.]

Let me bring the point home again: there was no evidence of this at all, in fact I don’t think I ever saw the two together. But extremely weirdly, I did in my mind. It fascinates me now, because what motive did I have for imagining this? Was I just sick? But I have no recollection of thinking of my teacher (and certainly not Uncle Craig!) as if she was attractive, so I’ve no idea where it came from. Childish innocence with a twist. I don’t remember much else about this lady teacher, except for a day when we had to make dinosaurs and I made mine “Domosaurus”. Amusingly enough though I mispelt it, so it actually said “Doomosaurus”. I also remember one fateful day when I was absolutely busting to go the toilet and asked her to go, probably quite calmly, about five times, then couldn’t hold it in any longer and just pissed myself. She then led me to the toilet and had a few angry words to impart to me, to the effect of “Why didn’t you tell me how badly you needed to go?” Well, why didn’t you just let me go, woman?

[I do not say “woman” like that in real life, just to ease the pained look on your face. Come to think of it, I don’t even write it.]

I also recall the look of absolute annoyance on her face when I missed getting off at the bus stop for school and ended up at the depot instead, having to be driven to school.
It wasn’t my fault though, honestly. In an example of the naïvety I displayed towards the world, I didn’t realise that I had to push the button to tell the driver that the next stop was mine. The thing is, every single time I’d been on the bus before, including when mum was showing me how to catch the bus (obviously I hadn’t paid too much attention), someone else had pushed the button for that stop, a schoolkid or someone else. On that day though, I was the only schoolkid on the bus, so the reins were handed to me. Which I had no idea I had to pull. As I watched the school zoom by, I walked to the driver and said, “Excuse me, but you missed my stop.”
In the gruff voice that only bus drivers can manage, he asked, “Did you press the button?”

[This is conjecture. I don’t remember the actual sound of his voice at all, just the fact that he said it.]

“What button?”
The driver inhaled deeply, as if sucking a cigarette, but really in exasperation. “You have to press the button or I won’t know to let you off.”
“Oh.” A pause, while he continued driving. “Well, can you let me off at the next stop?” It was coming up anyway, and it wasn’t too far from the school.
Yet the driver said no, that it wasn’t safe. So instead he made me stay on the bus all the way to the depot, whereby numerous phone calls and bewilderment from me later, I was picked up and driven to school to meet my furious teacher.
Come to think of it, he was probably right about it being safe. It’s amazing how, as a child, sinister motives simply do not occur to you. I remember one other bus trip, and that was where an attractive and motherly looking woman asked me if I wanted to get off at the next stop with her. God knows what she wanted – was she looking for a ransom? Was she a paedophile? I seriously don’t think I knew her at all, but I didn’t suspect a thing. Two things saved me from potential abduction, dismemberment and sordid sex. For one thing, I was running a couple of minutes late for school, and I knew I had to get there on time. Secondly, the stop she was getting off at was at Bar Beach – a single stop before the school. I reasoned that if she really wanted me to come with her, we could get off at the next stop instead since that’s where my school was. So saved my life. Interestingly, I don’t remember what anyone else on the bus was saying or doing at the time, so either they weren’t paying attention to the fact that I was about to be abducted, or they were waiting for my consent before leaping on the woman and taking her down. But seriously, on a public bus? Insanity.
That’s it, then. Three years of my life condensed into less than ten paragraphs, and ranting paragraphs at that.
Following that, I was ripped away from my former life.
We moved.

Chapter Two: Dom is out of Newcastle! Dom Whited Out!

[Actually, moving to Singleton has made me sit in front of my computer and steadily grow more vampiric, so that title isn’t inaccurate. Um, apart from the fact that it’s actually talking about me moving to Melbourne.]

It was when moving to Melbourne that things started to rack up. I have countless unrelated memories of Melbourne, but I’ll try and write them down in a readable fashion.
The first school I went to was called St Ignatius at Richmond. We’d moved interstate because of Marco’s work (I think he was finishing his thesis), taking the luxury tour of big large moving trucks (which we bloody well didn't have when moving to Brisbane). My sister Nina, being a tiny bub at the time, was cute and sick. Literally. I think she was close to death or something. Being the selfish git I am, I have no recollection of this at all, but I’m told it’s true anyway.

[Actually, I don’t even remember being told this now. Hmm. That’s a bad sign.]

Our new Melbournian house was nothing special, not from my memory. The house itself certainly wasn’t; a simple bricked little dwelling is all I remember, with a backyard almost shielded from the outside world and accessible via a winding wooden ramp, where I used to set fire to ants with magnifying glasses – or I attempted to. Turned out that it was harder than certain movies, such as Antz, claimed. I’d just resort to bouncing a basketball under the guise of exercise, when truly I was committing genocide. Exercise or genocidal ambitions? You decide (sounds like a history book on the Hitler Youth).
But enough about the house. Just look at the location!
Richmond was one of those places where ethnic minorities tend to group together. I can understand why they do this, to create a sense of unity. Then again, I can’t understand how Richmond worked, because whilst there was a domination of Asian families – Vietnamese mainly, I think – there were also a fair amount of Mediterranean families too. Mainly Greek. In fact, if I’m going to be honest, we were probably the only stereotypical “white Australian” family in the entire suburb (except Mum could pass off as Italian, and Marco and Nina have Italian lineage. Damn, I was the odd one out). Ironic that the ethnic minorities became a majority, whilst we were the minority. Not that this was a problem at all – I can’t remember any instances of racism at all.

[More to the point, I honestly didn’t have “race” even cross my mind. The paragraph above is me looking back and speculating, not what I thought at the time. As I’ve said, naïve… but oh so blissful.]

On the other hand, there may possibly have been a racist fuelled attack at school, but in all honesty I think he was just mentally unstable. I never felt different to my classmates, but he bloody well made me feel bad nonetheless. For the purposes of this I’ll call him Parky, which is definitely not his real name (otherwise he’d have been beaten up). He beat me up, thrashed me whenever he felt like it, and was often unpleasant. Oh, and he was my best friend.
God knows why. I was the only person he beat up, I think, so I really have no idea why – why I was beaten up by him, why I was friends with him. If it was a racist attack, I certainly don’t remember what ethnicity he was. But I honestly don’t believe it was – just a power trip. Everyone else kind of looked away when this happened – my other friends, who I’ll call Tuan, Billy and Judge (those are their real names though, I think). In fact, I don’t think I ever invited Parky home, on the grounds of being shit scared of him one minute and happily playing with him the next. I don’t actually remember playing much with him at all, but I know it must have happened. I only remember being beaten up once too, but since I remember what I said, it definitely happened more than once.
I was indeed a strange kid. That was one of the advantages of being in St Ignatius at such a young age – I was so unimpressionable that I simply didn’t see at the time that the rest of the kids were nowhere near as white as me, and with this and the bashing I just assumed that’s how the world worked. My reactions were frequently bizarre.
In a particularly memorable conversation with Mum, I responded to shockingly sad news with a defense mechanism that unfortunately didn’t work out entirely right.
I was playing in the back garden, killing ants as usual, when mortality came back to haunt me, as Mum approached me with her serious face (which I hadn’t yet learned to read). “Dom,” she said slowly and carefully, “you remember your friend from Newcastle, Leo? I’m afraid his father has cancer.”
I laughed.
It wasn’t a laugh of mirth. In actual fact, it was a laugh of uncertainty, as if Mum was kidding, and anyway I didn’t completely understand the implications of these news. But Mum’s shocked “Dom!” told me all I needed to know. I really needed to get out more.
Certainly, apart from ant-killing, I did nothing of worth at home. I didn’t play music at that stage; in fact the only thing I think I did was cuddle and kiss Nina on the cheeks, for the hell of it. She looked like a little doll. Which, saying that now, sounds rather disturbing in a “Bratz privilege child prostitution” way, but come on, this is my unimpressionable young self.
School wasn’t much better. I can’t remember playing any sport whatsoever – I can’t remember playing in general.

[This isn’t true, actually… a later paragraph describes me playing. I’m fairly certain the memories were just flooding back as I wrote.]

What I do remember is playing a priest, the role anyway. Yes, god forgive me, I was an altarboy. I’m sure it was Mum’s idea. I’m damn sure. Well... I hope so. I’m joking, it honestly was her idea.
Maybe that’s why I was beaten up.
If that’s the case, I wasn’t exactly a devoted religious fanatic anyway. I was frequently told off by Mum after my morning altar shifts for yawning noticeably behind the priest as he rambled on. But these early mornings were killing me! Plus, I have nothing to hide from God – if I yawn, then so be it. Anyway, the other altarboy yawned too.
The other guy was a couple of years my senior, which wasn’t much – I was at St Ignatius from years 2 to 4 anyway. I don’t remember talking to him, but I do remember hitching numerous plans to manipulate my supposed “trench humour altarboy bonding” relationship with him.

[No, I didn’t think with those words at the time.]

He was dating this brunette girl with braids in her hair who was also 2 years my senior... I wanted her best friend. Vicky.
I’m not sure why – she wasn’t stunningly modelistic, but then, who wants to date a model? Fuck maybe, but date? But this girl was something special. She had seen me before and smiled. I believe we even spoke once. Yes, she liked me. Yes, she would go out with me. Yes, she would stand by me.
Yes. She stood by me alright. She stood stock still and watched me scream in frustration and fear as I had the living shit kicked out of me by Parky.
I was doubling over, wheezing and groaning in pain, but still yelling at the top of my voice. How didn’t the teachers hear us, for god’s sake? My incoherent attempts at reasoning with Parky were along the lines of, “Why? Why do you always do this? I thought we were friends!”
As I clutched my stomach and tasted blood on my lips, each kick expelling my energy and sending me further to the cold cement underneath, I looked up one last time, past Parky. There, on the other side of the playground, where I instinctively looked, she was. Our eyes met, mine tearful and pleading. Hers merely pitying.
To her credit, she didn’t look away in embarrassment, even though her friend was next to her, watching. But then again, she didn’t call a bloody teacher either. No, I sound angry, but I’m really not. It’s not like it was her fault. Probably wasn’t Parky’s fault either – maybe it really was a racist attack, and his parents were giving him strife over befriending a white kid. Who knows?
Thankfully, the rest of playtime was a hell of a lot more fun. Stupid games devised by myself and Judge (who was tall and, I reckon, Chinese) included zombie tag – where whoever was “It” had to catch people, but you had to keep your eyes open without blinking, even as the wind ripped at your sockets. That game didn’t last long. We had long, philosophical discussions about whether hippies really rooted trees whilst scraping sap from a flaky school tree, giving it an experimental rub myself once just to see what it was like (thankfully, I hadn’t realised that the removal of pants was a necessity).
Experimentation was the order of the day, and I probably set myself up for the beatings by experimenting on myself like a guinea pig. Just as the killing of ants, seeing those thousands upon thousands of sprinkled pepper corpses, held sick fascination for me, so too did seeing the limits to the human body. I can’t say I actually enjoyed Parky’s beatings, but they opened up a window of possibilities for me. Thankfully not in possession of a knife and blissfully unaware of emo culture, I instead opened up wounds by slamming my fists repeatedly into the brick walls of the school. I never bled, but I was fascinated in particular by bruises. I loved the weirdness of the purple, to the yellow, and sometimes the black and blue – the fascinating colours that my skin could turn. Perhaps I was trying to make myself “coloured” subconsciously, to erase my whiteness? I doubt it, though. I’d just stand there, punching the walls as my friends, Judge, Tuan and Billy observed (never Parky, curiously), casually chatting to me as if nothing was happening. Occasionally I’d experiment on the sides of walls to add grazing to the mix, or Judge would sometimes even join me in punching the walls. Coupled with the ant-killing and the Death series I had planned with Liam (a poor ripoff of Goosebumps), I was becoming pretty aggressive.
I even led an attack over the school fence at, embarrassingly, a nunnery, where we pelted rocks at their houses. Not them, thankfully. But we still had to send letters of apology back.
All this aggression, from I don't know where. It grew and grew over the first few years. In year 2, I was angel. Through years 3 and 4, I slowly developed into a hardened cynic ready to hurt. That’s not to say I was a bully, or that I wanted to hurt other people. But pain fascinated me, and physical exertion tied in naturally. As did a certain amount of respect. During year 4, I finally struck back against Parky. It wasn’t a powerful hit, I didn’t bruise or bleed him. It wasn’t about that. It was just the fact that I hit him. His eyes widened in shock. We remained friends after that, but with no more beatings. Yet my aggression was still growing.
It wasn't until we moved house that I found an outlet.
We moved literally less than a block away. This time, we didn’t bother with trucks, we simply lugged it across the road. Of course, the piano was a bit of a problem, but other than that, everything was simple and quick. The new house was christened the Blue House, for reasons that should be blindingly obvious. It was much bigger than our old house, and had a better garden and everything. Almost a forest of gardening, and better yet we lived adjoined to a practically abandoned childcare centre (actually, here’s an example of my “ethnic upbringing”; that for me, childcare centres, pre school, are forever called “creches”), and a huge tree grew from the back of our garden, allowing me easy climbing access to spy on... well, nothing. But it was cool nonetheless, and figs were a prominent commodity from this tree.
The house’s best feature, which I miss to this day, was central heating. But I’ll return to that later.
The Blue House was extremely close to a park, and I’d just gotten a bike. Marco, being the clever mathematical genius that he is, put two and two together and got... erm, bike lessons (okay, maybe not that much a mathematical genius, but practical). Numerous fascinating grazes and blood later, I could ride a bike. And ride I did.
Sometimes I miss the sheer pleasure and novelty of riding a bike at first. Or maybe it was just that riding my bike at top and utterly dangerous speeds is just so connected to Melbourne. Come to think of it, it was the perfect mix between hilly and flat – Newcastle is basically flat, whilst Brisbane was bumpier than driving on a Dalek in the Magic School Bus. The exhiliration, the wind sweeping past, the absolute knowledge that nothing could go wrong – and the fascinating notion that, if it did, I’d have some cool new graze that got me closer to death with blood-loss. Ironically, I managed to keep myself pretty damn safe – and it was years later, when riding a crappy scooter, that I finally got an injury worth bragging about. But that’s a story for later. The only really bad crash I remember was trying to steer my bike through two very close fat white poles, which I didn’t have a hope in hell of going between. Actually, I lie, I went straight through them. The bike didn’t follow. Well, at least I had a helmet.
And there went my aggression. But I also started becoming sporty – imagine! Frequent cricketing at school, and then entering a basketball team – a non-school one too. As ever mimicing the course of my life through sport, I generally took defensive position, with occasionals bouts at goal shooting that surprisingly worked well. I was on fire, I was awesome, I was unbeatable. I’d seen Space Jam, and I was inspired.

[I had Tazos too, naturally.]

I sustained the best injury of my life one time at a basketball match. Come to think of it, it was actually before the match. I stepped out of the car, all psyched up, tripped, and managed to graze my knee on the gravel right in front of the basketball pavilion. The graze truly was bizarre – I’d somehow managed to cut it so cleanly that not only did it not hurt, but it honestly resembled a grilled slab of meat, with the lines of blood substituting the lines of the grill. After a quick bout of pressuring the blood to stay in though, I still played the bloody game (no pun intended). I didn’t even wear a bandage. God, I’d squeal like a girl at the thought now.
I was an animal. When we used to play chasey at school, I was actually a velociraptor, or so I acted. I was fast enough – I just didn’t have the looks, as hard as I tried to salivate, roar, and hold my hands in place (which probably made me look gay, actually).
But towards the middle of Year 4, I had a sudden experience that killed it off and made me quiet again. As ever, we lined up at the computer room for our lessons, where I fully intended to play that crappy 2d (and I mean “2d”, it was just green lines) tank fighting game. But for some reason I can’t fathom, an older student thought he’d be cool by showing how stable he was when he stood on a curved hand ledge three floors up from the ground, ready to plunge to a messy death. The teacher saw him, and screamed in rage and fear at once. The guy’s confidence was shattered, and he unbalanced, slipping, slowly and almost comically waving his arms, before he pitched and fell.
Backwards. Back onto the ledge.
He got a reprimand, nothing more.
But it still opened my eyes. Pain may have seemed cool, but if it led to death, then it wasn’t. There had to be a way to stimulate the sensations of the human body without pain...
All that testosterone was bound to go somewhere. And, I’m ashamed to say, some aspects of my puberty started unusually early. I blame the gas vents in our house – there was nothing like getting up on a cold morning and squatting over the vents as if about to shit through them, the warm air glistening up my pants legs and brushing against my scrotum with intense satisfaction. It was my fault for not wearing underpants, though maybe Mum wasn’t prepared for my being such an early riser, in two senses of the term. Seriously though, how couldn’t it happen? It was inevitable.
That’s not to say I got my first boner over a gas vent. I mean, I don’t actually remember, to be honest, when my first was.

[But hey, I do remember my first masturbation. Do you want to hear about that? …Oh, fine then.]

But I distinctly remember the first person I ever erected over, in secret (fun trivia: the song Diamonds are Forever came on as I wrote this, with the lyric “they stimulate me... caress it, touch it, stroke it...”). In Year 4, we had a music teacher who would come in every Thursday, a blonde woman with glasses with a good figure and a face that I don’t honestly remember. I’m actually more a brunettes man, if I’m honest, but blonde women with intelligent glasses have always appealed to me. Maybe I’m attracted to paradoxes?

[…Hmm, I’ll get back to this “brunettes and blondes” thing later.]

At any rate, I don’t remember much that she taught us, I just remember staring at her.
The reason that I remember she came on Thursdays is because I used to regulate my erections.
Regulating pleasure... odd, isn’t it? What I really mean by this is that, whilst it was okay to have a boner from thinking of her on most nights, Wednesday night was definitely off. To be honest, I thought it meant I’d be likely to have a pseudo-hangover from the effects and leap all over her. I didn’t have boners at school, so I was safe. For months I made sure I didn’t erect on Wednesday nights.
Then one night, I couldn’t help it.
I came to school the next day, hoping that she was off that day, or that I could pretend to be sick, or anything, anything! My mind swam with escape possibilities and foreseen consequences.
She came in. It was too late. I was done for. I’d have to just let it all out.
Nothing happened.
It was like an awakening for me. I suddenly realised that no-one could ever possibly know, no matter where and when I had one. I started to extend my boundaries a bit, thinking beyond this one teacher (who at any rate was about to stop teaching us and move on) and casting my eyes over other potential candidates. By this stage, Vicky was long forgotten, but I had a teacher fixation anyway. So who was there? For some demented reason, I only chose teachers that had taught me, because otherwise it would have felt wrong, as if we didn’t have some sort of bond that allowed me to think about them in the first place.
I mulled over the candidates in my head. My year 2 teacher? God no. She was a bloody nun, and an old one at that. I’m sure I didn’t understand the problem with thinking sexy thoughts about nuns at that age, but I certainly knew the age restrictions, from a simple embedded reaction. It wasn’t something I needed to be taught. Nuns are no go, even if they’re not Bible-pushers. She was actually a rather nice woman, but also strict in a mock strict way. She’d lecture me when she met me out of school hours over eating too many BigMacs. Like I was going to get fat. If God wanted rid of McDonalds, why has he let it infect the entire planet?
My actual Year 4 teacher I considered for a second before discarding too. One, she was old, 40ish. Two, she had weird arthritis in her pinky fingers – which I found fascinating, not disturbing, and I would mimic from time to time. Thirdly, her name was Mrs Dickson. The potential for disaster is self evident, because at this stage I was almost treating my fantasies like marriage. It was so bad that I couldn’t get away with remarking amusedly, “Mrs Dickson’s dictation” in class without a myriad of sniggering and being sent out of the room (honestly though, that’s what I said!).
My Year 3 teacher on the other hand was a suitable candidate. She was actually hot. She was late 20s, early 30s, Italian, tanned and graceful. Her name was Mary. She had immaculate nails, which she often broke in class with the stereotypical screech of “I broke a nail!” and then bleeding over the time tables (I didn’t find this as fascinating, actually). There was the slight problem that I’d called her “Mum” once, but you know, we could get over that. She was also, rather unfortunately, a huge Michael Jackson fan, making us watch Thriller on many occasions. The worst straw was when she rather disturbingly made us do a singing routine for our parents of that song that goes,
“Don’t blame it on the sunshine,
Don’t blame it on the moonlight,
Don’t blame it on the good times,
Blame it on the boogie!”
With embarrassing moves present, too. Much pouting, moonwalking, and sexy dancing for Year 3s. Hey, maybe I actually was in with a chance, if that was her fetish.
Nothing came of it.

[I should point out that I don’t hate Michael Jackson. I don’t think I’ve ever had any interest in listening to his music beyond recognising the importance of Thriller, and I’m pretty sure this is because I remember all this stuff. It’s irrelevant who it was, really. I’m sure if you’d made me dance like Thom Yorke in ‘Idioteque’ in front of my parents, I would have distantly and bitterly hated Radiohead for the rest of my life.]

But I became a boner whore, making rises over any woman I found attractive and knew on some basis. From Marco’s friends’ girlfriends (not all of them, some. I can’t remember them now though), to... well, embarrassingly, Mum was once in this childcare club thing where she and a few other mums went on picnics with the kids and stuff, all Nina’s age. I usually tagged along. One of them I was really quite attracted to, mainly because she was nice (although she was pretty too), and resilient too. I mean, this woman got a sewing needle stuck in her finger, and caught a tram to the hospital whilst holding her crying kids. It seems silly now of course, and if she reads this (and other relevant women who read this too), I mean nothing by it, it was just harmless puberty kicking in a bit early, and I wasn’t going to do anything. Besides which, her husband was a Thunderbirds fan. I mean, come on! There’s no way she wouldn’t consider anyone else!
As my pubic awakening continued merrily along and my schooling year finished however, it was suddenly clear that we were to move again, this time to what would end up being a more white suburb. I don’t think it was intentional, but then, maybe we were kicked out? Perhaps they got sick of us. From Mum’s childcare club, to the teachers at my school... Vicky found me so pitiful that she never wanted to see me again, Parky wanted to beat someone up again, Judge wished to stop punching walls.
Billy deciding that he no longer wanted me at his bloody expensive Greek holiday house on the beaches of Aus where we’d watch Goosebumps+ and wonder why aliens went to camp.
Tuan deciding that he’d had enough of me refusing his offers to make me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and tiring of whipping me in X-Men beat-em-ups as that crappy do-gooder Cyclops. Maybe he had hoped Cyclops’ rays would give me a tan. Didn’t work.
Maybe it was in fact our cranky old next-door neighbour who was increasingly cranky whenever my balls went over his fence and eventually deflated my basketball and crushed the roses in our garden*, leading to resentment and neighbourhood feuds.
I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Either way, by the end of Year 4, we were out of there.

*Actually, I can reveal, all these years later, that I had accidentally crushed the roses, and blamed that on him. Sorry, mate. But you still deflated my basketball, you barstard – unless you were a member of the Royal Soceity for the Prevention of Cruelty to Ants?

…aaaand that was it.

Hooray!

I’m tempted to vaguely just point out what I started writing about in tonight’s now-lost entry rather than actually writing it, but that’d mean I’d be lazy and angry, and we wouldn’t want that. Anyway, this is my Journal. I have some measure of responsibility to it, surely.

So. This hard drive I talked about? It came with three videos on it. Actually, I thought it was only two, but I’ve discovered another right at this moment. I’ll just watch that one, hang about.

…Okay! It appears to be a Japanese video that limbos by doing the splits on roller skates. That’s actually pretty cool! Typically Japanese I suppose, but hey, easily the best video on there.

Oh yes, the other two. Well, the first is called “Why Kids Need Pets”, and is effectively just Funniest Home Videos. Yes, it’s got the sound effects and everything (just not the voiceover guy). It doesn’t actually give a definitive reason for why kids need pets, unless, you know, the idea is that kids need something to laugh at/get hurt by. Hmm.

The second is about cars doing burnouts. One in America, and one in Germany… accompanied, in fact, by Rammstein’s ‘Du Hast’, which seems very out of place to me. Yes, I know Rammstein (ironically or glorifyingly, I’m still not sure) flaunts a lot of the stereotypes of Germany, yet beyond a tenuous Lost Highway link, I’ve not seen them hold any particular fascination with cars. Surely Kraftwerk would’ve been a safer bet. Though, of course, less rawkin’.

Oh yeah, and there’s a third burnout, which is performed by a guy in Iraq on a bicycle. I’m not sure whether we’re meant to cheer at him doing it on a bicycle, or laugh at the fact that he (supposedly) can’t afford a car, or celebrate that it’s knocking down stereotypes, or be angry that it’s showing that the world is full of homogenised dullards.

Anyway. The reason I bring this is up is because the phrase “Why Kids Need Pets” seemed to link in with something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Having come back to Newcastle for a coupla weeks, I’ve been reacquainted with my dog. And I’ve started wondering, probably far too much, what’ll happen when he dies.

Morbid, obviously, but… I dunno. It’s the main reason why I didn’t want a dog in the first place, though of course I didn’t say that. The weird thing is, I’ve had numerous birds that died and I barely shed a tear, and numerous fishes that died and received no more than a rolling of the eyes in mourning.

So why is a dog so bad? Because it’s alive for longer? Because it’s subservient? Because it appears to be more intelligent? Because it exhibits human qualities (or, we project human qualities onto it)?

Maybe it’s because fish and birds seem so mundane and widespread. Generally speaking, for instance, visitors don’t ask you what type of fish you have unless they’re a) very into fish or b) the fish in question is bizarre and awesome (I mean, how can you not fall in love with a fighting fish? That damn thing ate my other fish and some snails, but it was so cool. Its name was Sobek too, which is even cooler). As for birds, that’s rarely asked either, and I’d usually answer when I was asked with “uh, a budgy” or something equally non-committal.

(Hmm, so basically how I reply to the “what kind of music do you play?” question. Um, with a non-committal response, that is; not with “uh, a budgy”)

And of course, the likelihood of them asking is increased by if the pet is there at the time. More to the point, if you were to say, “I’ve got some pet fish” whilst at a dinner party, everyone would sort of look at you strangely. If you were to say, “I’ve got a dog”, everyone is suddenly interested. Even if they’re a “cat person”.

Inevitably, you get asked what breed it is. I’m still not sure what breed my dog is exactly, which seems to add to its mystique to me. It makes me look uninterested and silly to everyone else though, I’d guess.

It’s hard to qualify why we care more, though. As an example, I said in The Story of Dom that I’ve probably killed millions of ants – in fact, I killed two today – yet were someone to kill a dog in my immediate area – mine, or one I’ve never heard of before – I’d be more concerned. Far more.

It’s akin to – as Lawrence Miles would happily (or, um, unhappily I suppose) tell you – caring far more about a teenager slashed up in your local suburb than anything happening over in… ooh, let’s say Iraq. Caring more about the death of a fictional character than the death of children in Africa.

Hmm, see the problem? Already it looks like I’m preaching. It’s that difficult to even acknowledge problems around the world – I’m putting it as vaguely as I can so as to not put anyone off reading further – without everyone suddenly sneering at you for being an idealist fool.

…of course, in a way, they’re right. We are effectively doomed, that’s pretty much a given.

Anyway. I’m not even prepared to talk about that myself – mainly because, if I’m honest, I’m not as well versed as I should be in such matters. I’ll leave it be. Man, just read what Lawrence Miles has to say on it (I’ll send it to you, if it’s not on his blog).

Aaaand… I’ll finish there for tonight. I remember what I was going to write, but I’m too tired. If only I hadn’t originally lost that stuff, grr. Bye!