You're being raped and YOU LOVE IT!

About a week ago I was expeditiously attempting to do my weekly shopping. Now, supermarkets are a strange place to me. I've even experienced a sort of grok, an empathy with the shoppers and checkout chicks and even the boldly coloured products on the shelf. Sure, I'll admit it, I'm a shameless consumer...I don't like that I'm forced to be one...And I do tend to vote with my purse though my one guilty pleasure is coke~a~cola-can't drink bourbon without it and there isn't a single cola that can match that taste. Given the chance to I would love to have my own little self sustaining farm. But in all practicality I cannot afford it; unlike Buddha and your cause-of-the-month-clubbers, I've never been spoilt brat. Fuck, who am I kidding? I can't garden, my thumb is black. And I like hot water and I like downloading music and I like red meat. And I don't drive...So I choose to live in the city. And be reliant on certain corporations that manufacture products for mass consumption.


Now as I was gazing at the shelves trying to decipher which type of simmer sauce most resembled real food, I noticed a pair of hippies out of the corner of my eye. I find hippies amusing. Especially the ones that live here. The Gold Coast (for my foreign friends) is the Australia we want you to see. Its an illusion based on a stereotype. Its town planners designed it to look like sushi. Neat, trendy, youthful, perhaps even glamorous, sino-friendly, but at the heart its still raw fish. Its a place I've grown to love and hate. It has many quirks and nuances that you will not find anywhere else. Its also one of the most corrupt places in Australia. I'm talking silent crimes here. You won't hear about it on the news, but you'll feel it in every suburb when the street lights come on. Growing up here was like watching Pamela Anderson's corpse decay. Parts of it remaining fresh, unchanged, a thousand year land mark to artificial beauty, other parts brown, rotting, maggots boring into the diseased flesh.

So, being a gold coaster by birth has ingrained into me a certain type of ironic, warped sense of humour. People come here to live like beach bums and end up being corporate prostitutes. It makes me laugh anyhow.

The hippies were so stereotypical, I almost laughed very loudly in their faces as I wheeled my trolly past them but I managed to suppress it to a mild giggle that they didn't notice. Freckle-tan browned skin from twirling in the sun too much, the girl wore a purple singlet top, no bra and dirty loose legged jeans that clung desperately to a pole shaped waist- The guy had baggy dirty jeans and a green t-shirt, both had rather motley hair, the guy had dreads. As I moved away from them down the isle I heard the girl say to the guy "You don't want all that processed shit." Again I giggled since it was so typical of the flakey pseudo-alterna-type I've seen in my mother. So I finished my shopping and ended up at the counter. It just so happened that these two were in front of me. I couldn't help but notice that on the conveyer belt was a bottle of tomato sauce, otherwise known as ketchup to our american friends, two packets of gelatinous lollies and a pre-packaged pair of steaks as well as some greenery milk and bags of flour and semolina. Surely this was a joke. A hippy activist buying meat and one of the most over produced fruits on the fucking planet? The guy headed off to the smoke counter before paying. Funny stuff. And the funniest part was the price they paid for their pitiful weekly shopping. They would have had maybe three days worth of food - twelve meals with a semolina+milk breakfast - I didn't see any household or bath/beauty etc. products either. For food alone they paid $155. I almost laughed when the check-out chick said it. I paid just under $50. And that lasted me the whole week.

But this blog isn't really about money. I'm more interested in hypocrisy.

I see this a lot on the internet, especially on myspace. And I know that the people I'm referring to are not reading this blog since they're so fucking self obsessed and narcissistic that they're perfecting their online image byte by byte in bulletins and CSS which was generated by a site that has numerous corporate sponsors that are willing to plant tracking devices in your computer to find out how to advertise to you. If you've ever received spam through Yahoo, you know what I'm talking about. You go into a religion chat room under the primary ID on your email account you'll get spam for christianmorgage.com or banner ads for prayer books for ethiopian kids. These things have been common knowledge on the net for quite some time yet those enterprising enough will find a way to be free of it. Even if it means not visiting corporate sites. Bob forbid we don't have a thousand internet friends to promote your cause (blog, book, album, movie etc.) to. Oh you might as well slit your wrists if thats the case.

I am constantly amazed at how many people on myspace hate corporations. I don't think half of them see the irony. I also wonder at the people who hate myspace yet are too afraid to branch out beyond their bulletin spaces and myspace specific graphic sites. They whinge about being raped by a million pop up ads and yet won't even endeavor to do a simple search to figure out how to avoid pop ups, or how to be self-reliant on the net? They also whinge about how fake myspace is...its funny though, the only outlet they appear to use is myspace. You know how I know this? The level of annoyance/anger at myspace downtime. The more angry someone is about errors, not being able to log in, site difficulties, spam and the lack-luster tech support, the more they complain about all of myspace's faults, the more reliant they are. As much as they think we're all corporate nipple suckers and fake people to be humiliated, they still complain that they don't have an outlet to communicate with us. Is it just me who sees this? If you don't like the service, go somewhere else. You'd stop visiting a cafe if the barista spat in your organic frapp, why do you persist on coming back to myspace and whinging about it to the rest of us who are glad there is a free site where we can reach potentially millions? Why don't these people start their own sites? Because on top of everything else they are tech incompetant. Most of these people don't even know basic html let alone how to start their own site. And I am talking about independent sites, not xanga pages you fuckstains.

People post bulletins about rapists and claim to be well informed about crime and current events and they never even fucking google the god damned names. How informed can they be if they can't even take ten seconds to check their facts? No one questions it. Its a given that people on the internet are all truthful and smart. I crack myself up sometimes. Seriously though, a little curiosity and a discriminating mind can be a good thing.

The majority of myspace appear to be newbies to the net. Its more of a hypocrisy out of ignorance than anything else. We're all new at one time or another. I just wonder sometimes whatever happened to questioning the world around us, but then, since when was myspace representative?

The ones that get me though are deliberate hypocrites. Recently, a fairly well informed friend posted a bulletin about a group of kids who were running around filming their sadistic exploits. The funny thing about this bulletin was it had URLs to the myspace pages of about four of the kids involved. I looked. They were legit. One profile had been deleted though. After a few emails back and forth my friend decided to delete his bulletin and tried to stop the bulletin spreading from his friends list. He, like myself and another friend of mine immediately had an impulse to protect the community against these young predators. And the only way they knew to get at them was through information--the pen is mightier than the sword --or so they say... The hypocrisy here is that the people who read this bulletin and pertain to be against violence, crime and abuse inadvertently commit these crimes by stalking, threatening and abusing these kids. See, its an eye for an eye... A girl got pissed on and some homeless guy had flares thrown at him but the most important thing to those who strike out against the offenders is to get revenge. It went through my mind that what the person who posted the bulletin wanted was to effectively round up a digital lynch mob. It reminded me of the monkeyman email hoax which turned into the jokerwhateverhisnamewas hoax on myspace recently. Those who took the bait did not even hesitate to ask if it were real, if this could be just some stupid cyber prank, if perhaps it was even a publicity stunt since, after all, the only reason these kids got into trouble was because they were selling the movie at school. They were also dumb enough to put their names in the credits. heh, if they weren't all under 18 I'd be laughing my ass off as they got a cocking huge ass kicking by skinheads. Point is that the general public seem completely unconcerned that they're being told what to feel. As for the movie, I've seen much more horrendous crimes go completely unnoticed. Remember I was talking about silent crimes earlier? And I think the movie is getting much more publicity than it deserves since this will set the bar for other extreme videos. Its like a dare to every idiotic teenager in the country to go out and do something much more appalling. Schoolies is just round the corner too. Excellent. Just what the gold coast needs: a teen snuff film industry.

But these vigilantes aren't the only types of hypocrites on myspace. I've noticed a large number of "rebellious" types who go on and on about how horrible corporations are and animal rights and why you should buy a t-shirt to stop global poverty, you know, cause-of-the-month-clubbers. Advocates and activists. heh. We're talking about the people who use myspace to announce protests here. A social network, owned by a corporation that has massive (and I mean FUCK-ME-BACK-TO-THE-FIRST-REICH-HUGE) advertising contracts. And lets not forget the journalistic integrity of newscorp. Myspace, sponsoring lies since 06'.

Lets take a quick look at this recent animal rights activist story that was so fucking important I got about 40 bulletins about it.

If you believed (or wanted to believe) what the animal rights activists were telling you this is how the story went:

There was a group of protesters at a pharmaceuticals laboratory called huntingdon life sciences (aka huntington life sciences...depending on the literacy level and discriminating mind of the person who posted the bulletin.)
This group, known as SHAC7 were arrested after protesting peacefully, trialed and sentenced as terrorists.
The cute widdiw bunnies are still dying as a result of this new law that lumps protesters and every free speaking American in league with Osama Bin Laden.

Now the "independent" media is lapping this shit up. You google SHAC 7 and you'll get about ten results in the news about how the poor animal rights protesters are being oppressed, their freedom of speech stifled and the potential for the law to be enforced against non-violent protesters and the media blah blah blah the government are nazis.

Look a little closer at why they were charged though:
The group posted the names and addresses of employees and their families.

They were found responsible for vandalizing a golf course the night before a banker who was about to do business with the company played there. As well as vandalizing the property of the company and private property of the employees.
Several group members visited the home of one employee who's son hid in a hallway while a confrontation took place at the family's front door. The 8 year old child crouched in the hall and armed himself with a knife and told his mother after the event that he will get them [the animal rights activists.] Another employee had his home and two cars vandalized. Apparently stalking and vandalism is a non-violent protest. Yeah, gandhi would be fucking brimming with pride at that one. I'm not kidding, these people likened the legislation to oppressing Gandhi.

Now, I'm not going to make a big issue of the case here. The hypocrisy is fairly self evident in the points illustrated above. But on top of that the ones who are advocating this group and their case, the ones who claim that the law that they've been sentenced under is..against..the..first..amendment..are essentially saying that one has a right to free speech damn the consequences. They're also saying that the right to refuge of the employees of this company is "collateral damage" in the war for animal rights. Okay, I'll publish your name and address and suggest that you advocate terrorist acts. How's that feel? What about I turn up on your doorstep with pictures of animals bleeding all over the place. How bout I also mention that you're as a "pro-[animal]life" advocate who would kill a scientist to save a rat? Extreme? Well you gotta break a few eggs to make an omlet. I'd even hazard to call these people speciesist since the only species they seem to discriminate against is humans. At least the animal lab employees are only anthrocentric. And after all, we are animals, and our instinct is to propagate our species and we do it by being the best. Top o' the food chain.

What I find amazing is that while organizations like peta, WAR or the SHAC 7 thrive, organisations that are notoriously anti-human and pro-animal, movements like the voluntary human extinction movement, the RSPCA, the Animal Welfare League and The Humane Society go largely unfunded, under appreciated and unnoticed since they do everything the legal, non-sensationalist way.

Our parents were hypocrites, sell outs, plunderers, cattle led to the slaughter so why should we be any different? But we insist that we are different. Our parents are straight laced, and listen to rock music that now features in car commercials. We like being entertained by cutting edge musicians like green day, you know, cause green day make such political music and stuff. We go to events like lollapolooza where its all alternative and you can buy so many cool anti-institution t-shirts that were manufactured in Indonesia by a thirteen year old cripple. We can even get redbull there.

Its so easy to act like you care about something today too. Just pick up your remote, mute the TV and change the channel to a random news program. There you go, something to care about. And its so fucking trendy to advocate something. And it generates billions of dollars...Just look at Bono and Opera selling a compassionate image generating millions for charity and even more for themselves.


We are lazy. Conveniences like myspace and t-shirts for poverty are too big a temptation to resist. This is a good idea and we're going to invest all of our hopes, dreams and expectations in it. If it fails even temporarily we'll whinge and whinge via email and to all our friends until you put it back. Why should I learn how to do shit for myself when its already done for me? You have 13 seconds to explain yourself.

Pathetic.

My City is a Whore

This was one of my favorite posts that I wanted to keep.

I've been inspired by one of my favorite artists (yet again) to write about my home town, the Gold Coast. Now some of you have had a little introduction to this town via my blog "you're being raped AND YOU LOVE IT." Where I began to describe what it feels like living in this cess pool. I only breached the surface in that blog though. And since most of you are too lazy to click my links I'll use part of what I wrote in that blog as an introduction of sorts...Hell, I just love that picture of the hep c infested...what the hell is that thing anyway??? Anyone? Buler?




The Gold Coast is possibly the most corrupt place in Australia. I'm talking silent crimes here. You won't hear about it on the news, but you'll feel it in every suburb when the street lights come on. You can walk down the street at night and feel safe but there is a definite uneasy feeling about how close the houses are to each other and the high voltage power lines. Its nothing particularly loud, though at times you will see its face. Especially in this generation coming up. They don't know it but they feel they're a legacy to something undefined, something sickly.

Growing up here was like watching Pamela Anderson's corpse decay. Parts of it remaining fresh, unchanged, a thousand year land mark to artificial beauty, other parts brown, rotting, maggots boring into the diseased flesh. So, being a Gold Coaster by birth has ingrained into me a certain type of ironic, warped sense of humour. People come here to live like beach bums and end up being corporate prostitutes. It makes me laugh anyhow.

Magic Mountain.
My first sense that there was something very wrong with this town was when I was very young. A theme park called magic mountain was the scene for my first nightmare. For those curious:

I dreamed that I was in the car park of magic mountain. It had been conquered by these massive spiders. If you've ever seen the dark crystal they were about that size. Anyhow, as I went in from the car park I saw them wrapping people up in web to save for later. I went into the arcade and that was all I could remember.

Garthim from the Dark Crystal.
Magic mountain was a great theme park. It was built on and around some headlands in a beach side suburb called "Nobby's Beach." On the opposite side of the same headlands there was a huge sign built into the ground that read "Hi Miami High." And this looked down onto the school's sports field.

There were a few rides, the little train, the ball pit, bouncy castle, a chair lift...not a whole lot there. But it was the theme that really made it fun. As you got off the chair lift there was a sword in a stone. And tourists would always line up and get a photo of themselves trying to pull the sword out. I did it a couple times. I found out the trick was that there was a button that you pressed with your foot to release the sword. Even as a kid I knew there was more to "magic" than magic.
There was also a sort of hall where they did magic shows and such. I got called up on stage as a volunteer once. Good times.

Magic mountain was not just a theme park. Most of the Gold Coasters who lived here while it was still open refer to the headlands as Magic Mountain and it has been some the theme park closed permanently. And before it closed down there were many rumors of satanic rituals. People reported seeing cats skinned and strung up from trees. Others reported trees with phallic shapes carved out of them that ..witches.. would impale themselves on. It didn't surprise me. I've often assumed that it was part of the reason that magic mountain shut down. Of course, its a bunch of units now.


The hole you can't get out of
This was often how we described good old Mudgeeraba. I used to go to school there. Its a nice looking suburb. In fact, it could easily be mistaken for a township rather than a suburb of the gold coast. Mudgeeraba is a lush, green one horse town to about 10 thousand people though it isn't nearly as bad as Springbrook which sits above it to the west and is a 0.2 horse town.

As a kid I used to spend many hours in mudgeeraba hanging out with my friends at the pool or at the cemetery so I feel as though this is almost a second home. It was where I had one of my most visual acid trips. Its also a lovely place to get molested.

Mudgeeraba Caravan Park is the stuff of legends. I had a friend who was a bit on the upper side of middle class. She said her father would take friends for tours around mudgeeraba caravan park. She said as a joke whenever her or her siblings were being a pain in the ass he'd threaten to drive her or her siblings out there and leave them there. Its a sort of lawless place, since the cops are too scared to go in there. Everyone owns a gun. There are the odd exceptions, which is usually where the trouble starts.

It takes all kinds though. The denizens are not just your average old coots and crack whores. Bikies, drug dealers, wifebeaters, psychopaths...Its a rich field of white trash variety. I'm just glad they're confined by distance.

Mudgeeraba cops are fun. One Halloween myself and a few friends were going to egg and toilet paper something...not exactly sure what. We got stopped by the cops.
"Whats in the bag?"
"Oh thats just some eggs and toilet paper. Mum asked us to pick some up while we were out trick or treating."
"Okay, you kids be careful."

Another time we had been drinking. The cops pulled up beside us and asked us where we were going. "We're just heading home."
"Have you been drinking?"
"NooOOoo!"
"Alright, you kids be careful."
It was probably the same fucking cop.


If you lived here you'd be as psychotic as me by now.
Varsity lakes as it is known today was the suburb I grew up in. I am surprised I survived. This place used to be called "Stephens." I'm not entirely sure why they had to rename it. Apparently the gold coast has around 22 new suburbs each year. At this there will be a Gold Coast suburb for each child in China by 2032. The name can be attributed to Bond University which is a few kilometers up the road. I was a bit disappointed as I was hoping they'd rename it "Dingleberry on Cerebus' asshole." But I guess thats a little long for postal addresses.

You guys think I'm kidding, but this is seriously one fucked up neighborhood. Oh sure, you can Google it now and see the urban sprawl behind the university and think "Oh I SEE! She's being clever and making a scathing comment about urbanization and suburbia har har har har...where's my beret?" But I am deadly serious. This place is the fucking epicenter of hell.



Naturally the Uni is rife with date rape and alcoholism, but isn't every university? No, I've seen some fucked up shit in my time here. Less than a hundred meters away from where I sit now a woman killed two of her small children by hanging them, then, after her third child escaped, she killed herself. The day after I noticed that on TV there was an Oprah special on post partem depression. The worst part of this was that all the neighbors tried to get a soundbite in for the news crews that reported it. They didn't even know her. Nobody did. That was probably why she did it. This was what inspired Jabberwocky: Life Like.


This place isn't quite as bad as the Mudgeeraba caravan park. Our drug dealers only wield machetes. There is a guy who deals drugs in my block. I have no idea what kind of drugs. One night he decided to start some shit with a neighbor. And he brought a machete. No one was injured but a few people missed a bit of sleep.

Its not all nutjobs and freaks though. One night after watching a cult movie and retiring to write 'damnation,' I was most disturbed by the rather loud music that pumped out from some unknown source. I went wandering. It really only sounded like it were across the road and I didn't see any drunken party guests stumbling home so I assumed that it was just a few people blaring music or maybe a band rehearsing.

I wandered further towards a nearby park. There is a community center there, lots of trees, not a lot of lighting. Thats never stopped me before though. Two figures in black were sitting down in the grass near the toilet block. I wandered over to them. It was a couple in their late 30s .. 40s. They were both wearing leather jackets, leather pants. Their Harley was parked some three meters away. I asked them about the music and if they knew anything about it. They said they didn't but that it was probably the biker's club having a party. They were rather polite and decided that I'd probably be better off writing than seeking out the source of the music (from memory it was gerling - a fine aussie band...not the sort of stuff you'd expect from bikies though.)

You see, there is a bikey club located in the industrial zone that completes the third of the sandwich that is Stephens. The bikers mostly don't cause a whole lot of trouble ..that being said I don't particularly want to dis them for fear of retribution. Heh. A few years back the cops raided them and found a stash of drugs and guns. But from what I can tell most people on the Gold Coast use drugs, be it of the prescription, legalized or illicit variety. Unfortunately caffeine is the only drug I use these days. Not that I wouldn't kill for a cigarette...

The face of tomorrow.
Schoolies week is something that happens here around this time every year. Surfer's paradise is the center of this phenomenon. You see, the Gold Coast being a den of inequity likes to ensnare the youth of other states; we like fresh meat. We have an infamous club scene here. I'm not sure why. The clubs are bullshit. I suppose it has more to do with the distribution of drugs and the blonde bitch on the door telling you that you're not good enough. It has that forbidden appeal. So the attractive kids go into clubs get drunk and date raped by the fat old retired tourists while the less attractive kids hang around Cavil Mall beating up other unattractive kids, buying drugs from mobile phone store clerks and being date raped by uni students from out of state. See, for the most part the kids who come to schoolies are well behaved, its the older students who want to maintain the dream by coming back every year and hanging around in the mall since the clubs won't let them in dressed in thongs and track pants, regardless of the brand or bling.


Surfer's Paradise is a dealer's best friend. From the impressionable teens that desparately want to own the town to the sharp pointy aerial of Q1 which, from a distance, looks like a massive hyperbolic needle. Of course drugs aren't the only wheels in motion in surfers there is also a thriving prostitution industry. Its legal...in brothels. But their business is really in the clubs and on the streets and in real estate. Did I mention the cost of living here?
Possibly the best thing about Surfer's is the bizarre sense of self it has. Raptis plaza has a statue of David and a Ripley's believe it or not under Raptis Plaza.




There used to be a sort of arcade/amusement center called Grundy's on one side of the mall. I think its now a disco bowling alley.

Underneath disco bowl and opposite the beach there is a surf-wear shop which has a set of jaws which probably should belong to a former Megaladon.



There was a suntan guy who used to spray suntan lotion on the beach who died of skin cancer a few years back. And another local celebrity that died a couple years ago was Big Kev. He was one of the old people at the clubs, only he paid before date raping girls...

* * *

Overall its not such a bad place to visit. We don't have a rich culture which makes it okay to cum and go as often as you please without actually contributing much more than a few bucks to foreign brewers. There are theme parks and amusements for the tourists. You won't be bored...



I've only touched very lightly on the topic here today. I may come back with some more pics later. I was VERY disappointed that I couldn't find any of Magic Mountain or the Megaladon Jaws. I know I have a few somewhere that I could scan. And I don't have any recent pics since my camera died. I may head out sometime later this week and snap a few though. This is probably the first of a few posts on this topic. Stay tuned kids!