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.
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.’
Subsequently to asking the big question – Can I make a living entering internet competitions? To which I found the answer was definitively in the ‘No’ corner of the fight cage, I thought I should not let my work and words go to waste. So below is the script I intended for the Carlton Dry Legends of Dry competition.
Are high stakes/low loss competitions primarily for the desperate and weak? I don’t know – how many billionaires play Lotto? I would ask them but I don’t know any. I dare say the majority of committed participants in high stakes draws of luck and chance belong to the realm of the destitute, the disenfranchised and the hopeful (like me).
S.P. and I seemed to start going out because of some fucked up adolescent deference to symmetry. My older sister was going out with her older brother and when my sister told me she liked me we were inextricably yoked together as boyfriend and girlfriend the following day.
In an act of self-discovery, to figure out what the fuck is wrong with me I thought I should return to where it all started – my first date and my first girlfriend, which are indistinguishable, not because of a poor memory but because it was the early nineties and for some reason the two were hard to separate back then.
Let the clichés begin. ‘I thought I’d give internet dating a crack,’ explained one woman in my search criteria of 22-35 year old women seeking men, with a primary photo, living no more than twenty kilometres away.
I resume my review of transferable skills otherwise forgotten, overlooked or omitted in a effort to strengthen my résumé and broaden my search criteria. This includes Public Speaking, Biology, Self Defence & Music followed by References. Again I ask if you currently have a job vacancy need filling I hope you might find this list of background qualifications suitable. Otherwise I appreciate any help to derive unconventional connections from my cumulative skills and recommend compatible jobs that I am presently unaware of.
