you scratch my back, i'll scratch your eyes out.

Sometimes, when I'm alone, I fantasize about my blog being somewhere to just, you know, hang out and meet other e-citizens of the infodata web of freeways. A kind of online telecafe, if you will.

Currently one of my favourite e-citizens is a cyberlady known as Hot Soup Girl. I have stolen a couple of ideas from her, the main bit being the idea of a theme song for my blog, which you should hopefully be able to download from the side bar on your left or from here. So mad props to you, HSG.

dancing with amyl on a saturday night

Last weekend, I went to a party and danced to Micheal Jackson while sniffing amyl nitrate. My life has reached some sort of zenith and so I've been thinking about what I could possibly do with the rest of it.

1. Concentrate on writing.
Maybe the best way to take my tendancy for ripping off somethingawful.com and passing it off as my own brand of humour to its logical conclusion is to write for a living. Here's a sample paragraph:

Yo! It's me, straight up from the streets. You know what's a fly album? Busta Rhymes's new one. It's shnizzit on my wazzit. You know what I'm saying? It's all like "bloo da da blip" and Poppa Smurf on my listening biscuit. Let's fight nanoprobes my unfortunate friends!

This is pretty much in the style of all the press in the city where I live. The key to writing for today's youth is to make no sense at all, but name drop constantly, just like Rocky Balboa says.

2. Express myself through dance.
As the amyl seemingly relaxed my sphincter to the extent that my legs moved independantly of my buttocks, I received nods of approval from my peers. This is because through moving in time to 'Beat It' I expressed all their rage against machines and other metal objects that cause alienation. Perhaps this was a window of opportunity, or perhaps it was a chimney of success. Either way, I intend to apply for some dancing jobs and these will be duly noted on next fortnight's dole form.

I would describe my dancing style as part jazz ballet, part scottish sword dancing and part reptile. I feel quite strongly about keeping my elbows below my shoulders when moving to the rhthym of the night. To do otherwise is to enter the realm of flashdance, and at this stage of my career I don't think I'll be ready to flashdance until I'm either a) thirty years old or b) married to Ben Affleck to hide his perchant for man sex.

3. Sit on my arse all day and eat chocolate that Katrina stole from the supermarket.
I crave comfort as much as I crave fame, so why not combine both? Perhaps someone can call one of the tabloid 'current affairs' programmes (hint, hint) and they can do an expose on how a witty, capable man can be so lazy. I'll just stare into the camera, contraband chocolate smeared around my cake hole in a scat-like fashion and wait for the fame to come rolling in. Alternatively, I could get up at 7:00am, make a fort out of the cushions on the couch and wait for Dragonball Z to come on the telly.

philosophy at the matey mission

T E A M W O R K We are all winners when we work together as one.

As I sit in the Matey Mission, there are various signs around the room. My favourite sign, the poster of html colour codes, was taken away a few weeks ago. There's a large, framed poster, designed to inspire, directly in front me. I have done an approximate rendition above. What message is this supposed to convey?

music for tough lads II: electric fancy land

Having covered the bases on hair metal for the charity receptive (see post dated June 26), today I will display another option open to the would-be surly welfare recipient: gangster rap.

You don't own me, fool.

Ice T
Before Ice T was an internationally famous dramatic actor, he liked to "rhyme" about life in the "concrete jungle." This is gangster code for talking rhythmically over music about experiences in poor urban areas. The actual merit of Ice T's music is beside the point; he's as tough as fuck and he'll mess you up if you don't like him. By extension, his fans will mess you up if you don't like him. This is what started the 'Eastside versus Westside' battles in the early 1990s, aka 'The Gulf War.' The only way to not get messed up by Ice T's fans or by Ice T himself is to like his music.

Ice T can magically produce uzi machine guns that fire out of his eyes. What sounds like his voice on his albums is actually him slapping fake MCs with such precision that it sounds like words. But it isn't. It's him slapping folks.

He has a ponytail that will turn you into stone if you stroke it.

Time makes you crazy.

Public Enemy
The best thing about Public Enemy is the acid-wash trenchcoat that Flavor Flav wore in the 'Don't Believe the Hype' filmclip. Oh, and they can "rhyme".

Strictly speaking, Public Enemy aren't gangster rap, but I decided to include them anyway, because they have superpowers. Frontman Chuck D can do somersaults like nobody's business. He'll just be rapping away in the studio, then >BAM<, he'll pop a body roll before anyone knows what to do. He's crazy like that.

Flavor Flav can travel through time, as evidenced by the large clocks he wears around his neck.

He just said 'bitch'!

Kool Keith
This is one of Kool Keith's rhymes from the Ultra Magnetic MCs album Critical Beatdown (1988):

I'm ready
And now it's my turn to build
Uplift, get swift, then drift
Off... and do my own thing
Switch up
Change my pitch up
Smack my bitch up, like a pimp
For any rapper who attempt to wear Troop's
and step on my path

Kool Keith is obviously a devotee of Bruce Lee's philosophy; "no style is style". His pace is like water: it can crash, it can flow. Put it in a cup and it becomes the cup. Put it in a teapot and it becomes the teapot. Put it in an arena with elite martial artists from around the globe and it'll kick you in the back of your head.

P.S. Hello Judy from Subway!

second best is good enough. or is it? i'm sure it is. or am i?

Sometimes Cykill just seemed better than Megatron. His name had the word 'kill' in it, afterall.

Sometimes the imitation is better, sometimes it's worse. For example, I'm the only person in this dimension willing to entertain the possiblility that Cykill and Crusher, villains from the Gobots, were creepier and scarier than their Transformers counterparts.

Now, many kids were under the illusion that the Gobots (also known as The Mighty Machine Men) were a rip-off of the Transformers. Not so. According to my copy of Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry (1990), Gobots actually preceeded the Transformers, and if anything, the Transformers ripped off the Gobots, at least initially. They just did it better than the Gobots.

Didn't it hurt when she crashed into things? Crasher actually seemed to enjoy it.

Then the question is, which is better? Work or Work for the Dole? As far as punishments go, WftD isn't the worst thing I've ever had to do. The worst punishment I ever got was having to come to school during a public holiday for stealing reams of paper to photocopy role-playing manuals (this was during my brief affair with role-playing games. It didn't last long, I promise). I was made to weed the gardens.

When I used to work in a supermarket, I once had to spend the day removing a plastic sign with paint stripper. The chemicals burnt through the flimsy rubber gloves and onto my hands. Work for the Dole is the mental equivalent of that. Sitting under these fluro lights in front of a poor quality computer screen, it feels like the entire cast of Fame are wearing stilettos and are dancing in my eyeballs.

Oh sure, I'd like to say something all revolutionary like "you shouldn't have to choose between forms of oppression", but opting out isn't an option. WftD has vastly crimped my lifestyle. I'm actually entertaining the possibility of trading my labour for a wage.

It's obvious to anyone who thinks about it that the dole is also a wage-labour form; my job is to compete in the labour market to drive down wages and to act as a threat to the employed in exchange for centrelink payments. Clearly things like WftD are designed to make the main alternative to labour (the dole) seem that much more unattractive, and the consequences for those actually in such programs are almost inconsequential, aside from the necessarily public humiliation. In short, this shit is so bad, I'm thinking about looking for work.

To be continued...

careless whisper

Here's a funny Work for the Dole story I was told yesterday.

Get inspired with party games, y'all!

It involves a certain infamous member of the Dole Army, let's call him 'Robin Dolczyks'.

Robin was forced to undergo an 'Intensive Assistance' programme. For some reason, this was a group class rather than the usual one-on-one sessions. At the end of the day, after being given various hints about writing your resume, kissing your boss' arse etc, they were to have a really fun game of... chinese whispers! You can imagine that all those involved must have been practically shitting themselves with enthusiasm.

The message at the start was something like "I'm looking forward to using my new skills and getting a job". Without skipping a beat, Mr Dolczyks changed it to "Why work when you can steal for a living?" A look of horror and much hilarity ensued when the final guy who got the message stood up and recited the message.

stop the carnage

Today we were told by Ronald from the Matey Mission [see the June 5th blog] that things were going to change around here. Apparently this followed on from an address to the masses made previously, which I missed because I slept in and saw an asian guy collapse [see the June 19th blog entry], that explained there were to be 'procedural' changes. Such changes would explain why the sign-in/sign-out book is now hidden during the day. This means that you can't just sign in and out at once, meaning you can't leave whenever you like.

Ronald came into the room and asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to build websites for community houses. For those of you unfamiliar with what a community house is, these are places where people can have meetings, sometimes they have classes and Neighbourhood Watch gatherings. 'Community' in this case means "old people with nothing better to do than engrave numbers on the backs of their VCRs." When Neighbourhood Watch was mentioned, I immediately thought that there was no way that I wanted to have anything to do with it. Only two people volunteered. As I've said previously, there's always one or two keen bastards.

Through a series of farcical situations involving quantum theory, my Work for the Dole experiences served as the inspiration for the movie Mommie Dearest.

Due to the lacklustre response, Ronald went into a speech about how there were going to be more changes around the Matey Mission. We were told that they were rewriting their mission statement or some shit, and that there would be punitive measures added to make us work on particular projects to be enacted within the next fortnight or so. He then had a bit of a sook about the unenthusiastic participation of some (I felt conspicuous), and intimated that we should be grateful to be there, because there's "a waiting list of 150 people wanting to get into this programme."

What rockin' Ronald and his pirate earring seem to have overlooked is that we are forced to come here. I don't want to be here. There are other things I could be doing; watching Jerry Springer, working on my zine for this weekend's symposium, listening to heavy metal.

So the brains-trust of the Matey Mission has decided the we will be compelled to enjoy our wonderful experiences here, under penalty of removing society's safety net. It's all stick and no carrot. Whether or not you agree with the 'mutual obligation' regime, it's hard to see why we should be compelled to be enthusiastic. Whatever happens, I have a feeling that if I'm forced to work on anything, Ronald might be a little disappointed with the quality of my work.

This all means I'm going to look for a way out of here. E-mail me your suggestions: daddy0_86@hotmail.com .