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Epilogue: Since the last Job Club: Fifteen Years of Anecdotes & Reflections – Part IV, dated July 2010 I’ve twice needed to claim the Newstart Allowance as an unemployed Jobseeker. On both occasions, in late 2013 and more recently in 2014, the stigma, pedantry, inconsistencies, inadequacies and bureaucratic hegemony I’ve discussed in my previous posts are still prevalent. To borrow a phrase from our regional northern neighbours , “samesamebutdifferent”. However, change does come, even if it is wee small amounts, which need a sharp eye to see.

The store started to flow. Middle-management on stolen lunch breaks toss half smoked cigarettes away at the door, snatch extra large take-away bags off the counter for the team back at the office and already have stuck another fag in their mouths before exiting.

June 2010 – Northbridge, Perth, Australia: I’ve realise the reason the Jobsearch area of my Job Network Service Provider looks particularly Spartan today is over half the computer terminals are missing from the time I began Jobsearch six weeks ago. It’s easy not to notice. Like living in a houseshare with a crack addict, computers and equipment, essential to Jobsearch have gradually disappeared since I started attending.

May 2010 – Northbridge, Perth, Australia: It’s Thursday and I’m sat in the austerity of a Jobsearch room at my nearest Job Network Service Provider. Thursday is the appointed day once a week I’m required to attend in person and log two hours of job search. A less than stable middle aged Chilean man dressed like a 1980’s TV themed police detective has been sat next to me for the last half hour sniggering incessantly while idly surfing the internet.

May 2009 – St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia: Both in 1997 and 2002, the unctuous rhetoric of support and training were equally loud and convincing. Back in 1997, being fairly naive and without comparison I believed this. With a useless degree in my back pocket, I was trying desperately to break into the film and television industry.

Prologue: For all the fortunate sedentary souls out there blessed with vocational stability I feel it must be difficult to imagine the other side of full-time employment and fiscal dexterity. And there is a migration of influences colouring the reality of unemployed life on the dole. There’s regurgitative current affairs programming and their obsession with pillorying the notorious and mythical Dole Bludger. Then there’s Government policy and the perpetual re-enacting of stringent policies designed to dissuade and penalise people on unemployment benefits – tainting the nation’s collective consciousness with suspicion about everyone on benefits.

India for so long has been travelled, idolised, loathed and revered in literature and backpacking jive – stories, experiences, enlightenment and tumultuous history so often recited and reinterpreted, the clichés and contradictions were impossible to escape. Anxious to let India settle gradually on me I was mindful to avoid large cities where I feared the filth and sweaty mire may taint my impressions unfairly.

Joy has a twin sister called Charity. They are twenty-four. Joy owns a shitbox Honda Civic that she lives out of – she’s going to sell it at the end of summer to give her more money for a year’s study in Freiburg. Charity has two kids, a house and a second hand children’s clothing store.

Max stood at the restaurant’s dispensing station nearest the main entrance on the corner of Oxford Road and Portland Street. People use to call him Maxwell or Mr Hinkley, which he preferred. It was a professional courtesy and he liked it. It set him apart.

I just had an ultrasound of my nut-sack after a rather disagreeable pain in my right cojone mulishly persisted in spite of a strong prescriptive course of anti-inflammatories that I was assured would fix me.

It’s not unusual for kids to grow up in dysfunctional families and fucked up environments and consider it all very normal. As Christof, the megalomaniac television producer in The Truman Show so concisely stated, ‘We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.’

Christian Christian Senior strolled into McMahon Sports Bar either unaffected or unaware of his lateness. His punctuality or lack thereof was commonly known and easily tolerated by his wife and embraced by friends because he was such a damn charismatic fellow.

In a world boasting and bursting of continually updated and unmitigated connectivity – wall-to-wall polyphilia, live chats, tweets, blogging, tumblring, and skyping, Jerome had never felt more maligned and alone. He was walking testimony to Seneca’s astute insight made two millennia ago: ‘Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.’

Lunagirl sees the boys are far from the lads they’re pretending to be and the men they want to be. But sympathy is not cheap in this town.

It’s only fair I should start by clarifying if you’re looking for 12 ways to make yourself feel happy, or better this isn’t the blog for you. I’m not qualified – and I tend to find inspiration in others because I struggle to find it in myself. But the irony isn’t lost on me that the people who inspire you the most are also possibly the reason you feel so shit.

Lunagirl knew it was an apology of sorts, albeit unspoken, after being abandoned on the first day they met – even though Lunagirl stopped feeling abandoned a long time ago. Rainfish said it was a surprise. But to pass the time as they headed up the back of Alexander Park he started telling her about One-Legged Keith, which to Shades, sounded more like warning.

Lunagirl couldn’t see if Rainfish vanished into the puddle, or the puddle swallowed him. Liquid and solid masses seemed to connect somewhere just off the ground. A gutter of embrace and Rainfish was gone. The puddle fell back down to its apathetic state in the shadows.

Lunagirl’s khaki canvas rucksack is strapped like a Neolithic shield to her back. It bounces along with her through the drizzle as they head south on Princess Parkway and onto Wilbraham Rd.

Before Lunagirl has time to react Rainfish has her arm like a leash. ‘Come-n’ – We carn’t slow down. Fouk’it Shades. Don’t stop.’ That’s what Rainfish called Lunagirl – Shades, on account she always wore turtle blue sunglasses. To her mother Lunagirl was Jane.

The following Monday Josphine wrote a review of Finn’s birthday movie night in the double-sheeted weekly newspaper Lieb had just launched. It was titled Amateur Perfectionist Projectionist.