9223954
Barkly Square Shopping Centre, Brunswick
The scanner situation isn’t looking good. I spent about an hour fiddling and prodding and squirting, trying to get the ugly dots to disappear from my scans, but all to no avail. I was able to achieve some variation in the level of spottiness, but nothing that actually approached a clean picture. I’m still pretty convinced that the cable is the problem, so I set off to Sydney Road to try and find a replacement. Also to no avail. I went to a dodgy computer shop where half the shelves are empty and there are cardboard boxes lying around the floor, and the guy was very helpful and accomodating, but there was no disguising the fact that he didn’t have this cable. Less accomodating was the guy at Strathfield, who gave me the blank stare which employees at electronics chain stores must get special training in. In desperation, I even went into Kmart, realising that they don’t sell computers, but knowing that they do sell software and the odd peripheral, but, needless to say, I drew a blank there as well.
In better news, I got another gig for this weekend. That makes it two this weekend, and one next weekend, to supplement the one that I did last weekend. I was hoping to be doing one a week by the time I started uni, so if they keep coming in at this rate, it looks like I might make that target. Not that one gig a week is enough means to actually live within, but you can’t get two gigs a week until you’ve first got one, if you see what I mean. Last time I looked, which was a couple of weeks ago, I calculated my zero point, the point at which my money would actually run out if I didn’t get any work, at about two-and-a-half months. I think these four gigs between them should make up the two weeks that have since gone by, so I’m holding the deadline pretty much at bay at the moment. Hopefully it won’t draw any closer. Unfortunately, in the music business it’s difficult to ever be completely confident about the work continuing to come in. All you can do is look in the diary and see what you’ve got and hope that it continues, which it almost always does. I know that the supposed security of other jobs can be illusory as well (just ask the Ansett employees), but there’s a special kind of faith that’s required to make your living playing gigs. If you worried too much about whether or not the phone was going to ring, you’d spend your whole life worrying, so all you can do is forge ahead and have this feeling, this notion, that the phone is going to ring and everything’s going to be alright. I think of Geoffrey Rush’s character in Shakespeare in Love, trying to ward off his creditors with his hazy notion that everything’s going to be alright:
(Or something to that effect). I’m not a believer in any sort of unique magical showbusiness energy that makes things work out alright on the night, but I am a believer that if you’re doing a good job and people enjoy what you do, then it’s going to have long-term consistency, even if the short-term prospects look bad. That’s why, being a musician, you can never actually afford to spend all the money that you have. You can’t actually live a hand-to-mouth existence, because if you did, there would be times when you would starve. Having money in reserve isn’t a nice comfortable luxury, it’s the only way you can actually get through. There are always going to be lean times, and if you don’t prepare for them, your bank balance will hit zero like the fuel needle on a Holden Premier. My two-and-a-half month theory really just means that I’m relying on the fact that I’m not going to go more than two-and-a-half months without getting enough work to pay my way. I think it’s a fairly safe bet.
9213395
Why there are no pictures or graphics of any kind
Well, my digital camera got stolen, and my scanner’s got the heebejeebies. There seem to be these random renegade pixels that revert themselves to primary colours all over the picture, making each snap look like a sort of acid-inspired snowglobe. I’m hoping a bit of WD-40′ll fix it. I always hope that.
9212886
Brunswick Baths
A lot’s changed in the swimming pool business since we used to make the pilgrimage down to the George Bolton Swimming Centre in Hazelwood Park when I was a kid. I used to swim along the bottom of the pool looking for change that people had dropped (there was often a surprising amount), then take it up and queue on the hot cement in front of the kiosk with its faded icecream signs. With my afternoon’s scavenging, I could afford two or three Redskins, which didn’t seem at all politically incorrect at the time.
This pool doesn’t have a kiosk. It has a cafe. It doesn’t serve Redskins. It serves biscotti. There are hot showers here that you don’t have to put five cents in and hope that you finish before the hot water does. There are no turnstiles with gold tokens, only a smiling receptionist who scans your bar code.
In this cafe (where I’m writing from now) there are tables and chairs set up looking out through big opening doors onto the pool itself. It’s after ten now, so there are only a few lonely swimmers plouging up and down. There are two stories of windows adjacent to where I am, through which you can just make out the figures of people punishing themselves on treadmills and stair-steppers, or moving in awkward synch with the aerobics instructor. It feels a bit as if the whole place is just quietly going about the business of fat burning. All around me those lipid cells are being broken down and metabolised (except in the case of the person on the table next to me, who is pleasantly bolstering hers with a cinnamon muffin and a mochacino).
Yesterday I had to enrol at uni, so I got up early to fit my swim in and still get down to Caufield by ten. Coming to the pool at about seven, I ran into the hardcore swimmers. During my normal time, I’m pretty at home in the medium lap lane. There are always a few people with muscles bulging out of skintight Speedos who glide past me as if moved by external propulsion, but there are just as many who struggle and spit and get passed by me in a few hopefully-effortless-seeming strokes. Admittedly, quite a few of those who I’m gliding past are pregnant women, who are understandably battling a higher drag coefficient. In the early morning shift, though, it’s a totally different story. The water is as choppy as the start of the Sydney to Hobart, just from the wake generated by the controlled thrashing of a hundred tanned and toned pairs of well trained (and, one suspects, slightly webbed) feet. The double lap lane in the middle of the pool, supposedly for median-range swimmers like myself, becomes a boiling mass of flesh and lycra as whole quivers of triathletes battle for tumble turn space.
When uni starts, I’ll surely have to be messing it with the big boys of the 7am club. That gives me another month of training alongside the pre-natals to build my strength and confidence. It’s not going to be easy.