John Cleese and I

On the weekend I went to "A Night With John Cleese".  He sat on a stage and talked about his life, where he came from, who his family was and how Python and other great collaborations came about.  It was an excellent night.  I really enjoyed seeing his skill in manipulating an audience and talking about some personal material.  He talked about the death of his mother and father.  Graham Chapman and David Frost's death as well as his progression from school right through to falling into writing and acting.

I lucked into a great seat about 8 rows back, had a
clear view of him all night!

I have my humour set heavily in the British side of comedy.  Irony, sarcasm, dry humour that is full of silliness.  In fact, I realised during the concert that my humour is not only influenced heavily by Python, it practically is Python humour.  It is then no wonder that I have idolised these old skits and movies to this very day.  If you asked me my favourite comedy movie it would invariably wander from Holy Grail or The Meaning of Life largely dependent on my mood at the time.  If you asked me which skits I liked the best it would probably be The Secret Policeman's Other Ball although Little Britain comes a close second.

I have also been a great fan of the Goodies and I always thought that they kind of grew out of the Python craze.  I was amazed to find out on the night that both Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie were both all tightly involved with the group largely before they became Python!  John Cleese showed us the Fish Dance skit which the Monty Python crew voted their most silly skit of all time and I recognised the Goodies quite clearly in it.

My son, Ethan, is also hanging on to the same style of humour.  While he is not into Python as yet (he is a bit young) he is deeply enamoured by the Goodies and much darker humour.  This makes me very happy.  In fact, my whole trip to see John Cleese has made me a lot happier too.  It has gotten me in touch with my inner self again, when I was a lot happier in general.  It made me realise again that life is for living and laughing just as much as it is for working, bill paying and the intrusion of the darker things in life.

So, there you have it.  To the readers of this blog, try to work out what style of humour really works for you and visit it often.  Do not let a chance to catch up with a laugh or two ever as it is just as important to you as it is to those around you to see you laugh and have a good time!  Thanks for reading!

Election Time

So it is election time in our little wilderness state of Tasmania, Australia.  In little under a month the goodly Tasmanian's will be called to enter little booths with pencil and paper to commit our state to another 3-4 years of governing from one of the political parties.  I am a little depressed about this coming election as there is no-one that I clearly want to vote for.

40 Year old me!  I see a wrinkle!

This past 4 years has been governed by an alliance of two minority parties who largely have conflicting goals.  The Premier of the state is the  a  complete nonce who likes to have a photo op rather than have something important to say.  In the past 4 years our finances have been flushed down the toilet and she has the gall to say to the opposition that they can't make promises because there is no money.

But the opposition is just as poor a choice.  Here is a guy who I am fairly certain thinks he already has things won.  He pays too much attention to the polls me thinks.  he has made promises of payments to various sectors but all politicians do that.  Besides, I really don't think that anybody really gets the real issues here in our state anymore.

Finally, there is a new party on the scene.  they don't really say much about anything unless it is derogatory to the other parties.  They say "Hey vote for us because we haven't caused any damage, not like X party" and I think that is largely because they have not made it in to government yet.

I am fairly certain that when I go to vote I will still be as confused then as I am now.  Not one of the parties want to speak about the real issues.  Escalating depression and suicide rates.  Increased mental illness, alcoholism, drug and gambling problems.  Jobs going overseas at the rate of the thousands.  Laws that allow the rich to get richer, the middle to just scrape by and the poor to be forgotten.

We are facing our worst challenges everywhere in Tasmania on a social level but not a single party wants to speak about this.  What they want to do is talk about money and where they can put it for a short term boost in employment or revenue.  This is part of the problem but none of the parties have a holistic view when you need it.  In fact, I cannot think that any party in operation is working for the good of the people any more.  They are simply working for the good of their party.

Everything is about money.  The focus on every minute detail is ridiculously revolving around the planet of the dollar when in reality the money is a symptom of deeper issues.  Ask yourself, do you know your neighbour?  Have you done anything for someone recently and expected, nay WANTED nothing in return.  Why do we turn our back on people in need on our own streets and yet sponsor people in need in other countries.  Look to what you can do to improve the lot of life of people in your community.  Prove to them that you want to help them and that you can be reliable and open.  If we all acted in this way and took a moment away from our own needs and wants, this State of Tasmania (and the world) would be a much better place.

Well, that is what I have been thinking about any way and this is the view from my window after all!  Have a good week everyone.

The Downgrading of Society

So, enough about my personal issues.  I put up the last posts so you can understand me and see where I am coming from and why I am a depressed so and so.  But that is not necessarily what I wanted this blog to be about.  This blog is more about my opinion on certain things in life and what I think we need to do as a society to pick things up and return to a better style of living.  This post I have been dying to do actually and I think it is an important thing to speak out about.

Globalisation.  The internet has pushed the world into a period of never before seen access to other countries.  Even in the early 1990's when the World Wide Web was yet to show its face the other side of the world was what you heard about in the news, and then only when something major had.  But the internet has now created an environment where I spend a good deal of my time discussing things in a live environment with people on the other side of the world.  This is a great thing but there are things that globalisation has destroyed in our society.

Act local, think global

It is a mantra that has become a catch phrase in Tasmania, especially with politicians and it is partially this mantra that has led to the loss of skills and manufacturing in this country as well as the growing financial problems that it seems almost everyone faces.  It started with a thing call de-regulation as the Liberal Federal government called for open trade in the interests of globalisation.  Prior to this the government invested money into industries so that they could be competitive in a global environment.  When this happened it seemed like a great thing.  But at what cost.

This is very pertinent to me at the moment because in the past week a massive chain hardware store known as Bunnings opened here in Burnie, the local city about twenty minutes away from home and everyone thinks this is one of the best things ever.  Except me.  Bunnings is a store that is owned by a company called Wesfarmers.  Wesfarmers also controls Coles Pty Ltd, one of the two largest chain supermarkets in Australia.  Bunnings stores follow the same style of approach as a supermarket but with hardware.  So why would I not be excited?  Let me use Bunnings as an example of how globalisation is ruining our communities but it is not just Bunnings.  It is Spotlight for crafts, all sorts of new car dealerships like China's Great Wall model and the like.

Think of a local hardware.  Your local hardware of ten to twenty years ago.  In all likelihoood the hardware may have been a franchise but it would be a franchise owned and run by a local community member.  Of course it might actually be a completely independent hardware store.  You walked in to the hardware and if you were a little handy it is likely that they would recognise you.  Over time it may even be one of those places that your children get a go at their first job because the guy/girl that ran the store is part of the community and he/she wants to be connected to the community and help it grow.  The prices may be a little more than the big city hardware BUT they don't have the community the same size as the big cities so they have to mark the prices up a little 

Then imagine you hear your local council approves a massive development for one of the largest supermarket giants to put in place a hardware store that prides itself on being the cheapest they can.  They can be cheap because they have the financial clout behind them to buy containers and containers of stock up front.  They can cater to people who look only at cost by buying inferior quality stock from countries where the labour force demands little in the way of pay and conditions.  They can also buy the higher quality stock but know on the whole that the highest sellers will be those that are the cheapest goods.  The proprietor of the local hardware has good reason to be fearful.  You see, they only have a small quantity of poor quality products from inferior producers and they do not sell much of them.  They don't because they give good advice and point people to the products that sell the best.

They look to the other stores of the same company that opened and they see that their own bottom line was hurt at the same time.  They can no longer afford to put little Jimmy through his first job because their profits are reducing all of the time as they try to bring back their customers.  Even the local store opening of the chain store that is two hours travel away it hurts them.  As time begins to tick down fewer and fewer people come through the door and it is all they can do to keep the doors open until three months prior to the opening of the new store.  Then they cross their fingers and hope that they get employed in the new superstore.

So, what is going wrong?  De-regulation has not only allowed free trade with companies that can under sell us because they have nowhere near the overheads that we do in an over-governed society but it has also allowed the sleeping giants like our monopolised supermarkets to start to create monopolies in other industries.  The people that will serve in these stores will have guidance based on the business model of a supermarket as opposed to the skilled testimony of the local store owner who checked the devices before selling them.

This happened in Burnie.  I look at the newspaper and it is all about the celebration of the new store opening.  It closed five local hardware stores and Burnie itself had NO hardware store for over three months.  Now I look at photos of people walking out holding cheap products made in under-developed countries.  I sat at a birthday party and heard them let off what must have been at least $25000 worth of fireworks celebrating this.

Australia is losing its manufacturing industries at an alarming rate because we cannot compete with other countries labour costs and under developed working conditions.  We have come from a position where everything is over regulated and all that Australia has done is taken away the regulation of trade restrictions but now work on modernising our working environment is ignored.

These conditions are not sustainable.  I can see the effects of these problems on a daily basis.  It does not only hurt us at the hip pocket but also as a community.  These stores will argue that they put money back into their community and they do.  But that money is at a superficial level.  The executives of these companies behind the scene is where a lot of the money really ends up, and you can guarantee that these peopl do not live in the community.  Unlike the people that they have displaced, who still live in these communities.

But who is to blame?  Is it the companies?  Is it the government?  No, it is the community.  the world revolves around money now and this is why globally countries are finding themselves in difficulty.  Their economies are beginning to collapse. It truly is looking like a dystopian future if we do not work out these issues.  I do everything I can to buy locally and support stores that are not yet pawns for bigger companies.  I implore you to do the same.  Until we as a community start to reject these stores they will continue to destroy local economies and lives.  

I so want to write a lot more on this issue but I hope that I have gotten my point of view through.  I hope that many of you can see the same thing as I am and that enough of us eventually start to act on this knowledge.  To restore a community, we must first become one.

Weird But True - further into my reasons for depression

I had stated in my previous post that things were a little weirder in my family, particularly on my Mothers side.

My grandparents had three children.  Don, Diane and Marilyn (My mum).  Each of these children got married and had two children of their own.  Don had Angela and Sandra; Diane had Jane and Martin; Marilyn had Michael and myself.

Sandra was born with cerebral palsy and was not expected to live much longer than her teens.  Apart from that everything was pretty straight forward in my generation, at a glance anyway.  My brother Michael and my cousin Martin were born only a couple of days apart in the same hospital.  Martin grew into a strong, strapping guy who played rugby and rowed for his school.  He was healthy like an ox.  But just before he was to turn 18 Martin got hit bad with an illness.  The Doctors flew him from Tasmania to Adelaide when they realised Martin had a hole in his heart and his heart was enlarged!  No one could really believe what was happening.  This strapping kid was very unwell.

They treated Martin and hoped that he would be able to make it home for his eighteenth.  It was never to happen though as Martin made it through all the surgeries he was required to undertake and then was killed by a heart attack caused by a Golden Staphylococcus infection.  The family were literally stunned at this.  It is completely overwhelming and unthinkable that this happened to him.  Something completely out of the blue.

Life continued for us and in time the pain eased and I would think fondly of the times that I had with Martin.  But then another tragedy lurched into being.  My cousin Sandra (Sandy) had survived well past her teens and she was in her thirties.  She was such a funny spirit.  Wild and spirited with a mischievous humour much like her father she was a joy to be around.  She was at home by herself when an electrical fault in her wheelchair caused a fire.  I cannot bear to think of what she went through and I hoped that I would never learn what it would be like to lose someone in such a circumstance.

But of course you may have read my last blog and know that I did.  My brother killed by a one in a million circumstance.  I llok at our family history.  Three children of one generation; each had two children of their own; each lost one child to circumstances so unlikely as to be considered one in a million events.

I look at that and wonder two things.  Firstly, is our family cursed?  Secondly, is it proof of a greater pattern to things?

I cannot say for sure but I can tell you one thing.  It sucks.  I hate even that I have to think like this, or that my mind is conditioned at looking at things this way.  I know there is greater pain and suffering of others out in the world but this is so personal to me and it is part of the complicated relationship of my depression.  I do feel that without this repeated pattern of loss I may have healed from the loss of my brother but with the added losses I feel like I was set up to fall in this hole.

Thanks for reading.

The Cause of My Depression

Thank you for waiting for this.  I realise I had promised it for Sunday last (my fortieth birthday) but circumstances have caused me to postpone this post until now.  I can pin the cause of my depression down to a moment in time because I have reactionary depression.  That is my depression has been caused by an event that I have reacted to.  There is non-reactionary depression also where the minds chemistry is not balanced correctly (I believe that is the case) and people are just depressed and are not sure why.  So in that circumstance I actually feel lucky to have reactionary depression.  I can't think what it would be like to think that feeling like this is a natural thing.

My depression began on Monday the 21st of April 2003.  This was Easter Monday and I was at home playing Mario Party or something similar with my wife and my two kids, Shanise and Courtney.  The phone rang and I let it go as we were in the middle of a round and I decided to use the caller ID function to call them back after the session.  We were living in Emerald Queensland at the time, a long way away from my family in Tasmania.  I walked out to the kitchen and dialled the *10# number that allows you to retrieve the last number that called you.  It was my mother and I dialled it back.

I heard the receiver lift on the other end and as I was in a jovial mood at the time I made a joke that I knew would make my mother laugh and be shocked.  I said "What the f*&% do you want?".  Unfortunately the next voice I heard was not my mother but someone else.  They asked who this was.

That really knocked the wind out of me and I became worried.  My mother lived alone and would never let some random person pick up the phone.  I explained who I was and my mother came on the phone.  She was distraught and had obviously been in tears.  She asked me to sit down, but I couldn't.  I asked what it was and then she said to me;

"Michael has been killed in a mining accident."

Michael was my only sibling.  My big brother.  Growing up it had always just been my parents and him and I had always thought the world of him.  A lot of who I am is due to Michael and it really felt like I had been hit with a physical blow.

I doubled over.  I could not breathe.  I must have made some kind of wild/feral noise as Nikki came running in to find me.  I was inconsolable.  My mother told me that she had left some rather curt messages on my Father's answering machine (they were separated and he had married again) and I knew I could not let him find out in that way.  To hold myself together I just repeatedly dialled his number until I got him and gave him the news.

Michael is one of those people that everyone loved.  he was mischievous, fun, caring and charismatic.  People could not help but like him and he always was surrounded by a massive amount of friends.  He was always chased by the ladies as well as he was considered quite the catch wherever he went.  I always measured myself against him and I always fell well short in every department.  When he died I quietly repeated a mantra to myself for many months.

"It should have been me."

It is funny in a way as I have since heard a lot about my brother.  I had been away for some time and though we spoke infrequently we were never a family that spoke in depth or personally really about anything.  We would keep our emotional selves in check and talk about other things.  But talking to people that knew Michael it seems he was very much envious of me.  He was envious of my stable relationships and of my intelligence and I am sure if it had of been the other way around it may have been him that thought exactly the same things.

It is eleven years almost since Michael passed away.  He died instantly according to the coroners report and the Doctor that called his death advised that it could have gone the other way and made him a quadriplegic with no ability to communicate with the outside world, which he would have hated more.  You may think that it is ludicrous for myself to be still in depression like this, and I agree with you.  But I can't seem to let it go.  Doctors are happy to get you on medication and I have seen counsellors but none of them say "This is the way to stop feeling bad about this".  They tell me that the medication needs to level me out and then slowly come off it and I will be find.

The medication simply stops me being angry.  I struggle to find happiness in my life and when I do find a place to be happy I normally am disapproved of by one faction or another until the thing I find offers me no enjoyment any more.  I want to break the cycle of depression but I feel I am caught.  Each time I think of Michael it fills me with a deep loneliness and I can conjure up that initial pain of first hearing it as though it were seconds ago.

Michael's death was the trigger but there are other, weirder factors that have me in this depression to do with my family.  I hope to talk about those in my next post.  I think I have put myself through enough for one sitting!  I hope that this post will explain a bit about depression to some people and also reach others that have some similar circumstances and see that it is OK to feel this way and I hope that through my writing that can follow my journey of what I am doing to try and get out of this hole I find myself in.

Thankyou for reading.

Who Am I?

I get the irony a little in writing this post.  But before I go into more of what I want to achieve I want you to know who I am and what I have experienced in my life.  Of course doing that this early means that I run the risk of not many people reading it but it is an important to get this out there so you know why I want to share my point of view.  In fact why I need to share my point of view because at this point in my life (I am a week away from turning 40) I look at the world and it makes me sad.  There are parts of my life that are great, but I can no longer look and say nothing about what I find troubling in the world.  What I hope is that this blog will grow and like minded people will join with me and discuss the points that I make and see what we can do, if anything, to change it.

I was born in Hobart, Tasmania on Saturday the 26th of January almost forty years ago.  I had a Mother and a Father and an older Brother.  I was the last child and that is how my family looked for most of my life.  I was born with anaemia and was a very pale child.  My very first photo upset my extended family so much that my Mother could not show it on the mantle when they came around as they said it was hard to work out where I began and the sheets finished!  Soon after birth though the condition went away and I became normal so to speak.  But what is normal?

My mother, my brother and his daughter Indiannah

My family moved to Burnie, Tasmania before I turned one and for my entire childhood I lived in Burnie or near Burnie.  When I was 4 we moved to a 5 acre farm in Elliott which is 20 kilometres away from Burnie and we spent ten years at that farm.  It was a great place to grow up, and it instilled rural values into me.  So what do I think that means because everyone has a different idea?

1. Community is all about knowing each other and helping out each other
2. You get an understanding of the cycle of life and how things interact to create that cycle
3. You build up a "have a go" attitude where you just try to solve things yourself
4. You build an excellent imagination and a sense of exploration

I went to a small school that took us from Kindergarten right through to Grade 10.  I only went to Grade 6 though and moved on to Burnie High School after that as it offered a better curriculum for me. We stayed in Elliott for 10 years before we moved back into Burnie and I stayed there until I moved out of home to my first job, working for the Australian Government.  I met my wife and travelled about various parts of Australia with my work.  At this time my Mother and Father separated and then we returned to Tasmania after a tragedy. 

This caused me to quit my job and finally take a hard look at what I was doing and change direction.  I went to Uni for around ten years and then took on a new job by happenstance teaching (I did not get an education degree at University, it was a Bachelor of Computing) senior secondary students.  My mother then passed away and I have been 4 years in the job teaching.  And it is at this point in my life that has brought me to writing this blog.

So there you have it, the very brief auto-biography.  There are gaping holes there which I am sure you can plainly see but I will explore them in connection with other things in the future.  Next week, for example, I will explore the tragedy I mentioned which is also the point where I gained my depression.  I will talk about this in relation to my depression and how it has been living with it for now over a decade.

I hope you join me next week, on my 40th birthday to take a look at the next post!

The View From My Window

Hi all.  I hope that some of you are interested enough to start reading my new blog.  This is a much more personal view of my life than my other blog (www.thepathfinderchronicles.com) and I will be using it once a week to make personal comment on the things around me and maybe also giving you all a view of my personal history.  It will also cover details of my progress from  depression and hopefully back to a happy healthy self again.  It is a goal that I want to achieve by the end of this year and one that I have started to work on with some effort in the past weeks.

Me trying to be earnest...

Topics likely to be covered will be;

• My personal history
• The effects of loss and grieving
• Politics and religious views
• Depression
• Programming and technology

There will be no coverage of;

• Specific commentary of Role Playing Games
• Videos of games

I am going to post once a week on Sundays to this blog and I hope that some of my regular readers on the other blog join me and I also bring new readers into the fold in the near future.

Thanks

Mark.