Tales from the Pub: Junkie Shines!

Ooh look, is that Hindmarsh Drive or Tuggeranong Parkway?  I like it when I get to draw Canberra in a comic coz Canberra aint never represented by nobody else, so Canberrans have to do it themselves.  Tuggeranong pride 2903.

Seriously though, people from Tuggeranong actually tattooed their postcode to their arms as a lame source of pride.  Here is a list of other stupid sources of pride:

• Nationality. Everyone was born.  It takes no effort at all to plop out of your mum, and you had no say in where her clunge was when you did.  Be proud of what you’re like or what you did instead.  Every thug in jail is proud of their nationality even though their country actually pays to have them removed from society.  It’s a bit weird to be proud of something you have nothing to do with.  It’s like me being proud of Rod Stewart.   The ones who ‘flew here’ have more right to be proud of being Aussie than those who ‘grew here’, since they actually went to a lot more effort.

• Sex. Men don’t go on about it but women often prattle on about how they’re a woman and have ovaries and crap.  I guess it’s harder to be a woman than a man.  But half the world are female so big deal.  Plus minges are pretty gross if you really look at them and all manner of gunk comes out of them.  So do nobs but they’re more like a neat hose.

• Race. Who cares if you are descended from the Maories, the Cherokees, the Celts, the Great Danes or the Monkees.  I only care about interesting stories your dad might have and how physically attractive your heritage makes you.  But don’t bore me with the fucked music of your people or your dumb tattoo.   And if you’re one of those white pride neo-nazis who points to Beethoven and Newton, don’t fool yourself.  Some white people were privileged and nurtured and able to express their genius, but our ancestors were 99% sick, poor, filthy peasants with no teeth, doing anything the Church and King asked them to and eating poo for dinner for centuries because they were chicken that God might get all angry.   So unless you’ve done something good yourself, shut up.

• Religion. Followers of mainstream religion don’t seem particularly proud of their religion.  They like it but they don’t bleat about it.  New-age followers on the other hand tend to like to go on and on about their exotic made-up beliefs using the words abundant, goddess, creative, sacred, blessing, divine, journey etc etc.  This one woman I read about who practiced voodoo insisted on spelling it vodou.  If that annoys you, you can be my friend.

• Supporting some footy team or other. Pretty much the dumbest thing to be proud of.

• Living in the one place your whole life. What an achievement!

• Being able to drink a lot.

• What your mum or dad was, if you are not that thing yourself.

• Being good at a computer game.
  

• Owning an official, olympic design frisbee. This is here because I have a friend who once boasted about owning one when we offered to buy him one.  He didn’t say ‘no thanks’, he just went on and on about this frisbee he had in a really loud voice.

• Knowing and understanding these traffic lights. Another time we were riding our BMXs and he zipped across these lights, whereas I waited for the crossing light to go green.  I mentioned as I caught up to him that he was lucky the light was about to go green and that there were no cars.  Instead of letting it go, he asked me to repeat my comment, upon which he explained at length that when he was a boy he oft spent many an afternoon riding his bike around this area and so he ‘knew these traffic lights’ instinctively, as if he posesses some kind of street smarts from his adventurous youth.

• Not having eaten at McDonalds for over 6 years. He won’t even take you through the drive-thru.  It isn’t political coz he’ll eat at Subway or KFC.  But his other boycott is that he wont eat at the Tuggeranong Ali Baba because once, 8 years ago, one of the staff was rude to him.

• Putting spare change in a large jar at the end of every day and eventually accumulating $1000 in gold coins. This would be a feat if you were 16, but he’s 34 and has a job.

I done gone drawn Tim.

Here’s a drawing of my pal Tim that I did.  I entered it for consideration for this “Window Frames” exhibition which displays art in various shop windows up and down Sydney Road.  It got rejected which wasn’t too bad coz it meant I could give it to Tim for his birthday.  But I got angry when I went to Sydney road and noticed there was some art in the windows that looked like it was drawn by a rhinoceros.

I got tricked into entering into a storm of controversy about a mascot called Unit Man.

From the Australian Financial Review, Friday 30th October:

Unit Man will show up in grocery catalogues, online and at checkouts. But the Queensland Consumers Association doubted the unit prices would be as visible as their heroic mascot.
“We have found far too many of the labels are either difficult or impossible to read for a normal-sighted person,” spokesman Ian Jarratt said.
“The print height isn’t big enough, the print isn’t dense enough, in some cases the characters are too close together and in others they are too low on the shelves.”
Melbourne-based cartoonist Ben Hutchings did not share consumer groups’ apprehension.
“He’s quite well drawn – and cute,” he said.

Now I sound like an antagonistic shit-stirrer.  I wonder if when Ian Jarratt reads this (if it’s printed on paper) he’ll scrunch the very page with his clenched fist (of rage) as he reads it, his face turning a deep shade of crimson and his whole body shaking.  Then he might get his index finger and stick it in his collar and pull it out to let cool air flow and swirl around his tits to reduce his body temperature.

I wonder if he is actually really insecure and reading some hip cartoonists laid-back, laconic counterpoint will make him feel foolish and uncool in front of his fiancee.  Or maybe I am the fool, because Ian Jarrat seems to have a no-nonsense design sensibility but my opinion is just baseless.

I guess only time will tell who is the fool, and indeed if perhaps in our own ways we are all fools.

THE END

By Ben aged 34.

PS:  I have like two itchy bites on my arse.

An Open Letter to Kevin Rudd…

Dear Kevin,

How are you?  How’s the family?  I am pretty good…. I am writing this because I saw a picture of you in the paper and thought I’d write to say hello!  I am just on my computer.  There are really loud cockies outside screeching… hmmm must be that time of year or something.  I haven’t got much news.  The other day some dude left a busted up car in our parking area and it was blocking all the other cars.  The note he left said he bought it for parts, but then it broke down and he had to put it there so it didn’t get stolen.  What a wanker!  The people in my apartment block who own cars moved it out of the way but then it was blocking my space so visitors can’t couldn’t get in, so eventually me and Simon actually pushed the thing up the driveway along the side of the apartment block.  I pushed it with my back while he steered, and it was really hard.  He kept saying we couldn’t do it, but I got annoyed and said “Come ON, man!”, like are we not men?  He can be so half-arsed.  The driveway gets steep near the top and I kept complaining that if I lost control, I wouldn’t be able to move out of the way before it just run me over, and I was panicking a bit!  So when we got to the really  steep bit I got Simon to hold it and I went to call out to the Indian dudes upstairs to come and help us.  I kinda took my time, forgetting immediately how heavy the car was to hold on your own and sort of dallying about, leaving Simon sort of there on his own, eventually calling “hello?” up to the window.  When I did, I heard them imitating me and laughing, which I found interesting but they came down and helped us push it the rest of the way.   They had thick hair and one had a moustache.  The shorter one with the larger, rounder head had the moustache.  I think that is the rule in India.  So yeah, we shifted the car, and then headed back inside, congratulating ourselves for a while and laughing about how I was all Captain Intenso, but then leaving Simon to hold the car on his own for ages.

La la laaa… hmm hmm what else… apart from that, not much has been up.  I got my editor wanting to run Lesson Master in 100% Home Girls which is a Picture spin-off.  I said OK, as long as I didn’t have to make it rude.  I wouldn’t have thought LM would really suit the audience, but he must know what he’s doing and as my sister Sarah pointed out, probably all kinds of people read porno mags, eh.  For instance there is a group called Suicide Girls who do nudie porn, and it’s exactly the same except they have that  goth/Bettie Page look and instead of pouting their lips like retards they do smug, one-sided smirks like fuckwits.  They are aimed at alterno type guys.  Oh, and girls since all goth girls are ‘bi’.

Anyway, hope you are enjoying being Prime Minister.  I don’t follow politics at all, because it’s so depressing.  Not because of what happens, just because everything about it is boring.  Like, even the word ‘policy’ just makes my heart sink.  And ‘legislation’.  But no offense!!!!! I know you need to have politics and that it’s important!  Don’t hate me!!!!!  I bet you do a really good job.  I get the GetUp newsletter but then it started getting sent to my spam folder and I haven’t bothered un-spamming it because I know I will just never read it.  Whenever they go on about “the future of this country” I just think “fuck off.” But I bet you don’t care about comics or drawing so….

I don’t really have anything else to say now, so I’d better go and do some more work and then I might make some dinner.

Those cockies have stopped screeching which is good.  I hope one day I can meet you.  But it’s more likely Sarah will first!!!!

Talk to you soon,

Regards,

Ben

The First Comics Camp Weekend!

When I found out Tiger Airways could get me to Melbo and back for a low, low $56 I decided I’d go to this thing.    Only I clicked on the wrong dates, and booked myself a week in Melbourne.  How the hell would I fill up one whole week and where would I sleep?   David and Sarah’s is the short answer.

A funny answer to how to fill up one week in Melbourne might be “order a coffee” but it didn’t fit in that paragraph.

So I spent two nights with David Blumenstein and his now fiancee Sarah. They live in a small apartment that is smaller now with Sarah – but when I’m there too you have to stand in the kitchen. But I behaved, and held most of my farts in for two nights.  I had the couch though, as you can see.  Me:1  Them:0

On Friday, we left for the Comics Camp. We first picked up Chris.  He was from Tennessee but is now from Tasmania.  We picked him up from the station just as a crazy man began talking to him.   He apologised for smelling like travel, and I apologised for having fingers that stunk of salmon because I’d been picking at this chunk of salmon we brought along.   He’d been waiting around Melbourne since like 7AM.   That’s the worst.   Chris does autobio comics, with a page devoted to each day of his life.

Next pick-up was Jo, who lived on the outskirts of the city. Inside her flat, Jo had her money stacked into little piles of coins and I laughed at her but they explained to me that it was good to do that if you travel by tram. I wasn’t listening though, I just wanted to make fun of her. Jo does all kinds of comics and illustration. She is working on the outline for a graphic novel for Allen & Unwin and she laughs a lot.  Like some kind of mentally ill person.

We got lost trying to get out of Melbourne, and as we sped along freeways, we were treated to the world’s ugliest environment. I have never made fun of a landscape before, but it was so desolate, ugly and boring that we couldn’t help giggling.  It was impressive how fucked it was. This was the industrial area.    We saw a towering pile of broken glass,  factories with masses of pipes, smog, traffic and the occasional huge overpass with arty architectural colour bits on them.  Soon we passed a small patch of dead grass and plastic bags.  I noticed a sign on it saying “grass reserve”.

Eventually we passed just a big field of death where the smog obscured anything on the horizon.

Then we started passing hideous ‘estates’ with endless cloned mansions.

Chris fell asleep, then woke up with a “WHAAA?” then muttered something and went back to sleep.

Later at the servo, Jo found a dead bird that was quite pretty and rare. But I hate dead things and I didn’t let her bring it in the car. She had it in a little bag, but what if the bag touched my knee?  I later realised I should have asked her to just keep it in the boot, because she really wanted it.

We were greeted at the cottage by John Retallick – he does an enthusiastic radio show about Aussie comics, Kirrilly Schell – originally from Canberra like Mandy and me and Joy, the owner of the artists retreat. It was a proper retreat too. We should have been wearing large knitted jumpers and sipping from mugs of Nescafe or something.  It was all wooden and in the bush.  Joy had laid out a spread  (not in a rude way). There were the best muffins ever, bowls of nuts, yoghurt covered sultanas and all kinds of stuff. We ate and read the books and graphic novels that were all over the joint. Finding Nemo was amazing. I inspected the dirty pond with Jo, enjoying the little cicada skin husks until I realised I was scared of them too.  Jo slipped a bit in the mud and got dirt on her arse.  Not Finding Nemo… Little Nemo in Slumberland I mean. Jeez..

Everyone was looking through the binoculars because they could apparently see kangaroos amongst the trees. I toyed with the idea of refusing the binoculars, explaining that to a Canberran like me, kangaroos are no big deal as you see them all the time, but I was a bit bored plus who gives a shit so I took them. And anyway I couldn’t see any even though everyone else could. I began to get anxious so I headed to the artists room and began to set up.

It was the perfect drawing environment.  The room was wooden, with beams across the roof, and large glass sliding doors. The light was warm, and in the middle we’d pushed a number of desks together. There was a TV with a small, strange collection of films.  Intelligent but boring Dendy dramas, mixed with tacky fantasy flicks.  I found the perfect drawing movie – Gladiator.  Good, but not distracting good. All of us sat there with our heads down, sketching away in our sketch pads. There was beer too. I was in drawing heaven to be honest. Plus I had the biggest, comfy chair. And everyone else was right into it. I have not been to many comic meetings where everybody draws, so it was great.  Pat was working on this giant poster comic the whole time.

From left to right: David, Sarah, Arran, Anthony, Pat, Chris, Mandy!

At last a new carload pulled up containing the other chaps: Arran, Bernard and Michael. Arran had his 1-up Mario top like mine but a different design, Bernard was tall, and Michael Fikaris, well he is this old school Aussie comics fella. I’d heard his name bandied about since I started comics, but I had never met him. He was one of the ‘Silent Army’ chaps from Melbourne who I never met. Those guys are proper art scene guys, who like, live in studios in alleyways and do illegal wall art, and don’t care about things like Harry Potter or iTunes because they live on the edge. He seriously looks like Freddie Mercury in a cap. He was so talkative everybody kept drawing portraits of him. Mandy did a good one where she was telling him to shut up.

When I got back in, Gladiator still wasn’t over. Boring idiots were on the screen standing around in costume giving speeches and being all majestic. One by one the girls disappeared to bed, then some boys. Michael got louder and more nonsensical by the minute until he lay down and fell asleep in his own confusion. Pat and Arran and me plopped down too. It was 3 AM, so we were the most hardcore.

The next morning Anthony arrived. He also does autobio comics like Chris, but he hails from nearby Ballarat. Mandy Ord turned up too, in her own good time, as you please. She used to live in Canberra when I started drawing comics, and she onced asked me, “Do you use Wella?” There was still some drawing going on, but then we had a few ’show-and-tell’s using a little projector. Joy put down a bowl with two varieties of Tim-tams. Two different kinds in one bowl. That’s crazy town host-wise isn’t it.  The room was still nice, with all wooden bits and stone walls.

That night we went to a pub for dinner where I ate bangers and mash. Everyone was drawing all over the napkins, and again Michael Fikaris got like three or four versions of himself. I think he was the most drawn fella that weekend. In the toilet when I was trying to do a poo but it turned out I didn’t really need to, they were playing the Australian version of ‘Everythings Allright’ by Kate Ceberano and John Farnham. Later when I had a cig outside they were playing ‘Two Strong Hearts’. It was like everyone except the people inside were being treated to John Farnham. I never liked John Farnham very much but he was a great Jesus. Maybe better than Ian Gillan but I dunno, that may or may not be blasphemy.

We did a whole lot more drawing that night. Oh, it was beer fuelled but there were also mint slice biscuits. They are the most boring of all the chocolate biscuits.  I love how sweet biccies are divided into three levels of specialness: Plain, cream and chocolate. And each level has the shitty one and the best one and most people agree on what those are. So for me, the shittiest plain one might be Nice. It’s plain with sugar all on it. The texture sux and the taste is dull. Best? Who cares. NEXT. The best cream ones are probably those little fat square ones. Shortbread creams. You can eat like 10 in a row. Even the three lines across the top are appealing. The shit one would definitely be those fuckin’ orange ones. What are they even meant to be? I don’t know why anybody would like Monte Carlos either. They’re stupid and not even yummy.  Anyway, I had like 5 mint slice biscuits because they’re chocolate aren’t they.  The best chocolate ones are Tim Tams in case you were worrying about that.

I put the Matrix on as i’d only once seen it when it first came out. It was pretty cool but I can’t believe how people go on about it, and the ‘philosophy’ behind it. A uni student tried to blow my mind once. He’d started philosophy and he asked me how I knew I was alive. I said coz I’m breathing. He said “Yeah but it could all be a dream!” and he looked at me like expectantly, as if the very foundations of my beliefs were beginning to crumble and i was teetering on the edge of a chasm. He mistook my annoyance for fear but it was because I was about eight when I first heard this question, thought about it for a few minutes, then decided there were better things to think about like making a waterfall for my ewok figures with a hose. Michael was going “WOW!” sarcastically when those dumb squid machines were floating around which was hilarious. He wanted us to talk instead of watching nerd films.

Pat, Arran and me were the last ones awake again, and everyone else was in the other room. I made some really hilarious joke then we all burst out laughing then suddenly stopped and fell asleep.

So on Sunday we drew for a while, swapped comics and had lunch and everyone said goodbye, traded contact details and that sort of thing.  Bernard gave me the latest Tango which was massive.   Everyone was muttering about how awesome it had been.  We’d all drawn loads as well. There are some scans at Michael’s flickr site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/frothindustries/

So we dropped off Chris and John, and went to a Greek restaraunt where they don’t have a menu, they just give you what they’re cooking that night. Sarah was not impressed by the fact that my sister Sarah’s middle name is also Louise. She said all Sarahs are either Sarah Louise, or Sarah Jane. My mum told me the exact same thing word for word. Coincidence Town, Vic, 3045.

The rest of the stay was great. I saw chum Irene one day and the next I joined Michael’s street art tour which had some of the best art I’d seen.  That eve I left Melbourne with the thought I always have – that it is truly is a city of creative people, some of whom have talent.  HO HO!

War Force

This is a muckaround 3D animation project that will never amount to anything, so I might as well share these screenshots with you.

I have been back at 2K Games this week, so when i get home i wanna unwind with some fun 3D.  The thing about working at 2K is that for some reason working there gives me insomnia.

The other night I lay awake till about 2 and then awoke at 2:30 to really weird sounds… it sounded like what I imagine snoring pigeons to sound like.  I had heard snoring pigeons on Sesame Street so I knew that wasn’t it.  Maybe it was bats.  It was similar to the dipthong wail of those shaggy yaks from Star Wars Special Edition, or that “mmm!” sound the Skeksis make in the Dark Crystal.  It also crossed my mind that it might be people – really satanic ones wailing in a weird way.  There was also heaps of distant traffic and quite a few nearby trucks and cars which was really odd for 2:30 AM in Canberra.  I thought maybe there was some really big truck and cattle show for I dunno,  farmers out near Narrabundah or something and the sound was carrying really far.  But the weird ghostly whistles were weirder. so I got up and got dressed and got my little dictophone and went out.  I was glad I wasn’t superstitious coz the soundscape was very eerie.  If you believe in ghosts you are pretty much a write-off if there’s anything out of the ordinary at night time.  If I am ever at Sarah’s at night and say, something falls over, all I have to say is “That’s a ghost” and she gets a cold chill and goes all stiff and tells me not to say it.  But I always have to do it just to check to see if it works.

Out in the streets it was deathly still but sure enough, there were quite a few cars pulling out of driveways and stuff, and a few big trucks driving really fast and recklessly around.  One was one of those car-carrying trucks and there were a few vans and things.  They weren’t going to or coming from the same places.  This sounds very unexceptional but seriously, for Canberra that’s crazy town.  I thought there was some scheme afoot.  Anyway, I could hear the sounds clearly now and I recognized them as cows mooing.  Not the conversational moo that they do when they’re hanging out in the fields.  They sounded a little high pitched and distressed.  It sounded like they were coming from behind the flats across from the Red Hill shops which was weird as there is nothing but houses there.  I walked up past the shops adjacent to the flats, and a massive truck was pulling out from behind the butchers.  It was driving really recklessly and I almost thought it was gonna swerve into me.  There was no action here, so I wandered back down the path then turned up and went around behind the dodgy flats, but couldn’t hear anything except for the air-con at the shops which was blowing really loudly.  I think it was air con, but it could have just been a fan-based whoosh generator that they leave running all night for no reason.  I don’t know about all that shit.

I realised the cows must have been back down near the school grounds and their moos were echoing from against the flats.  The occasional car drove past, their headlights leaving spots in my eyes which made me think I saw figures moving about once or twice, giving me a fright.  As I walked back down, that same big truck was pulling out from the little road near the school and lurching and squeaking its way to the butchers, where it stopped and men were opening the doors and stuff.  There was a big logo of a cow on the side of the truck.

That seemed to half solve the riddle, but not really.  Why was there was mooing?  Trucks don’t deliver live cows to the butchers, do they?  They kill the meat at the abattoir first, and they sure don’t carry live cows around in that style of delivery truck.  There is no abattoir or coweries anywhere near Red Hill.  I never got to the bottom of it and I still wasn’t tired.  I had another shower and lay awake til about 4:30 thinking about my DVD collection and wondering if most people would recognize a cow if they heard it, or if they knew how butcher’s worked.

I worked all day the next day despite being fatigued.  Meanwhile everyone else was leaving early for stupid things like slight headaches and tummy bugs.  One guy left because his eyes were ‘really sore and twitchy’.

Fatal Rage – new background

This took about 6 hours!  it is meant to suggest the world of Fallout 3 which is a computer game which judging by the screenshots I used for reference is a shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world.  Gamers think the dumbest stuff is cool.  The Matrix was really, really popular.  But Good Game viewers are happy with us when we pander to them, so that’s what we do and it’s nice hearing them squeal with delight.

On my Sheezyart page once, I posted a Lesson Master episode and in one frame I drew the word Taito on the top of a building.  Taito are a computer game company.  Somebody responded with the message “Taito! ” like they were really happy that I wrote the word Taito.

Speaking of computer game companies, when I was in Japan on the way to Kyoto on a bullet train I looked out at these paddocks and rice fields in the middle of nowhere and saw a multi-story Namco building.  Just thought it was weird, that’s all.

Also i went to the Tokyo Game Show with Felicity and David (also a 2K Australia employee) and looked at all the student developers work.  I woulda thought they’d be the best, being Japanese but they were nowhere near as good as Australians.  One dude had tried to make a game for the WII about a bunny that jumped jerkily through bright green hills, shooting fireworks inaccuarately into the sky which was plain black.  It didn’t work properly and had no shading but I played for a few minutes to be polite even though i was frustrated after one second.  Japanese concepts are always ten times better though.  The Tokyo Game Show was mostly mobile phone games as well which was weird.  Also, even though we were with 2K we still had to pay to get in.  I mean, we’d just made Bioshock. They probably would have sent limousines driven by geishas to pick us up if we’d actually told ‘em we were coming.  At one point a journalist approached me to talk about games, just by chance, not knowing I was a developer.  Felicity is in marketing though, and I mumbled so much that she pretty much took over the interview.  I remember she tried to drop jargon like ‘motion capture’ into her speil which must be a marketing trick.  Afterwards I felt so lame that I’d been a game developer for eight years but had to get my girlfriend to talk for me about it even though she didn’t know what ‘motion capture’ really meant.

C.L.A.W. poster on big electronic billboard

My poster is currently appearing on this screen at the Convention Centre!

The C.L.A.W. launch party was awesome. I invited my friend David and his sister Jess and her boyfriend Nick because I like them and because I hate parties but I go to them all the time anyway. The party started in an alleyway at Manuka at this hair salon. You could tell it was an art crowd coz everyone was dressed quite rich but there were beards, weird sideburns, large earrings and the occasional splash of fake hair colour. They had loads of cheese and bread too which I bet was some special crusty bread with probably olives in it. Plus they had some free wine which I managed to score two cups of before it ran out which was good. Red wine. We stood in the alleyway outside looking at this arty movie clip which was being shone up on the wall. The girls there were all attractive for some reason.

So, soon I got chatting to this quirky girl and this wacky woman who were both quirky but with slightly different styles of quirkiness. You can’t really use the word quirky because basically it means ‘not boring’ doesn’t it. So I actually hate the word quirky. Anyone with a half decent sense of humour gets that label, just like somebody with an interest or a hobby that isn’t football gets ‘eccentric’ or a girl who has a lesbian experience and gets loud and annoying when she’s drunk gets the label ‘wild’. Wild girls are the most boring of all. Outside of the time they kissed a girl or flashed their tits at a cop, what have they got to talk about? I think nearly all girls have snogged another girl at one point so that’s why that song ‘I Kissed a Girl’ shits me. It’s like me making a song called ‘I Am A Man, Yet I Have Long Hair Which Is Unusual These Days’.

Anyway, they weren’t quirky now that i think of it – they were just nice. I totally forget their names though. They ran some music festival in Corin Forest which even though music shits me, it sounded like it would be a gas. Imagine going up there for a music festival for three days. They wanted animation to project onto a screen and I said “I’m your man” even though when I look at all the animation i have ever done it is 90% game shit that you can’t really use, and the occasional extremely rude or inappropriate or one-joke animation clip such as Sniff My Penis. My latest animation project Fatal Rage of Conflict is so universally hated by Good Game viewers that I don’t really want to project it anywhere. What is weird is that I still quite enjoy working on it! I love making the pixel animation as good as possible. It just isn’t very funny and I don’t know why, and I don’t know what to do. If it was up to me I’d just make it really rude, and all about shit. But I don’t give a fuck – even though usually if someone dissed my drawing I’d be gutted. I think it’s because the audience are high school gamers and their hate is so intense it sort of deflects off my heart like a blunt, stupid spear made of gay high school rubber. One of the women was a science teacher and I asked her which creatures haven’t evolved very much over time (alligators and some crabs and some microscopic animal. They also used to have mini-horses), and when I asked her if any creatures have turned from herbivore to carnivore over time I think she said humans. Even though that was interesting it didn’t satiate my thirst for knowing if any like, proper non-person animals had. Such as what if sharks used to just graze on seaweed or whatever. Jay, my old workmate who actually got me my job at 2K in the first place turned up too. He’s learning ukulele and was inspired to do so by the game Guitar Hero. The chap who interviewed me on Art Sound FM gave me a quick interview again and I was trying to be honest and funny, but I think I came across as a smart-arse. Thanks, wine.

Everyone ‘migrated’ over to the gallery up where Starbucks used to be. Su who works for Canberra Arts Marketing told me they had free showbags so Nick and me grabbed one straight away. The art was really interesting because it varied so much in quality, skill and experience. Someone had made a giant spoon out of sugar cubes with a drip full of blood stuck to it which dripped blood into the pile of sugar at the bottom. This one girl with a bored manner had a really bad drawing on the wall done in cheap texta. I mean it looked like a year 7 drawing. I asked how old it was just to make conversation. She said she did it eight years ago. I imagined she probably wasn’t very prolific. David and me were giving amusing pun names to the art but you had to be there. It was a really good exhibition I thought.

Soon, a DJ began mixing some beats. DJs are interesting because they are treated like musicians. It’s like the term ‘graphic artist’ which nowadays means ‘Dude who can arrange clip-art in Adobe Illustrator but who’d shit his pants if you asked him to actually fucken draw something’. If you look at modern designs on ads and things, it’s all lazy digital rubbish that anyone could do.  Same with band posters, same with live music. How often do you look at a flyer for an event and have to try and figure out if the line-up is a line-up of actual musicians or DJs? This guy was pretty good though, mixing all kinds of tunes and sounds and was dancing around like he was loving it.   I asked David if he was better at DJ-ing and he said “yeah” like as if i even had to ask.

It was then that I noticed that Nick and me were the only ones there holding showbags. We’d been clutching them the whole time like total nerds.

We said goodbye to Jay and got some kebabs at Kismet, planning to now go to mine to try out this DVD series called The Wire which Jo Waite had lent me, telling me it was gritty and intelligent. Jay returned, asking us if we wanted to hang at his pad. He had The Wire on his PS3 you see. I was glad, saying that I didn’t want the responisibility of being a host. He assured us that he had tasty Snake lollies, as well as fruit loops which we could eat, but his lights were mostly out. I began to wonder aloud why we hadn’t tried to steal any of the free cheese from the salon. Cheese is really expensive. I don’t think I would have done that though. Jess and I marvelled about how tasty the kebabs were. Sometimes you are so busy stuffing your face you don’t realise how great your food is, and how it is actually producing endorphins because it is so good.

Nick and Jess went on this very mature shopping spree, buying wine and snacks for the night. I really needed to piss. At Jay’s I did. The name of the wine was ‘Cono Sur’. I am trying to lose weight but I ate three donuts, wine, snakes and loads of chips. I was actually sitting forward in my chair, eating them continuously and dipping them in salsa. I didn’t even realise what a guts I was being – I was enjoying them so much. When i realised this, I sat back in the chair, trying not to think about the chips. We watched The Wire which was shit, and played songs on Jay’s two ukuleles. Jay made up some chords and we played them, and David made up a song called ‘The Day I Kissed Ben’ which he apparently sung for about two days afterwards. He always gays me out in different ways. I soon forgot about the chips and thought about the donut but I didn’t want to have four. When I got home I had a cigarette and was pleased to realise I didn’t enjoy it one bit. I still had the whole bloody thing though.