The east coast of Australia is the hottest girl at the party.
She gets all the attention, and she knows just how hot she is. It’s a bit annoying if you aren’t her. In fact, it’s probably quite annoying being her.
Everybody who arrives at the party notices her, and she is the one everybody talks about.
A stream of predominantly pretty boys and muscle monkeys will dive in headfirst (probably drunk for the most part) and have a pop at her without hesitation.
The majority will be too scared to lose their inhibitions and have a go at her, but will definitely secretly want to deep down. They’ll wish they did. And in all likelihood, they would have a great time doing so.
Yet, even for those lucky enough to pull it off, there’s that knowing voice in the back of their mind reminding them just how many others have been there before.
And after the initial wow factor, any length of time spent with her just saps you of all your money (Sydney) and you’re left feeling disappointed at the lack of substance there.A testosterone-filled, tattooed, bleach blonde soup.
Enter the quirkier and uglier among us.
Enter the west coast.
Revelling in the rough, crude, swearing, shoeless depths of the party toilets, she is utterly unsanitary, but here for fun. No questions asked.
A little rougher around the edges, yes.
But, it’s a sure thing.
You won’t be disappointed.
And no matter how long it lasts, you’ll be gagging for more.
WA Outback Survival Checklist
2 lads: You want some company because… Wolf Creek.
1 4×4 and all trimmings: Nissan Patrol. Anything that can drive up the side of a house should be fine.
1 tent: must be snake and spider and shark and ant and emu and bogan-proof… (It won’t be. You really just need a lot of luck.)
1 mobile Webber bbq
4 fishing rods
water. lots.
beer. lots.
sunnies
snorkel
bathers
suncream
biscuits
meat
mossie spray
hat
camera
So, here’s how it all went down: 4,200km (the equivalent of driving from Glasgow to Moscow) in 12 glorious days…
But it wasn’t your average, fantasy petty crime – far from it. It had all the correct ingredients to stir up fear, but it rocked me not because it was a mugging, but because it just didn’t feel like a mugging. I know it’s daft to try and justify what would actually instinctively happen within me in that situation – to truly live and breathe in the moment of a hypothetical crime is pretty redundant, yes.
Yet, I awoke from this particular vision in an utter state of calm, and I felt like I’d really endured a helluva trial and prevailed as a victim. I’m not usually one to fixate on dreams all that much, or try to whittle them down into fragments of deep subconscious meaning.
We were at a party up on the hill in Tennessee. On a beaten, dirt track under the cover of darkness, a young gent under accompanied me for a walk. Just on the edge of a woodland it was. I’d batted away invites of a taxi down the road and decided to walk to save cash. Reflecting on it, fair play to the fella, he did everything right. Perfect setting. He even drummed up some decent small talk, and kept our journey on the slow side of a plod, allowing the couple in front of us to disappear ahead.
Well, he almost did everything right. Props were not an issue. He had that whole “college studenty” arrogant beyond my years and experience, but interesting enough that people want to approach me thing going on. Then, there was the knife. The big, fucking terrifying knife. His comfortable small talk lulled me into a sense of security, and he even seemed sincere in his “look, I’m sorry I have to do this” spiel, which showed he was a nice guy and showed he thought I was alright too.
I’ve always felt very lucky in life. No matter whether things are going well or not, I’ve always had a sense of someone or something watching over me, some force, that will guide me through the storms to safety and success. Ever since I can remember I’ve been that way. Right back to the time I fell asleep reading in bed at the age of five or six and my bedside light burnt my ‘Beano’ pillow right up to, but not onto my face, I felt a sense of guardianship from the universe. This gives me the confidence to take risks in search of reward and the determination that I can get myself out of just about any pickle, if need be.
I think most people have spent some time thinking about what they would do when life presents them with their “hero” moment. Most people get one on the spectrum of difference-making. Some people get more than one. Others go actively looking for them. A hero moment can be as extreme as a hijacker attempting to take over your plane. It may be a child walking out in front of a car right beside you. It could be the chance to save a desperate soul at the end of a phone you – out of the 6 billion people in the world with telephone access – happened to receive and pick up. It could be a granny in a house fire next door to you, a stranger who gets in trouble at sea on your beach or somebody being verbally abused on the train in your carriage. Everybody will have a chance to step up when these moments come. Everybody hopes they will jump into action fearlessly and fight the good fight. But, what would you do? What would I do? Would I really intervene, or would the moment get to me and pass by? Would I freeze in the face of life or death? It’s hard to say until it happens, but fun to ponder.
This time, in this dream story, I didn’t try to be the hero I long to be. I could have wrangled the knife away from my mugger. Maybe spooked him into running off. But, I didn’t. I let this hypothetical hero moment pass and faded as a victim. Another statistic.
I reckon if I’d been braver or rasher, I would have come away far closer to death. He would have threatened me a bit and panicked and lashed out, which would have left me with far less respect for the young hoodlum (hypothetically).
You see, neither of us were real bastards, so we were able to come to an agreement. He wasn’t a terrible person, just fell into the wrong crowd and now was a slave to desperation in difficult circumstances. He said he felt bad because his family were very poor, and I believed him. But, then, staring down the shaft of the whopping great blade disappearing into his basketball short waistband, as he very deliberately and very calmly demanded my wallet, and then tracing the outline of the sum 23″ through the material with my (hypothetically) shocked eyes, it all turned a bit too easy to be persuaded.
His one fatal mistake was his choice of target because I genuinely didn’t have any money (both hypothetically and currently true). He believed me. All I had to offer him was around $20 of lottery tickets. He took them, and he was consumed by his own hopeful greed. What had been designed to be a quick job for immediate results suddenly took a whole new twist into the world of what if. The dollar signs glistened in his eyes. After some tentative knife-point negotiation, we made this pact to meet again in one week at the exact same crime scene if the tickets won. He was physically moved when I suggested this, and the dollars in his eyes turned to misty tears. This could be the mugging fable to end all muggings.
He agreed to return in the event of a jackpot win to give me my $20 back with interest in the sun of around $50,000. Again, I believed him. After waking up and reflecting, I think he probably wouldn’t have returned a week later, but I reckon I would. It was too perfect and surreal not to.
I was also really mad at myself afterwords because as I was leaving and dithered over whether or not to call an über. I decided against it, and, ironically, the whole saga ended up costing me more than the price of an uber would have in the first place, and a few grey hairs besides.
I got back into town, which was far more like New York than the real quiet southern university town I went to, Maryville. That’s when I saw him. Down the main drag, I was walking with a classmate, and he passed by with a gaggle of young ruffians, complete with skateboards, tank tops and ball caps. They all looked like they needed a meal and the bit of hope of a dream coming true. I lingered with my gaze in the hope my mugger would catch my eye. He didn’t meet it, but he saw me. He knew I was there. We passed, and the moment was gone.
It’s weird thinking about the whole thing. I felt a great kindred with this mugger. I never once had any real trouble whilst in the states. A few bumps and grazes, yes, but they were mainly down to alcohol, women or my own idiocracy. I was in plenty of situations on my travels that could have gone that way in America and beyond. But, with the sense of natural protection I’ve got, intrinsic optimism and faith that most people I cross paths with in the world are decent folk, the worst I ever had was a lad asking for a couple of bucks for a bus — not a knife in sight.
Everybody dreams whilst they sleep, but it’s easy to wake up and not really feel like you’re living at all. Reality is far more fun for the dreamers – the heroes who grasp each little moment, even when somebody else tries their best to steal them all away. For you can take everything from a man and leave him with nothing, but he can still have the world, as long as he has his dreams.
At work today, i saw two separate pairs of sub-teenagers stop mid-clop on their Sunday strolls to take selfies of themselves and… nothing else of note. And that made me sad. It made me sad because they don’t have a choice anymore. It’s not their fault. There’s just so much technology around these days that’s far too accessible, they are powerless to avoid it. The smartphone is normality. So smart it dumbs us all down. The iPhone* is now as essential a part of the human condition as the eye itself, and in so many cases it blinkers us from so much that’s worth putting the phone down to actually see — without a filter or a hashtag in sight. I realise I’m as active on social media as most these days. But kids need longer to be kids. There is plenty of time for social media, but the right to grow up in relative peace — during that juicy stage when you’ve finally got stuff worth hiding from your parents but before you live at a different address from them — is precious. I just think back to that wonderfully awkward period between being a child and being a proper teenager on the verge of adulthood where you get to have a go at stuff and risk things in the course of figuring out yourself without having your errors strewn across a news feed. Now we just point a pocket-sized box at ourself, click until we satisfy our vanity, then let it loose to be judged on the number of likes we receive. In a world where success is going viral, how do these kids stand a chance of going to any place of self-understanding. Technology rules. Real life communication is dying. And adolescence is in a precarious place as adult material reaches younger and younger, quicker and quicker. That makes me sad. (*Other smartphone devices are available, but I don’t like them.)
The internet has led us to some great things — the globalisation of social media, maintaining international friendships on a level that burrows slightly (sometimes) deeper than superficiality, the digitalisation of music, online shopping, youtube etc.
We are definitely have more at our immediate finger tips than any other generation. We are blessed with abundance. But, for all the Instagram sunsets (exhibited by me shortly) and punny tweets, we sacrifice something that terrifies me without even realising it.
By relying on technology for all our communication and all our entertainment, we are starting to forfeit our ability to think freely.
In the pursuit of viral approval, we drown out the voice that stood up and was heard in strifes gone by.
In yearning for likes, we jeopardise the basic human ability to care about the wellbeing of people we don’t really know.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there are things that happen that are worthy of being captured, absolutely. Why, I would argue, here comes one now in the shape of Loch Lomond at summer’s dusk:
But, I digress.
Here lies my problem…
Of course, the Brazil fans are upset. What happened in Brazil on Tuesday night was beyond any rational mind. What happened during the course of the 18 maddest of those 90 mad minutes will be talked about well after any of us are still on this earth.
36.5 million people tweeted during the #GER v #BRA game, more than any other sporting event in history, even the Super Bowl.
They have every right to be upset. This generation’s Selecao were supposed to be the Saints that brought peace to a tortured nation. They were going to bring hope to the hopeless and bring football back home for the homeless The Brazilian players were humiliated and punished by their German counterparts during what supposed to be their fairytale of Belo Horizonte. But, the ruthless, polished German machine had other ideas.
For these fans, these viral art shows of hurt are not just significant of a crushing defeat on the pitch.
Never before, can I remember it being so hard for a national of any country to support their nation. 200 million people witnessed that 90 minute gutting of a football culture, but from a variety of perspectives.
There is division in Brazil.
These fans, broken and ripped apart, choose the glam and the fantasy of this tournament, which their country couldn’t afford and their people couldn’t avoid.
The fans. The dreamers. The lovers. They chased their dreaming hearts in hope of something else. Something brighter. They choose to play at being the haves for a month or two, just like the Brazilian governing bodies of football. They longed for something more than the despair and poverty of daily life.
36.5 million people tweeted about Brazil getting trounced.
How many people do you think are tweeting or, lone behold, talking about the poverty, the lack of sufficient infrastructure, the lack of schools, the lack of housing, the lack of public transport, the lack of basic standards of living, all of which we take for granted in the “western world”?
I can guarantee it’s not as much as 36 million.
The major media publications are endangering basic decency via sensationalism with heartbroken pic after pic.
They have a huge say in dictating what goes viral. My Facebook newsfeed has been inundated with heartbroken people, clad in yellow, over the last 48 hours.
There was precious little of the Germans celebrating.
There has been almost nothing on the heartbroken people in the favelas, heartbroken every day.
But, when football becomes a vessel for spreading bad news, the pack gathers to hunt.
The major media publications are endangering basic decency via sensationalism with heartbroken pic after pic.
All over the web is reel after reel, gallery upon gallery, capturing devastation, despair, emptiness, heartache.
This man actually gave his trophy to a German fan because he said she had earned it. Compassion face to face, in the quiet concave of a prying lens.
Just letting them grieve in peace isn’t an option. Leaving them to face the reality of choosing to back the hope of a sports team over the well-being of a neighbour isn’t enough and returning to that reality was never viable.
The prying lens of modern life demands they be ridiculed for the entertainment and newsworthiness. It’s the world that we live in and the World Cup, with all the cultural mayhem associated with it, that will go viral for all the host of applicable commercial reasons.
The world will concentrate on the football. The world will ridicule David Luiz.
The world will showcase the people in pain…in the stadium that is.
The world will forget the poverty and the pain on the streets and behind closed doors because 36.5 million people would never dream of wasting 140 characters on something as distant and uninteresting as that…
…would they?
The power of the internet is unrivalled. It’s all just dependent on what message you feel is most important for you to spread.
Sometimes you ask yourself if you made the right decision.
So many goals and targets slip by you because you think you’ve simply got no more hours to fit into your day.
But we make time for the things that really matter to us. We will sacrifice, albeit often subconsciously, that which matters not for that which we truly desire almost every time.
Last August, with far too much downtime and precious little money, I posted an ad on Gumtree offering tutoring services in English and writing skills.
It was a desperate plea, along with my awful attempt at picking up a couple of dog-walking clients, to make some money.
I got into that business for entirely selfish reasons. I think, if we are really honest with ourselves, most of what we do is based on selfishness in one way or another. It’s just a part of being a human. We are inherently ingrained to survive. Even the most selfless act of kindness gives us an unmatchable rush of feel-good that improves our state of mind, while improving someone else’s state of life.
Anyway, I went into tutoring with only myself in mind.
I got one client — a teenage elite athlete with ambitions to break into the Great British team.
This teenage star was in need of an English tutor after having tried and failed to juggle training with public education at two different high schools.
This athlete was bullied for being incredible at something. That is the grotesque nature of growing up in Scotland.
Crippling teenage years here are about survival more than anything else.
Bullies feed off weakness and if you don’t have any they will fill you with self-doubt until they convince you that your strengths are in fact weaknesses.
Hearing this story and reflecting on my own years in secondary school absolutely blew me away.
This was no longer about money. It was barely even about English.
It was about teaching a timid kid that it is okay to fulfil your potential and be great.
It was about teaching a fledgling human-being not to let those who fear achievement scare you out of a happy life.
It was about teaching a broken child to take shattered shards of confidence and rebuild them into social armour.
It was about teaching a nervous mute not to apologise for speaking out loud.
It was about teaching a unique and gifted individual that it is okay to be different from everybody else.
Through the medium of language and some of the most inspiring, thought-provoking stinging together of words ever written, I taught this student to believe in self-belief and they taught me to never again underestimate the power of a positive influence on a young mind.
Through verse of poems, quotes, free writing and demanding self-expression, over the course of 10 months, that lost young soul rediscovered how great it is to be anything other than normal.
I no longer teach that student because they are returning to school.
Forget money, hearing that my services would no longer be required because my student thinks I have sufficiently prepared them to face the fight once more is the greatest reward I could have hoped for.
To that student, all that is left is to say is good luck and remember:
“I hate relying on people because they just let you down,” said the man at the bar.
My friend didn’t come and pick me up like he promised, so I rely on the booze.
The numbing of the hurt.
The blinding of the pain.
The tranquility of fluid answers to intangible problems.
With beer there is no fear.
I buy the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth and the si…seventh because the security of knowing the cost will never surprise me provides comfort after all that life has cost me so far.
Loneliness conquered by the companionship of a friend across the bar.
My best friend, maybe even my lover, until the music dies and the lights go up.
So I’m staying here. I’m with my friend. Me and the beer until the end.
It blows me away to think a year has already past since I was taking the walk.
You get this day once and life from this day on will never be the same.
That is absolutely okay.
There will be times when you wish you could go back to the MC college days and do some things differently and times when you wish you could go back and do a lot of other things all over again exactly the same way.
That is also absolutely okay.
Enjoy it today.
Celebrate the way you deserve.
Congratulations to you.
Now go into the world, don’t stop fighting, don’t stop being Scottish and always stand free in your own mind.
Instead of true friendships, we’re obsessed with endless personal promotion.
Look at what I accomplished.
See that perfect sunset and tiger backflipping behind me…just a normal day.
Look how much I love (______).
AND PLEASE LIKE ALL OF IT.
If we’re not comfortable being alone, we’re only going to know how to be lonely.
Are you able to go into a busy restaurant for a candlelit dinner for one?
Can you enjoy a coffee and a date with your book without worrying what you look like?
Would you be caught dead in a movie theatre by yourself?
We claim to have hundreds of friends, but we maintain and kindle these friendships behind the glass shield of social media.
Thus, we find ourselves losing touch with the handful of real friends that are truly sustainable because we sacrifice them for the mass hysteria of a quirky post — instantaneous in nature but contrived and manipulated all too often. So, what do you do? In the world of online media that constantly requires feeding and nurturing, we must pick our battles.
Case in point, take the concept of #100DaysOfHappiness.
The irony of this charade comes in 100 consecutive days of ramming mere things you convince yourself make you happy down the throats of this PR audience we find ourselves locked in and label “friends”, which results in 100 days of tedium for them.
Okay, it won’t be 100 days, somewhere in that three month period great moments will present themselves, but just let them sell themselves without forcing the issue.
Paying less attention to selfishly promoting your self image and more attention to those close to you will probably result in your own image promoting itself naturally and speaking genuinely.
The maximum natural size of a group of humans we can know intimately is about 150 people.
How many friends do you really have?
Go forth and try to find the beauty in every day for 100 years, and — just for fun– why not try keeping some of the amazing bits just for you and your significants because some of the best memories in life just aren’t done justice by a “like” or a “retweet”.
So, what do you do? In the world of online media that constantly requires feeding and nurturing, we must pick our battles.
Fair Wind To Adventure 