Most of my time had been spent trying to break the psychological barrier of 90 minutes of continuous concentration. My current personal best was still well below expectation.
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
11:13am - 12:36pm
23 Stevenson Street, PADDINGTON, QLD
20°C
As a means of governing the legitimacy of any given activity I had conceived a set of rules.
1. When engaging in concerted concentration the aforementioned concentrator had to sit in the same spot. Movement is only legitimate if it is to pick up a new text, writing implement, beverage or Snickers.
2. Text that the aforementioned concentrator is permitted to read must be based on pre-proposed, pertinent, theoretical topics.
3. Any written activity that the aforementioned concentrator engages in must be deliberate, thought provoking and without affectation.
4. At the beginning of any pre-proposed concentratory activity the aforementioned concentrator must record date, time, location and outdoor temperature to get accurate results. The times will be plotted to provide historical data for future researchers.
Friday, December 19th 2008
2:10pm - 2:43pm
43 Dunsford St, ZILLMERE, QLD
32°C
Today was going very well. I had not let my mind wander to concentration breaking thoughts such as music, Dim-Sims or Firemen (bloody Firemen my eternal nemesis). Today my mind was a sponge. I was an agile intellectual capable of absorbing endless amounts of knowledge. I was feeling empowered, beautifully brisk and wanted the world to know it. The phone rang. I answered it. God damn you.
Wednesday, June 23rd 2010
10:15am - 11:33am
Edward St, BRISBANE, QLD
18°C
‘Hello’ I said, cursing my own failure.
‘Hello this is Tanya, I don’t know if you remember me?’
‘Tanya…Tanya…Tanya…umm, oh right Tanya…….
Tanya was from my theatre days when I was 17 years old and possessed with deluded dreams of being an actor. We were both new members of The Sacred Heart Players, which was an assemblage of amateur thespians who met weekly in the hall of Sacred Heart Church, and we had landed the leads in the production of ‘A Perfect Price for Donny’ written by Roger Fagan. Roger was an elderly member of the group and ‘The Perfect Price for Donny’ was his first and only play. Roger had worked at the railways for 32 years and had been writing ‘A Perfect Price for Donny’ on and off over those 32 years. He had not started another play, he hadn’t written any short stories, prose or even a Haiku. Since he had retired two years earlier he finally realised his dream of finishing ‘A Perfect Price for Donny’ at the age of 68.
During his time at the railways Roger was a shunter and that was all he did. He didn’t apply for promotions or transfers. He had seen the change from diesel to electric, the diminishment of the union and his colleague Keith become a double amputee after being caught between two trains. Roger had to pull the carriages apart, perform the essential first-aid and call the paramedics. Roger was also there when Keith’s wife and daughter left him. Keith was too old and disabled to find a new life or wife and would spend hours on the phone to Roger recounting his best years while wishing he was dead. Roger never turned up late or called in for a sickie. He took his annual leave in winter to allow those with kids to take the summer. Roger was the ideal employee and after 32 years he had paid off his house overlooking the bay and received a handsome superannuation package that gave him the chance to finish his opus ‘The Perfect Price for Donny’.
The story of Keith and Roger’s relationship would have been a great play for The Sacred Heart Players - full of drama, tragedy with a bittersweet ending (Keith won a bronze medal at the 1984 Paralympics, there were only 4 double amputees in the event, still he beat the 15 year old from Nebraska). However, the play was, by all reasonable accounts ‘horrendous’*. The theatre reviewer for The Bayside Chronicle Tristram Honderich, a former high school drama teacher who reviewed all the local theatre productions at no cost, described it as ‘having no coherent narrative…the performances were nonsensical and pouty’.
The only part of the play that touched on the themes of an elderly man who looked back on his life with a sense of regret or surrender was a soliloquy delivered by Harry, Donny’s father. Its arrival in the play is ‘out of context but displays a poetic sensibility that should have been explored further’*.
HARRY
A birthday is not a day to celebrate. Why would you celebrate being another year older, another year where you weren’t where you thought you would be?
At this age you should be better. Better at life, better at death and better at just being.
Depressed at the feeling of wasted energy and wasted ambition. Ambition was a sure-fire path to depression. Why want, why achieve, why strive when it can all come to you by lying down and accepting the inevitable. Why work hard at something when you can work average at something average and over time become above average.
I had auditioned for the part of Donny. It was my first role for The Sacred Heart Players and I took it really seriously. Donny was a welder from the wrong side of the tracks whose mother’s girlfriend was secretly trying to sell him on the black market to keep him away from her daughter, Ann, who was played with ‘cardboard like intensity’* by Tanya. The ironic twist was that the dodgy black market client that the mother was trying to do the trade with was actually Ann who was looking for her ‘one true love’**. For research I had gone to my uncle’s factory to try and gain some insight into being a welder from the wrong side of the tracks. The problem was that my uncle was a refrigeration mechanic from a very nice suburban neighbourhood and me hanging around started to freak out his apprentices. During the 8 gruelling weeks of rehearsal Tanya and I started to get along quite well.
Tanya was a law student and really wanted to be a lawyer. She was only doing the play because her law lecturer had advised them to do amateur theatre as a way of honing their interrogation skills and learning techniques for public speaking. I was trying to be Judd Nelson and she didn’t know who Judd Nelson was.
At the end of the play there was a kissing scene when Donny and Ann are finally able to express their ‘burning love’** and over the course of the season the kiss started to become more passionate. After the season finished Tanya and I decided to see ‘A Few Good Men’ together. Tanya loved the you-can’t-handle-the-truth scene and spoke about how true to life it was whereas I was distracted by other things, any things. I started to notice her eyes and how they seemed out of shape, like they belonged somewhere else, on someone else. It was like they didn’t move. Whenever she spoke or gesticulated wildly they stayed still refusing to budge. They were the most unambitious eyes ever, it was like they’d reached their pinnacle of expressiveness and had no more to do. Normally this wouldn’t have concerned me.
At the end of the date we hugged and tried an awkward kiss but the flame that was palpable during the finale of ‘The Perfect Price for Donny’ had expired and I avoided seeing her again. I hadn’t had any lingering issues with Tanya and I was sure she didn’t have any with me. She was a pleasant person even if her eyes were unambitious. Today, however, 18 years later, Tanya was trying to contact me and this was freaking me out.
‘Yes, I do, we were the leads in the hit farce ‘The Perfect Price for Donny’ for The Sacred Heart Players, ‘Is everything OK? This is a surprise, that must have been nearly 20 years ago’.
‘Yes it’s me. I just wanted to ask you something from that time and if you don’t remember than that is fine. It is a little embarrassing so please forgive me’.
‘Yes, yes of course, fire away I will try and remember’.
There was quite a long uncomfortable pause then Tanya asked, “What did you think of me? …You know back then”.
‘Sorry what do you mean?’
‘This is stupid of me…sorry to bother you, but some patterns have kept repeating in my life and I was just curious as to what you thought about me…you know…sorry…I’m just trying to gain some insight into my life’.
‘Well…um…that was a long time ago and we were very young’.
And then she hung up.
Wednesday, 21st September 2011
09:09am - 10:34am
119 Archer Street, GORDON PARK
24°C
* Denotes Tristram Honderich’s words, not mine.
** Denotes Roger Fagen’s words not mine.