Whatever happened to simplicity?

Whatever happened to simplicity? Gone are the days of a simple meaningful relationship – the sprawling, all consuming power of postmodernism has suffocated the last gasp of logic, condemning them to a life of social segregation. I’m no anti-modernist, but I do understand the philosophies. The convolution of goal orientation and labouring time do not directly produce happiness. In other words, happiness may be more difficult to reach in a post modern society. It’s difficult to refute this claim as a central idea, but as an anti-globalist theme is where the stitches start to unravel and fray. We are a very strong society with individualistic tendencies which mould us into imitators, and if we can’t imitate, we become disappointed and disenchanted with ourselves to the point where the motivation for suicide becomes illuminated. People abandon perseverance, opting instead for bitterness, hopelessness and despair. This is the true postmodernism, and we hide this under a translucent barrier, as if on a pedestal, rotating like a Foucault pendulum, for the world to see.

So what did happen to simplicity? Fair readers, I’m sure most of you would have noticed the ironic complexities juxtaposed with the opening sentence in the previous paragraph. I assure you, it was written with paramount intention. Sometimes it is difficult for me to translate my feelings and beliefs into words resulting in contradiction or misinterpretation or even false belief in wrong interpretations. Another problem raises the question whether people you open up to truly understand the anguish you feel and/or values you hold? A pinprick to some may be dagger in the heart to others. I’m not old enough to hold an accurate opinion about whether our forefathers shared the same problems, and even if we had the opportunity to ask them, would we have interpreted them correctly? Or would it simply be a game of Chinese Whispers starting from the brain to the second person resulting in a distorted message. How can we overcome this problem?

Romance and love seem like a great place to start with “anti-simplism.” I rarely mention romance in any of my written texts, let alone dare use the words ‘love.’ Romance is never a light hearted scenario. Sure, it can be, if you associate it with some stupid romantic comedy movie featuring Mark Ruffalo and Reese Witherspoon (I’m not going to mention the name, but watching the movie is definitely not ‘just like heaven.’ If heaven is ever like that, then I surrender my soul to the Devil for eternal damnation). Whatever happened to the simple days of romance? From a male perspective – you chase a girl, you ask her out, she gives you a straight answer and you either date if successful or bail if unsuccessful. Then at the break up, a simple face to face conversation resulting in painful emoting for the heartbroken and sympathetic feelings of guilt from the heartbreakee. Well, that’s how I imagined it all anyway. Instead, it is a manipulative, vampiric state of affairs, chaotic to the point of sensitivity to the butterfly effect. The proof can be seen already with the introduction of the ‘it’s complicated’ relationship status on Facebook to accommodate this. You could be, or not be, in a relationship with a girl, then be told over text or MSN messenger that you you’ve been dumped, or removed from contention for boyfriend status. You could even be dumped by the same girl who throws herself at you like a ragdoll less than twenty minutes later. It’s not unheard of, and it’s becoming more and more a reality in this post modern world. Technology is ruining social interactions. Getting back to MSN dumpings, some people have the nerve to say that doing it online means that “hurts less” for the heartbroken. Well they’ve got the ‘less’ part right – ‘gutless’ that is. I can’t imagine anything more gutless – apart from sending a sympathetic ‘sorry I gave you Chlamydia’ e-card.

My fair readers, have any of you felt the icy sensation of regret? It usually strikes after alcohol has passed out of your system, or when you come to grips to the fact that even though your idea sounded brilliant at the time, looking back on it now, it could have been handled much more professionally. We owe that sensation to simplicity breaking free from the shackles of containment and biting back. Perhaps if you are a woman, you look back at the time you got drunk and made out with another woman and put it on youtube. I mean, seriously, what possessed these girls to exclaim, “Oh my God. I am soooo drunk right now. Hey, you know what? Let’s put a video up on Youtube of us making out!” Another example, if you’re a guy and you drunkenly confess your - not mutually held - love to the girl of your dreams over telephone at 3am in the morning and realise the next day that not only does your headache, but your heart as well. Simplicity strikes again! In the words of Jeremy and Mark from Peep Show – “This was definitely a good idea. There’s no chance this wasn’t a good idea.”

Time does not stop, it collects youth. I can feel my youth slipping away, and the brutally harsh airstream of reality breathing down my neck. Perhaps it’s the realisation that what I have been taught in my early childhood has now become stale and detached from the present. I have always been taught to calibrate my views so I retain an open mind and respect others’ attitudes, values and beliefs. This is why it tears me inside to witness the expiration of these once socially acceptable interactions and personality traits. Perhaps this critical analysis is nothing more than an end of teenage life anguish, akin to the more popular mid-teen crisis. Perhaps, the thought of losing control of even my own youth, something I once seized firmly in my grasp, has spilled onto the sidewalk like the blood of another taxi rank brawl victim. I may in fact be searching too deep into my own psyche, and reaching conclusions that overstate simple bitterness. Things that never seemed to bother me now haunt me like ghosts.

I assure you, I wanted to completely avoid the whole romance thing in this blog. Most blogs travel down the path of ranting about how “x doesn’t like me” therefore the slight utterance of the words ‘relationship’ could have resulted in some clichéd disheartened bitching. It should be duly noted that I cringe at the very thought that my blogs being regarded as just another ‘hopeless romantic’ criticising the very fabric of a society that fails to include him in. My bitterness doesn’t stem from hopeless romantics who complain when they haven’t had a relationship for a month, and go out of their way in undermining your own self esteem for being without a romantic partner for longer than them. No, it stems from the way people make love an over-complicated scenario. As a firm Ladder Theory believer, I know the forms of attraction for both males and females can be broken down into a simple pie chart. To recite an old blog of mine, would I choose money over love? I would pick the former option because love is derived from money. Remember the ‘Bachelorette’ scenario with contestants Toby H. Poorasfuck and William P. Phineus Jr. For those that didn’t read the blog, I provided a clear and concise explanation of how everyone has a price when it comes to shallow romantic judgements. From this, I deduced that money is required to care for your significant other, something that personality cannot do. Therefore, to make an informed answer to the question, you would have to choose money over love, because love follows. It really was quite an ingenious piece of theorising, and difficult to summarise in this blog. Why did I refer to this then? Because love is like cutting the head off a chicken – you still run around blindly and don’t think about how brutal the rejection will be until you finally drop dead. Love isn’t something that is complex like most people say it is – you either have the looks or the money to get the initial attention, then you follow through with either personality, mo’ money or your raging ‘Stimulus Package.’ What’s so complex about that? First impressions matter, so apply that to a dating scenario, what is the first thing a potential candidate for girlfriend or boyfriend status sees? Your personality? Highly unlikely. Generally it’s physical appearance.
Still pretty simple isn’t it? So how about we apply some of the stuff we learned in PSYC2040 to help us out further? What makes someone more physically attractive than others? People seem to say that physical attraction depends on the person’s beliefs. However this can be cancelled out because numerous studies show that babies actually spend more time looking at faces that we deem as more attractive and therefore this leads to the possibility of a biological explanation. Enter the rigorously researched world of facial symmetry. Facial symmetry aims to provide a clear explanation of what factors need to be examined to have someone universally considered to be attractive. Bilateral Symmetry is the dividing of an organism down the sagittal plane thus creating mirror image halves. So imagine a line drawn from the top of a human face to the bottom, therefore splitting each side into left and right portions. Each portion should be an exact mirror halve of the other for successful facial symmetry to take place. Facial symmetry is an important indicator in determining the health of the person and their resistance to diseases and a way to determine the worthiness of mating with that person. It is assumed subconsciously that we are able to notice these aspects of a person’s facial features and determine whether or not they are worthy of mating with them. Of course, we cannot fully control how we look as physical abnormalities can occur during early embryonic development. Stress and other environmental factors can also have an effect on facial symmetry. These factors determine how efficient a person is at coping with these stressors with a higher degree of symmetry indicating a more proficient level of coping. Try and dispute the theory with the Japanese theory of ‘Wabi Sabi’ and you’ll get a knuckle sandwich. ‘Wabi Sabi’ only implies a more personal opinion in regards to attraction. It suggests that one person may find imperfections with appearance and still find them attractive. However it does not apply to the majority of the population. Though there is no denying that physical attraction has a significant role in determining a man that a woman wants to have sex with, it is highly debated just how significant its role really is when compared to money and power. Several studies have found that while males look for external features such as beauty in females, females tend to look for internal factors – and I’m not talking about personality. Past studies have found that in fatherless homes, child survival rates are significantly lower. Women seem to be more attracted to males with money, power and ambition. Reproduction is easy for males but difficult for females. Perhaps these different ways of seeking partners stem from old biological habits. Males seek young females with an ideal weight and a greater hip to waist ratio could relate to the fact that men seek reproductively viable women, while women, who look for these internal features are actually looking for men who will provide adequate childcare.

Now that was all pretty straight forward wasn’t it? That’s love in a nutshell. So basically, in the eye of the general population and to put it James Bluntly, you’re doomed from birth. Of course there is always the Wabi Sabi factor (look at Julia Robert’s ex Lyle Lovett for example – he’s the ugliest cunt I ever saw) but if you wanted to be adored, you better pray that your parents are an attractive bunch or you get rich quick, because if you fail, then there isn’t much hope for you in this cutthroat world of complexity. Therefore, love itself is a simple theory shrouded by several unnecessary complexities.
Complexity strikes in many other forms than love and romance, such as health insurance. I awoke to Channel Seven’s Morning Show distortedly blaring through the speakers of my parent’s small Sonwa television. After wondering why my parents decided to leave the TV on this morning, I decide to get up and check out the television screen, and I arrive at the start of an important consumer announcement. Sitting in a futon chair, a concerned Glenn Wheeler inquires whether I should be worried about the current state of my health insurance. I haven’t even got health insurance myself, so naturally I was alarmed and attentive. If I had in fact decided to get myself some health cover, I may have been paying for things I didn’t even need – like pregnancy cover, or as Glenn so succinctly put it, I could be paying for cover on a hip replacement that I wouldn’t need! Thank Christ for a company to come along now and allow me to take time out of my busy schedule and spend three hours ticking boxes featuring excruciatingly detailed cover options to find the ones that matter to me. If the world isn’t complex enough! Ignorance is bliss in this scenario. I did not know that I could select what I would like to be covered for health insurance, and I liked it that way. Why can’t they just make a plan that says – “Hey, here’s some health insurance for male teens. It covers sexually transmitted diseases, alcohol poisoning and any physical damage.” Simple, effective, and I would probably consider signing up. What I’m trying to say is, why don’t these health insurance companies compile plans for us and allow us to add on shit if we want, not give us everything and make us tick boxes. Computer companies can make ‘Student Boxes’ for students, why can’t health insurance companies make cover plans for women who get around, or cover for lobotomies for the elderly and decrepit?

It seems complexity has a habit of creeping up on me and taking my aural and visual senses by surprise, vehemently raping any minuscule shred of enjoyment I have for the world. I got the much anticipated and critically acclaimed Grand Theft Auto IV on Personal Computer after tolerantly waiting for its release since April 29, a total of eight months since its Microsoft Xbox 360 and Playstation Three release (on a side note, did anyone notice that on the spell checker, Word recognises ‘Xbox’ as a correct word, but not ‘Playstation’). After long-sufferingly waiting, it made perfect sense that I needed to purchase the game as soon as the opportunity arose. I have been a fanatical fan of the Grand Theft Auto series for many years. I have fond memories of loading up the original Grand Theft Auto on PC when I was around eight years old, much to the disgust of my parents who were wondering how they managed to get away with such recklessness. I can remember holding out for Grand Theft Auto III on PC in much the same way as I did for GTAIV this time round as I did not have a PS2 at the time. In fact, I remember the day I actually bought GTAIII. I was only thirteen. I had the whole world ahead of me, I had dreams, I had hopes and I had ambitions that I could reach. I was just an innocent thirteen year old, who got through the lonely nights by reading over reviews of GTAIII in gaming magazines under the doona with a flashlight, imagining what it would be like to play the game for longer than fifteen minutes, seeing as I was kicked off the PS2 demo by the Kmart store clerk for being too young. The day I purchased the game was one of the more memorable days of my teenage years. I coincidentally happened to stroll into Target on the release date and I saw the sleek black and red box leaning at an obtuse, 115 degree angle on the shelf. I immediately picked it up and took it over to my mother and exclaimed, “This is it mum! This is the game I’ve been waiting for!”
“Is it a driving game?” She replied.
“Well...sorta”
“Is it a shooting game?”
“Well...sorta”

My mother didn’t give a damn about whether I played violent games or not. She just wanted to know what the game was to make conversation while we waited for the pimply faced fat service assistant to hobble over and put through the transaction. That was then the greatest day of my life. I got it home, loaded it up, and within five minutes of installing, I was helping 8-Ball get back to his safe house by driving a blue Kuruma through the triad infested streets of Liberty City’s Chinatown, while listening to ‘Stripe Summer’ on Head Radio. That thing handled like a mother fucker too.

The main point I’m trying to make is that I was expecting the same ‘Greatest Day Ever’ vibe from loading up GTAIV. A five, maybe ten minute load time and an immediate entrance to the game. Boy was I way off the mark. I put in the disc and immediately I was met with a handshake and a punch in the face by Rockstar Games (the people who developed GTAIV). They demanded I join their ‘Social Club’ in order to follow through with the installation and subsequent playing of the game. Now, my friend suggested that Rockstar’s Social Club was the worst idea since Hitler’s parents engaged in sexual intercourse. I would have to humbly agree, as it is a terrible, useless scheme. A closer analogy of the Rockstar Social Club situation would be this – your friends purchase a prostitute for you in order for you to have sex with, but you later find out – mid-embrace – that she is in fact a male, but you probably have to follow through with the deed because your friends have already paid a large sum of money to get you the hooker, and you don’t want to hurt his/her’s feelings.

I don’t understand WHY I have to sign up for Rockstar Games’ ‘Social Club.’ I don’t want to be social! Do you think I WANT to be social when I’m playing a computer game? If I wanted to be social, I’d go out clubbing or to a movie with someone, not sit at home and play Grand Theft Auto IV while they watch. When I finally installed the social club app, I got to start the game installation! That took another twenty minutes – and to top it all off, I couldn’t exactly do anything else while it loaded, because I had to swap the discs over at the appropriate time. So here I am, sitting at the computer, watching a blue bar slowly creep across the screen, for twenty minutes!

Twenty minutes later, I’m jumping for joy over the tiring installation. I go to load up the game, and what happens next? I have to create a Windows Live account! But I already HAVE a Windows Live account for my Hotmail. What the FUCK does it want from me? After further sleuthing, I find out that I need to create a different Windows Live account and then link that account with my current account. That’s another twenty minutes of time wasted. Especially when I couldn’t get the account name ‘Matty Monster’ or ‘Geoffrey Thrush.’ The names they even suggested to me weren’t even remotely close to ‘Matty Monster’ either – ‘kittykat28’, ‘greentint32’, ‘matildamon77’ just to name a few. Finally, it seems the game is ready to play! I bust open the Start menu, but what’s this? There’s no fucking icon to play the game! I soon learn that by opening the social club, I get the option to play the game. Just great! So I have to have this fucking process running in the background while I’m playing a game designed for the highest ends of machines! Never mind. So I open the game, and immediately I have to log in to Windows Live. After remembering my username – I settled on ‘matthewbate’ so add me (especially you Zach, I don’t know/ don’t care where I’m meant to add other users) – I managed to log in, then I had to download a patch to upgrade the latest version of Windows Live. At this point, I was about to pack the game up in its box and take it back to EB Games and ask for my money back. But I persevered, and eventually after updating, I was able to log in. By the time I loaded up the game though, it lagged like a mother fucker, and eventually it came to a grinding halt and crashed, forcing me to restart my computer. I was puzzled, and had not thought this was possible on my computer (after all, it is a testament to the Gods). So I checked up my driver update page and I found that I needed to update my drivers. “For fuck’s sake!” I cried in agony. I felt as if Rockstar games was laying a nice steaming turd on my chest, whilst dressed in a bonnet and bib and sucking my thumb like a baby. I felt degraded and dirty. Why are they doing this to me? I haven’t done anything wrong! I got off my fat ass and bought the game like they asked. So why are they punishing me? When the drivers finally downloaded, I needed to restart my computer. After that though, the game worked like a mother fuckin’ charm. It ran as smooth as a malt liqueur. The game itself is pretty solid. But, to install and get to the point where you can finally play, took me a total of an hour and a half. If I was on my death bed, and GTA IV was released the day that I died, and I really wanted to play the game (as in, it was on my ‘Bucket List’), I would have been dead by the time I would have been ready to play. That’s simply not acceptable Rockstar Games.

See how effortlessly something - that could have been so simple - in its complexity, has turned around and bitten the hand that feeds them? I mean, think of the following scenarios, and reflect on whether it would be an efficient form of business, and whether they utilise a more simplistic approach to preparing their goods and services to the consumer. You don’t go into a florist, and have them pick the flowers straight from a garden, spray them with pesticide and have you wait while they go cut a tree down from the forest and turn it into cardboard so that you can write a lovely note on it for your secretary, who you secretly want to fuck? You don’t go into a brothel, and ask for a girl to suit your desires, and wait patiently while the manager goes out and finds a suitable couple to mate and give birth to a baby who then, however many years later, grows to suit your needs. See how inconvenient those things are to a business? I’m sure you can think of more things, in fact you are more than welcome to comment me with your inefficient ways of running an enterprise. I simply don’t have enough time, or space, to list several more. My point is, that you don’t see too many works of art like Kazmir Malevich’s 1913 work, unusually titled ‘Black Square’ (Do a google image search, and try and tell me how he managed to come up with the title...I’ll give you a hint...it’s just a BLACK FUCKING SQUARE). It’s simple, it’s effective. It gets its point across. In fact, here’s a little tip you didn’t know about the famous Russian’s Black Square work – It was originally meant to be a painting of a Smirnoff Vodka bottle, but unfortunately he drank the bottle he was modelling, smashed it, and in his drunken forgetfulness, he submitted the piece of art to the museum without anything on it (Source: Wikipedia.org)! From that simple error, he created a symbol for minimalism, and challenged the attitudes, values and beliefs predominantly held by the general public and the art community. Perhaps Picasso could have taken a leaf or two from Malevich’s book, and keep things simpler, instead of doing works like ‘Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.’ (NB: Yes, I am fully aware of the fact the work was done in 1910, three years earlier than Malevich’s work).

Just because something is simple, doesn’t automatically make it an appropriate way of completing our day to day routine. Dare I say it, but some things can be TOO simple. What better way to give you an example of over-simplicity than to guide you on an interpersonal review of one of Australia’s largest garment and shoe emporiums – Rivers.
It’s no secret that Rivers and I don’t exactly get along like the cast of ‘Friends,’ and there have been many scenarios where I have felt as if I would rather listen to Christmas Carols sung by Fran Dresher while she is dragging her fingernails down a two storey high Chalkboard in a harness than submit myself to the glorified hellhole that is the Rivers Superstore. However, to write this review for you, I had to sacrifice my sanity in order to give you a virtual tour of the store, to fully recreate the River’s Shopping Experience. You’re probably asking yourselves, “Matt, is it really that bad? Or are you just going on a mindless rant again, slightly ‘enhancing’ stories for dramatic effect?” I can assure you, that everything I write is a true recount of my shopping incident, and I guarantee that if you ever subjected yourself to such atrocities, you too would have gained firsthand knowledge of my gripes, and they would become clear to you, even if they were located in the ‘Decompression Zone’ of the store. I now present to you, The Rivers Shopping Experience, in full HD Text, complete with a cameo appearance by Malcolm Gladwell.
I awoke to the sound of birds chirping just outside my window. It was a sunny November morning, and the warmth of the sun crept through the glass in my second bedroom door, surrounding me like a warm hug. I opened the window and noticed the summers dew had pooled on my window ledge. It was beautiful day, and what better way to spend such a day than go to the Gold Coast! I returned to bed, and cranked my air conditioner full blast to cool the room down, cause I was sweating more than a platter of day old cheese.

When I awoke again, I thought I might take a train in to the Gold Coast. I flicked on the Television while I daringly mixed all three available types of Coco Pops into the one convenient bowl (Coco Pops Rocks, Checks and the original). I must add at this point, it was a very disappointing experience. It’s just like listening to Death From Above 1979 and thinking ‘a 2 guy band with a bass and a drummer is awesome’ and when you get to their live show, it really is… 2 guys playing a bass guitar and a drum kit (note: DFA1979 does rock hard, but this analogy was just to give you an understanding of where I am going with this). Anyway, when I flicked on the television, a Rivers advertisement came on. I immediately knew it was a Rivers ad by the terrible uncopyrighted free to use music blarring through my shitty TV speakers and the subtle flashing of the classic ‘Your store may have lots or none.’ I’m sorry, but what is this shitty music? It’s like a cross between head banging nu-metal and the hair metal thrash of the 80s. It sounds like shitty karaoke music that comes on those DVD discs or what you’d find in the possession of your local pub’s DJ on karaoke night. Last time I checked, speed metal doesn’t make me want to buy socks even my Great Grandfather would consider ‘so 1882.’ These socks even put Lowes to shame. Now that’s LOW(E). Argh, everything about this advertisement pisses me off. I’d rather listen to a stereo mix of someone grinding their teeth in my right ear while in my left, a group of bagpipe players playing Christmas carols than listen to this stupid shitty music and stupid ad. “Your local store may have lots or none.” Is there ANY need to constantly flash that on the screen every 2 seconds of the ad? Last time I checked, people understand the concept of ‘While stocks last.’ So just put that down the bottom of the ad! Why take up all this space with that stupid, blood pressure raising statement? I haven’t even made it into the store yet and already I feel like jumping off the Empire State Building while burning to death, into a pool of sharks while slashing my wrists with a metal teaspoon. Surely it can only get better from there right? What’s even more worse, is that they have a new advertisement, wonderfully and professionally narrated by some wannabe Radio Disc Jockey who could barely only secure himself a regular slot on the Graveyard shift of some college radio station. He mumbles and carries on about “genuine leather shoes” in a way that makes watching paint dry seem like a desirable activity. I don’t know what Rivers are thinking, but having someone give an impromptu speech about how good your genuine leather shoes are, whilst dropping several ‘umm’s and ahhh’s” in for good measure, mixed with the enthusiasm of a dead cat, is definitely not a professional or ideal way of drumming up publicity for your product. In fact, now they’ve done the exact opposite of what they originally have done – mixing heavy metal music with flashing text in the shape of orders the Gestapo would have been proud to scream into your ear – and bored the shit out of the viewer. They just can’t seem to get this shit right, can they?

So I took my usual 385 bus to King George Square station. It arrived late, as usual, but what was unusual was the bus driver who greeted me upon entrance.
“Hey, I’d like a concession ticket to the city please.”
She started at me confused, “ummm...what zone is it?”
I was puzzled. How the fuck do I know what zone it is? I just replied, “I don’t know.”
She got out of her seat and looked at the sign, then sat back down and replied, “Ok, you see that green sticker up on the bus stop there? That’s the zone number. Just take note of that the next time you get on the bus.”
Excuse me? Take note of that next time? I’m sorry, but aren’t you the one driving the fucking bus? Last time I checked it wasn’t my fucking job to keep note of the fucking zones. I felt like replying with “Oh yeah, well I’ll tell you what you can do with that green dot. Stick it up your erogenous zone!” But I thought, no that would be cruel. So I calmly gritted my teeth and replied with, “oh ok. Next time I’ll be more attentive.”

I’m sorry, but I just have to take time out here to note my disappointment here at the Queensland Transport system. First of all, the buses are always late. Is it too much to ask for my bus to not be twenty fucking minutes late every single time I go to and from university? Am I asking too much? I mean you aren’t exactly God, and I’m not exactly asking for world peace. If it’s too much to ask, then is it possible to be only twenty minutes late every second day, and nineteen minutes late every other day? It’s start at least. I’m not too sure if anyone can see the irony here, but aren’t these the same people who are up in arms, protesting about the Workchoices scheme? I’ll ask again, can anyone see the fucking irony here? Let me go into more detail – the bigger their badge, the worse they treat their customers. And I’ll call us passengers customers because, we pay money for a big fat sweaty man with a Mexican style moustache to take us from A to B with designated stops in between. It’s a service, and we are customers who pay for that service. Anyway, I once got on a bus with this British cunt of a driver, and he proudly wore his Anti-Workchoices badge honourably as he was being a complete dick to everyone who got on the bus. I’m sure his defence would be, “I’m just doing my job.” You aren’t doing your job you bollocking twat, you’re just trying to be a dickhead to as many people as possible! I have a history with this geezer, and I’m not afraid to tell him what I think. I’ve reported him twice, and I haven’t seen him for a while so I’m hoping he’s dead...or to a lesser extent, fired. But I once held showed my ticket to him, and he got angry and said “look, I can’t see that when you hold it up to my face like that. Pull it back a little bit, there we go, now I can see it better.” No joke. The next person got in trouble for having the ticket too far back. What really got on my nerves one day was when he would not accept my university student card as an eligible concession card because “University has not commenced yet.” I was forced to pay full fare, and I couldn’t wait any longer because this bus was already twenty fucking minutes late! And I was cutting it very fine for work. Ah what a douche. I hope he went to jail and dropped the soap.

I was talking to one of my high school teachers who was a strong anti-Workchoices campaigner, and she gave us some ‘Your rights at work are worth fighting for’ stickers to stick on our bags and around the school. I was a little confused though about the whole Workchoices scheme, so I asked her a couple of questions pertaining to the effect it has on the hard working Australian families. She told me that “Workchoices is about treating workers like dogs. It’s unfair. It’s like an employer putting the heel of their shoe on workers heads, and asking them to lick it.” A scary analogy indeed. Which is why I was confused. If workers can’t be treated like dogs, why do some of these workers, who are anti-workchoices campaigners, treat us customers like shit? I understand we’re customers, and customers are assholes, and we AREN’T right. But, why is bus driving the only job in the world that requires you NOT to be exceptionally courteous to customers? Last time I checked, you can be the biggest mudslinging dick in the entire world, but it’s perfectly fine if you’re a bus driver and your sitting up there in your ‘throne’ with your tight grey shorts and your ex-sailor tattoos.

Anyway, I got to the Gold Coast just fine on the train. Trains are great because you don’t have to interact with any transport authority on boarding. However, you do get those power hungry ticket inspectors who wouldn’t stand out as a professional wrestler or modern day action hero. Their gun-ho antics are laughable at best – every ticket missed is a matter of life or death. What really is ironic though, is those that do not bother paying for a train ticket in the first place. These same people would probably drop the same amount of money on the sidewalk and not even bother to pick it up, or better yet, stick a gold coin into wet cement (like one reckless juvenile was attempting to do at this particular train station). If these ticket inspectors spent more time stopping fights than channelling their schoolyard ‘jock’ or ‘bully’ days by preying on the weak such as myself about a dollar twenty train ticket, then perhaps trains may come back as an ideal and safe mode of transport.

When I made it to Harbour Town, I walked around all the other stores. Every third store I entered that day felt it was necessary to blast ‘Stronger’ by Kanye West to the suspecting public. Then the 16 year old girls started to sing along, and I wondered to myself...what the FUCK am I doing in a female clothing store? In disgust, I made a quick exit to the closest store to redeem my manhood. If I had known the terrors that would have unfolded from entering that store, I probably would have stayed in that female clothing store.

I had entered Rivers. That was the only excuse I could cough up for entering such a store. The walls were decked with bleeding timber and the entrance and exit had been clearly marked for easy access. On the walls are several hundred A3 sized portrait boards outlining the conditions of entry for the store. It was as if I was being initiated into some stupid American fraternity. I was even half expecting to be presented with a declaration to sign outlining that I must abide by the rules of the store. The rules range from courtesy guidelines (“please enter through here” and “no entry” just to name a couple) to ‘the full basic instinct’ blatant Nazi-like orders (“present bags in an orderly manner to the register assistant in order to leave the store” and “Achtung! Sie eintragen jetzt ein Konzentrationslager. Abtreten Sie bitte Ihre Freiheit sofort” just to name a couple). They even outline the full conditions of entry to the store on several noticeboards. In fact, for every square metre of wall in the store, there would be .31269 of a rule sign. That’s a sign every 3.1981 square metres! Each one of them written in that stupid ‘chalkboard’ style font like it looks like it was written with chalk on a blackboard that was made out of high gloss 240gsm A3 Paper, possibly Reflex branded. Again, I’m not exactly too sure why that looks cool...last time I checked, most of the demographic that Rivers appeals to haven’t been students at school for almost forty years, and any slight resemblance to the days of writing on a slate could reinstate repressed scarring memories of the physical trauma elicited in the form of corporal punishment in their schoolyard days.

Moving on from the Concentration Camp styling of the store’s presentation of the rules and conditions of store entry, and we notice that there is no music in the store. No music whatsoever. Instead, River’s draws on the techniques of Soviet Union by succumbing to unbelievably tight control and incredibly high censorship. In doing so, they have all the television sets showing a looped tape of Rivers propaganda consisting of everything you needed to know about the interesting world of shoe making. This is what the store gets, from open to close every day, instead of music. It’s safe to say that Rivers is the WORST store to leave your child in while you go around shopping for unusually large overcoats – the garment of choice for bearded paedophiles and public flashers. Extremely cruel parents could subject their child to such extreme punishment, but may actually find their child suffering from such detrimental mental anguish that they end up only with the skills necessary to work in the Rivers shoe making warehouse, and that’s one job no parent ever wants to see their child willingly participate in.

Not only does the store’s design breathe egotistical, fascist bullshit, but even the website has its rosy red lips pursed around a throbbing, sweaty member. Check out this link – rivers.com.au. Never have I seen a usually safe colour combination degraded and disrespected in such a way. Oh look, it’s a white background with...BLUE FONT. I barely see a picture so far on this page, so I check out the webmaster’s notes to see what the deal is with the layout. Thank the heavens that I did! Otherwise I would have been subject to intense loading times. Luckily the webmaster came to save the day with his sexy heroism by NOT enabling the “No Cache” meta tag in the source code. Thank you Mr Webmaster, please have my babies! We are not worthy! Whoever designed this webpage probably graduated from Griffith University ;) (Just kidding). Although on the webmaster page, there is a picture of two toddlers drawing on a piece of paper – I’m guessing that they are the webmasters and all the loose ends have been firmly and securely tied with a figure 8 knot. Here’s the website: http://www.rivers.com.au/webmaster-tip.htm.

Further analysis of the webpage has lead to the wonderful ability to VIEW THE TV ADS ONLINE. How fucking convenient. So I decide to log in… and this time it’s some stupid unlicensed ‘dance’ music over the top of a woman prancing around in a bikini...well, not exactly prancing. Not even DANCING. No, she’s just standing there, in a rivers bikini. She’s probably thinking “Fuck, I hope my girlfriends don’t see me do this. I needed the money for my college tuition fees. It was either this or stripping. Should have chosen stripping...at least that would have left me with some shred of dignity.” Like I have said time and time again, Rivers should stick to their age demographic – people aged 45 and over in the middle to low income bracket. If a girl wanted a bikini, they could go to whatever store women go to. Probably the store that plays ‘Stronger’ by Kanye West the loudest.

It’s getting to that point in the blog where, nobody is still reading the damn thing, so I can point a few fingers and make proper accusations to the decline of simplicity. I remember a simple time when kids spent their Sunday’s fishing instead of watching TV or getting up to mischief, Television was only in black and white, and computers came in the traditional white or beige casing separate from the monitor. Then, in 1997, Steve Jobs came along and decided ‘fuck that shit...people want their computers in funky colours for the style minded chic consumer!”

That’s right. Fuck you Steve jobs for making computers into fashion accessories! Instead of giving your computers a nice hardcore blingin’ case mod, you give us some fucking light blue bullshit that looks like it could fit into one of those arty German electronic band members’ houses’. In case you didn’t know – I’m talking about the iMac G3. That old piece of shit computer advertised on the back of TV Guides. I remember looking at it, wondering what the fuck it was, then, when I realised I couldn’t play Duke Nukem 3D on it, concluded it wasn’t worth my time. Yep, back in those days, people knew the limits of Macintosh. Things were indeed so much simpler then. Now it’s all – who’s smarter? Mac Users or PC Users? I’ll tell you one thing, Mac users complain a fair amount about how their hardware isn’t compatible with software available and constantly complain about how they have to keep asking whether an item is Mac compatible or not. If Mac users were so smart, they would have bought PCs, where EVERYTHING is compatible...but it never generally works efficiently. That’s simplicity. A Personal Computer...running Windows. You know what was even simpler? Microsoft Windows 3.1. Back in those days, everyone pretty much ran that mother. Sure, you can argue till the cows come home about it being an MS-DOS shell, but fuck, it was such a simple time. I remember quitting windows to MS-Dos, typing in C:\ commands like a mother fucker, then kicking some Nazi ass with the up, down, left and right arrow keys. So you’re playing Doom and some Cacodemon mother fucker hovers over your head in all its red hellish glory...just look in its general direction and press CTRL. Shit, you didn’t even have to fucking aim and that mother fucker went down faster than a prostitute at an all you can eat cock buffet. You can’t get any simpler than that! Now, you have games like Fallout 3, where you can only carry items up to a maximum weight. What the fuck is that? In Crysis, you have a suit that rejuvenates your health and allows you to cloak so you can sneak around enemies. FUCK THAT. You don’t see that shit in Doom. All you do is run in with all guns in your possession, and look around the room and fire, and you have your kill. It’s complex things like stealth that is ruining these games today. And you thought making the switch from the arrow keys to w, s, a and d and aiming and firing with the mouse was complex enough?! I mean, you can complete whole missions in Crysis by just putting on the speed cloak and gunning through the map – and lord knows, Zach and I have tried many countless times. It seems this age demographic has been thrust into this world of complexity. Nobody ever needed this shift in their games! Doom, Wolf 3D and Duke 3D were among the greatest first person shooters, let alone games, of all time, and they didn’t use any fancy cloak to do their dirty work for them.

While we’re on the subject of age demographic attitudes, values and beliefs, I’d like to introduce you to a new group of people I’d like to call the GAFR people. Sometimes I think that civilization as a whole has taken a backwards step in logical and critical thinking and reasoning. Who is to blame in a land run by faceless corporations and people’s overwhelming desire to be greater than everybody else? It turns out that someone else is always to blame for your own incompetent behaviour. We’ve evolved into a world that requires individuals to be perfect from birth and such high expectations are diminished if one yields and admits to their own mistakes. Instead, we logically deduce that someone else was to blame as you expect yourself not to make such a rookie error. This, was just a mere short example of how flawed our logic has become in this individualistic society. There are several factors, as I have pointed out previously, where our incompetence becomes apparent. However, these GAFR people that I am about to discuss with you seems to be the most unnecessary and pointless behaviour I have ever had the displeasure to encounter.

In case we’re not on the same wavelength, GAFR stands for ‘Get A Fucking Room’ and people who are GAFRs aren’t necessarily complex people. In fact, they are simple minded individuals brimming with testosterone, who probably succumb to the complexities of society. But that’s not the main problem. The issue we are dealing with here is that they make things complex for others. It’s one thing to push your beliefs on others – religious or otherwise – especially in a society that prides itself on freedom of speech. So, why are these people allowed to make life complex and unnecessary for others? Before you believe I have become punch drunk with jealousy or envy, I want you to listen to the few scenarios that I will present in the following paragraphs and you will see how irritating and annoying these people can be.

I was at the Normanby some time ago on a Sunday night and as usual it was packed to the rafters. The place is a claustrophobe’s nightmare as they cram more people in that place than illegal immigrants on boats. Noah would have had at least more breathing room on his arc filled with animals than he would at the Normanby, and it probably wouldn’t have stunk as much. I’ll save my bitter grievances of the Normanby for another blog, but the point I’m trying to make here is that, it’s hard to make your way around the place without bumping into people or knocking your drink on yourself or someone else. Every small entrance that appears to another room feels as if it were there due to divine intervention, and it’s not too long before it is closed and you’re back to finding another open entrance. In the middle of the pub is a large set of stairs which makes for a very awkward and dangerous experience. The number of times I have seen either someone fall down them or a fight started on them I can’t even count on my fingers and toes, and I’ve been to the Normanby all but regularly. In fact, I can count the number of times I’ve been to the Normanby on one hand. My point is, it’s really packed. So a nice young couple, drunk with love (and I imagine with other substances too) decided to make it even more difficult to navigate through the pub by standing right in front of the stairs making out with a girl, covering most of the entrance making it nigh on impossible to pass them. So what do you do? I thought of 3 scenarios – the first being walk away and go somewhere else in the pub and head back later. Second was standing there waiting for them to finish then walking up the stairs. Third was going up to the guy, tapping him on the shoulder and asking him to move, thus interrupting him and his passionate interaction with his female friend. Naturally I chose the first option. But doesn’t it boggle the mind that they lack the common logic you would think was necessary to survive in society? Not only was he like that, whenever anyone approached to get past him, he looked up at them without breaking away from pashing his girl as if he was gloating. That’s the way I took it anyway. It wasn’t my resentful attitude that caused me to complain, as the couple could have easily moved 2 centimetres to the left to convenience everyone who wanted to enter or exit the through that doorway.

Which brings me to the Bloc Party concert. For many weeks now, I have tried to write a small blog on my experiences of the evening. But I could never fit it in anywhere. But it seems now, I’ve completely accepted the fact that this blog is simply a bunch of stories I have started writing but could never finish, tied together with fishing line. What can I say about Bloc Party? GAFR scenario number two. Oh, I bet you think you’re so ‘original’ making out to the song ‘This Modern Love?’ Don’t you? In the midst of idiotic jocks carrying on like maniacs, pushing and shoving and having no respect for the fellow mosher (and I do use the term ‘fellow’ loosely because I do not wish to find a resemblance between people like them and people like me) were this nice young couple who had been dancing together all night. By dancing, I mean the guy had his arms around the waist of the girl while she sort of grinded in front of him. Nothing wrong with that, but here’s where things started to piss me off. Every time a guy was pushed into his girlfriend by the useless jocks, the boyfriend immediately turned around and punched the victim. If you don’t want your girlfriend touched in the mosh, don’t take her in it – ESPECIALLY at the river stage! Jocks must really love going to places that are overcrowded – the River stage, the Normanby...they flock to that like the Nazgûl to the bearer of the one ring. Then the guys started to take their shirts off. And with every bump, I was forced into their sweaty gargantuan arm biceps and their sweaty back. They then proudly wrapped their arms around the other jocks and jumped up and down, chanting “Oooaayyyy Macca” and “Fuck yeah, this is the best, cunt! Yeeeeaaahhh.” If these sorts of people knew exactly that the song ‘I Still Remember’ could be linked to a homosexual fantasy, then these people would have been disgusted, and they certainly wouldn’t have taken off their shirts. I mean, these people wanted Russell (the guitarist) to cut his fringe! Who do these people think they are? They aren’t Bloc Party fans...they’re just scum. If there’s one thing that pisses me off more than those jock guys at the mosh, is really fat girls who think they can just sneak in front of people in a mosh to get closer to the band. They think they can use their ‘attractive’ charms to get their way. You know the kind, they dress in slutty attire, they wear gallons of makeup and have a caked up face and they are too bitchy and up themselves to compare themselves to other more attractive women like Scarlett Johansson.

Finally, the last, and most unnecessary GAFR of them all. I was standing in the queue at King George Square Station, waiting for another late 385, behind a young hippie couple, who threw their arms around each other as if they were a romantic couple being split up for a long time at an airport. But they weren’t at an airport – they were in the queue for the bus. Maybe they were never going to see each other again, as she was going to go home and kill herself or maybe the bus we were about to get on met an untimely demise. At this stage of thought, they started to peck each other every ten seconds and making that annoying ‘click’ sound, and either scenario seemed tantalising. Then they got on the bus together. Well what was the point of that? They even pecked each other twice as they bought themselves a ticket. It only took them fucking forever too. So the bus was pretty packed, and there weren’t too many seats available. So what does this couple do? They run down to the back seats and lay across them and start to make out. I’m sorry, but is there ANY need for this? I had to stand, so they could make out. I wasn’t too happy with that. Not surprising too, because I had been standing in the queue for 40mins to get the 109 back from uni, then I had to wait 30mins for a 385, all I wanted to do was fucking sit down, maybe listen to some MP3s (if it hadn’t run out of battery from waiting so long) and relax after a hard day of university life. But I couldn’t even do that. I had to stand all the way up the back, right next to them. Talk about inconvenience. Fuck them. Fuck the jocks at Bloc Party, and fuck those jocks at the Normanby from preventing me from leaving the dance floor. Speaking of dance floors, I once danced on one and everyone walked away. Funny story, remind me to tell you all sometime. You know what? In some countries, displaying public affection is illegal. Let’s give some of these people the death penalty. There’s a time and a place – and that’s drunk in a place where no one could be inconvenienced by public displays of affection...like not blocking the only fucking hallway in the room. Is it too much to ask? Really, am I being unreasonable here? Just give me a good enough reason, and I will fire up the DeLorean to 141.62192km/hr (88mph) and go back in time and prevent myself from writing this blog! While I’m there, I’d also prevent you from arguing against my theory, so that I am not proven wrong.

For any of you familiar with my MySpace, and have been following my blogs from there, you may have come across my strong argument for the meaning of life. I sincerely apologise for rehashing my old material but I thought that this classic story of a meaningless life fits perfectly in a strong defence for the annihilation of ‘anti-simplism.’ In this mythological tale, weaved from the very fabric of humankind, we follow Sisyphus, who created a deceit that allowed him to escape from the underworld. When he was eventually captured, the Gods decided on a punishment. Sisyphus was required to push a large rock up a steep hill, only to have it roll back down again near the very top, requiring Sisyphus to start over, ad infinitum. Camus’ interpretation likened Sisyphus’ plight to the everyday lives of people working futile jobs. He states that the distress and tragedy of this plight is only noticed in the rare moments this becomes conscious. This could be referred to the supposed thoughts of Sisyphus as he is walking back down the hill to start over. It seems that Sisyphus is happy and just keeps pushing because he has accepted the futility of the task is beyond doubt and that the certainty of his fate gives him the ability to recognise the absurdity of his situation and accept it and thus ‘scorn’ is the appropriate response to the absurdity of life. On one hand, this tale tells us that life is futile, and we all come to that realisation (of course this was snapped by Nagel who stated that we can view things sub specie aeternitatis allowing us to take an ironic look at life and create our own meaning based on what is important to us, as viewing things in this way allows all meaning of life to disappear). However, on the other hand, this story tells us a man who is content with simplicity. He pushes the boulder up the hill, it rolls back down, ad infinitum. What’s so very complex about that? He doesn’t need to rendezvous with a Leopleuradon, or shoot a laser beam into a hole in the Death Star no bigger than a womprat. No! He rolls a big rock up a hill, and it rolls back down again! And he’s content with that. More importantly...he’s happy with that. Sure he’d rather be doing other things like getting sucked off by Aphrodite or some shit, but this is the life he knows now, and that will never change. Many of times, during this blog, I’ve been sitting here drawing comparisons with Sisyphus and myself. Though I hate to admit it, at this point in time, I do share some resemblances.

So what did in fact, happen to simplicity? We identified the problem in a romance and love perspective, and found the increasing reliance on technology as a primary source of communication. We also looked at how relationships and love could be interpreted in a simple manner, meaning that these things are not just naturally complex. Furthermore we looked at the anti-simplistic tendencies of companies in the gaming industry, and the over-simplistic tactics of retail stores like Rivers. Finally, we looked at GAFRs and the increasing development of individualistic tendencies. These together coalesce to present to you a pessimistic and hopeless look at postmodernism and the social segregation of once popular strongly held attitudes, values and beliefs.

On this note, is unfortunately, where I must leave you. It’s relatively safe to say that I am spent, exhausted by the volume of criticizing I have done in this weblog. Instead of trying to find my ladder, I have let the inescapable cloud of bitterness consume me and drag me further down into the fiery depths of despair. This makes it much more difficult to parkour out of, and I probably won’t find a ladder long enough to escape. Someday, I might find something to motivate me to keep wading through the day to day shit that I put up with and motivate me to write another blog. Perhaps, heaven forbid, I might even build my own ladder. That will certainly be my new year’s resolution anyway. Or maybe someone could throw me a rope?