Buzz Kill Zine

Being in a small country town, the only access we had to music was the single record store in town and the local newsagent where I would buy and read music magazines.

I would usually flick through Rolling Stone but it was too mainstream for me at the time (yes, I was obnoxious back then. I'm sorry), I would read the classic rock magazines with the opinion that 'Old Music' is better than new music (I said I'm sorry, ok! I have changed. I promise) but the main magazines I devoured were Kerrang and Metal Hammer, the later being the best value for me because it would include a free CD with each issue and occasionally, on the best days, a DVD filled with new heavy music for me to discover.

The DVD issues were always great because you could watch a huge mix of bands from different genres: Black Metal, Viking metal, Death Metal, Emo/Screamo, which I usually skipped because emo 'wasn't heavy enough' (I should've just done a blanket apology at the start for most of my highschool opinions), and would include live tracks, interviews and music videos.

I forget which specific issue it was but I was working my way through the DVD one day, skipped past a couple of emo songs and then onto the screen of my very old television came this image...

At first I thought it was going to be some black metal band, in Corpse paint, holding some satanic sermon. The song was called Burning Beard by a band called Clutch. That didn't sound heavy. I might skip it. But then, the band appeared...

Clutch? Who's that?

Who were these bunch of Dads?

Then, the there was lyrics...

Every day, I wake up we drink a lot of coffee and watch the CNN

Every day, I wake up to a bowl of clover honey and let the locusts fly in

What? And what the hell was this time signature they were playing in?

Every time I look out my window same three dogs looking back at me

Every time I open my windows cranes fly in to terrorize me

I was puzzled. This band that looked like a bunch of men who got together on the weekend to play a set of covers at the local pub were playing the most exciting thing I had heard since I started buying Metal Hammer. They didn't wear chains, didn't have long hair, weren't screaming, didn't have wild guitar solos... they just fucken rocked. Hard.

The lyrics are still some of the best bits of weird poetry with hidden layers and meanings that I've heard.

Swan diving off the tongues of crippled giants

Okkam's razor makes the cutting clean

I was hooked and had to find out more.

I bought the album Robot Hives, then went back and got Blast Tyrant. Then over the years, Clutch have become one of my favourite bands.

They pulled me out of so many shitty preconceptions I had about music, people and life in general.

Oh this burning beard I have come undone

It's just as I've feared, I have, I have come undone

A decade or so after first hearing them, while hosting my community radio show, I played a Clutch song. The text line lit up with people asking 'who is this? It's great!'. These listeners would then fall in love with the band the same way I did.

I guess the moral of this story is to not judge books by their cover. Enjoy the stuff you like, even if it's not what you have painstakingly engineered your entire personality around. Admit that it's ok to like different things and that your opinion on music is subjective and can also be flat out wrong.

Hey. It's me again, with another apology for being slack and unorganised.

I've been pretty busy and trying to not get burnt out with stuff so I had popped writing further down on my priority list. In doing that I had also become infrequent with my journalling which was bad. But I have since rectified that and am now prioritising this.

My girlfriend and I celebrated 11 years together yesterday. It was very nice. We got sushi and went op shopping. That was a good celebration for us.

Picked up a few cool things, but mainly it was just super nice to spend the day together, without having too much planned.

I purchased another typewriter but this one was more of a bucket list item. I have been on the hunt for a good, full sized desk typewriter for a while and this one fits the bill. Now I just need to make the time to use it.

I have a list of things to write about but I figure writing something like this is better than procrastinating and not anything at all. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But this is something at least.

Anyways.

I have been extra slack on the writing the last couple of weeks but I've needed a break from thinking about doing stuff. Work has been getting busier and I've been looking after my Mum who's had a knee operation. I've also been playing a lot of Tears Of The Kingdom.

I've been having just as much fun playing TOTK as I had playing Breath Of The Wild. I was still playing it up until the week the new one was released. My girlfriend got me a Switch for Christmas whatever year they came out and I got BOTW and Super Mario Odessy. I love the Switch. It's such a great console. I rarely play it docked, for me it's just a big gameboy that doesn't fit in my pocket. I know there's people who will complain about the power of the console compared to a PS5 or whatever number and letter combination XBox they're up to now but I don't really care. If something is fun I'll enjoy it. I hold the same standards for movies, TV and music. If I enjoy it then it's done it's job. I mean isn't that why art exists? For people to enjoy it?

When I say enjoy I mean the experience of it. I enjoy watching gorey movies. I don't 'enjoy' the thought of people being killed but I enjoy the movie. The definition of enjoy is pretty malleable in my mind.

Even when I'm fighting bosses and dying multiple times I am enjoying it so that's good.

Anyways, I'm going to scroll my camera roll for an unrelated image that you can hopefully enjoy on some level.

I thought that I had experienced a pretty stock standard week, no real massive developments. Then I realise of hang on... something DID happen to me.

So, on Saturday night, I was at my girlfriends ex co-wokers place as they were celebrating the fact that the ex co-worker was becoming an ex-worker for the company that my girlfriend is also an ex-employee of.

Things were going fine, I was being social but also had a puppy asleep on my nap (let's face it, all socialising should involve sleepy lap pups) and it was getting towards the end of the night and I received a text from my Mum. She was heading off to bed but was letting the fire go out cos she was a bit worried that she could smell burning wood, that wasn't the wood in the fireplace but possibly from the new chimney.

Now a quick bit of back story here. We had a new fireplace installed at the start of the year. We had to stop using the old one a few years ago because we had issues with the chimney. Similar issues that we had waaay back when I was a kid and we had a fire in the roof. It was all fine in the end and we were very lucky but the fact that we had found slowly smouldering insulation and wood in the roof a few years ago meant that we weren't going to risk another roof fire, so we flat out stopped using a fireplace and couldnt afford to replace it. This meant we had a few cold winters, with the whole house heated, just from one of those portable oil heater radiator things that took the harsh chill off the room but was never really 'warm' so to speak. As a result of the childhood roof fire we also installed a fire alarm in the roof, and would need the 6 monthly battery change and meant I would need to get up in the cramped roof space to do the battery change.

So, cut back to Saturday night, I get the text, decide to zip home (5 minutes up the road) and have a squizz for my own piece of mind.

I get home, get out the ladder, climb up into the manhole and lift myself into the roof. This is something I have done countless times throughout the years, zero problems.

This time however... I managed to somehow slip and put my entire leg straight through the plaster and rip a huge hole in the roof. I manage to only slightly graze my leg that punched the hole but pulled a muscle in the other leg. All things considered, it could've been way worse. I managed to save myself from falling all the way through and also somehow avoiding colliding with the wiring that runs straight along the board I slipped off.

Here are a few photos of the hole and my very professional job of gaffa taping it back up.

I'll eventually have to get the hole fixed but I'll have to deal with the avant guard art installation that's on the roof now.

Oh, and the fireplace was fine. Nothing to worry about.

My girlfriend and I went 10 pin bowling yesterday. I go bowling, maybe once or twice a year. I'm inexplicably good at it. I don't know why. I have zero sporting prowess in any other aspect of my life but bowling is something I'm somehow weirdly good. Not like bowling a 300 every game but I think I'm pretty good for someone who only plays, like, a grand total of 20 minutes a year bowling?

Bowling is a pretty social thing. As a kid i went to a couple of 10 pin bowling birthday parties, I went bowling one time for end of year activities in maybe year 10 and, I was not very good at it.

Then, one day, I hadn't been bowling in maybe 3 or 4 years, I went bowling either a group of friends and bowled 5 strikes in a row first up. Last year, the community radio station I volunteer at won the charity fundraising bowling competition. And yesterday, I got 5 strikes and a bunch of spares. It was actually embarrassing to have to keep turning around after knocking the pins down because I don't know how I was doing it. If I had practiced, had good technique, strategy etc then it would be different but I was literally just chucking a ball down the lane.

I don't brag about things, particularly sport things, but I'm somehow just pretty good at bowling all of a sudden. I'm not going to join a competition league or anything. I prefer it to just be some random thing that I can be pretty ok at cos there isn't many things i can say that about. Hell, even writing this may jinx it for me.

But at the end of the day it was a fun thing to do, which I need to do more of.

I also purchased another typewriter or a hunch. It's an Olympia Splendid 66 from 1968 and.... it is in script typeface! I got pretty lucky with it. I saw it on marketplace and noticed it had a '1' key. Normally portables will negate this key and you have to use a lower case L instead. But I took a chance and it paid off. I'll try and write next weeks post on that so you can see how fancy it looks.

Here's a picture of it.

I didn't get a chance to write yesterday because I went and saw Regurgitator which was great fun. Drove a couple of hours to the big city to see them (the downside of living outside of a big city is you have to travel there to go to fun stuff) but when we arrived I wasn't sure of the venues policy on bags. So I just took the essentials in my pockets (wallet, phone, keys, earplugs, mints, sanitiser and mask) and went and watched the show. But it made me think about what I carry around all the time in my bag.

So, here is a 'what's in my bag / every day carry / things I haul around every day and then wonder why my bag is always heavy' post.

First of all the main bit of what I carry is my life stuff.

This is a little pouch thing for my pens. This attaches to the cover of my journal, which is only a week old at this point. I like to put a different sticker on the front so I can tell which is the front easily (currently a Resignators Sticker, great band, check em out) and also it gives my brain a rough timeline of what I journal from what sticker was on the front.

I have a travel journal which I'm currently using to put ideas for stuff in. Just little notes, bits, quotes, sentences, story ideas, random words that I like and whatever else. I am using the pens and pecils for that stuff, which get stored inside.

There is then a 2023 diary to attempt to keep myself organised, or at least know what I'm going to be late for.

Then there's the other stuff in the main bit of the bag. Normally whatever books I'm currently reading, my Switch and DS. This is my entertainment. Currently halfway through the Mark Lanegan autobiography, and have Giovannis Room there in case I want to read something else. I normally have multiple books on the go at once because my brain won't let me focus on one thing for too long. I've already been up and down 3 times while trying to write this post.

This is the stuff that's in the two pockets on my bag. Phone charger, headphones, pocket knife (I use it to cut open cardboard boxes at work), a comb that looks like a flick knife (actually very practical because my previous plastic pocket combs get broken and this is a handy way to keep it clean and safe. Plus it has a bottle opener), a mask, some spare pocket notebooks, spare pens, earplugs and some lip balm, paw paw stuff and a Vicks Inhaler. Oh and some mints of some kind.

This is the stuff I carry on me in my pockets. Wallet, keys on a chain cos without the chain I'm always fucking losing them, notebook and pen, watch/fitness tracker and a phone that isn't pictured because it's doing the picturing.

And finally

The bag. This one is from @ironfoxtypewriters It's actually big enough to hold a small portable typewriter and I do use it for that as well. I just leave my switch, ds and books at home so they don't distract me.

So yeah. That's what I carry around all the time.

I seem to write a lot about stuff that happened when I was a kid. And at the risk of being compared to an elderly relative who only ever talks about the good old days, I'm gonna do that again now. Except the good old days I'm referring to isn't reminiscing about how we used to not let people of colour drink from the Whites Only water tap.

When I was a kid in the 90s (which my brother, who is a teacher, told me that they teach to kids as 'history' now), we grew up pretty poor. We were lucky in that we always had a roof over our heads and never went hungry, but we never had the same stuff as other kids. No game consoles, no fancy new bikes, no super duper toys or whatever and also no Pay TV.

I look back now and we had a pretty simple childhood I enjoyed the simple things in life. Mucking around and Children's television.

This is sorta a story about stuff I watched as a kid.

In Australia I think you had Foxtel and Austar. There were others but they don't play into this story. The point is, that we only had Free to Air TV, which at the time only consisted of 5 channels. There was the commercial channels: Prime (Nothing to do with amazon, it was the country version of Channel 7), WIN (or 9 if you lived in the city), Channel 10, then there was SBS (the multicultural/multilingual channel which had news in tonnes of different languages and late night foreign films which, if you were lucky, had nudity in them... but that's another story) then you had the ABC which is the government owned public broadcaster, and had National News, BBC cop shows, educational programs during the day and most importantly after school, cartoons.

Now we were mainly 'outside kids' and we grew up on a small farm so after school I'd basically, get home, change out of my school uniform, then go ride my bike around for hours until it got dark then would go inside for tea.

I'm aware that this sounds like a childhood from the 1940s but it was what we had and it was good.

Anyways, point is we weren't the kind of kids who'd get home then plonk themselves in front of the 'idiot box' and watch 'mindless drivel' until bed. At least, not at this stage.

But as I got a bit older, into grade 4 onwards, we were allowed to watch some more TV shows. (I say 'allowed' but to be clear we were never 'not allowed' really. I just preferred fanging around on my bike to watching TV, that's all)

My favourite shows as a kid were stuff like the Adventures of Tin Tin, Captain Planet, the X-Men cartoons, Batman (The grey and black suit one) and Spiderman.

I also loved watching old Waner Brisbane cartoons and even Marx Brothers and Ma and Park Kettle films that Mum had taped from the TV. At some stage they started replaying Thunderbirds at like 6am on a Saturday morning maybe? Coulda been a Sunday. It was early but I would set my alarm and get up and watch it. They also used to play the American Who's Line Is It Anyways before it at 5.30 and I eventually started getting up even earlier to watch that as well.

I remember when Daria first aired cos I watched the shit out of it. It felt different to everything else I watched. It was funny and felt more real. It sometimes had a warning at at top of the episode cos it was PG and then JJJ host Rosie Beaton would come on and tell you to get Mum or Dads permission to watch it. Great stuff.

The PG rated shows were always for the cool kids. Like Heartbreak High, Degassing and shit. It felt so grown up.

I remember the first PG movie I ever saw: The Karate Kid. It was coming up as rhe Saturday movie on TV. I don't know why martial arts were huge in the early 90s but they were. I begged mum to watch it when it was gonna be on because I knew all my friends were going to watch it and I had to watch it otherwise I wouldn't be cool. We didn't watch much M rated stuff as kids certainly no MA or R ratings. Other kids would watch Die Hard and stuff but I was way more into George of the Jungle. We were sheltered a bit in that way but I kinda didn't mind because I remember seeing an episode of the X-Files with a killer doll and it scared the ever loving fuck out of me and I couldn't walk passed my sisters doll filled room without tensing every muscle for maybe a year. If I had have seen half the shit my friends watched my brain would've broken.

It's broken now but that's just because of life.

The first regular PG watch was The Adventures of Hercules starring Kevin Sorbo. Xena was way cooler (and still is) but I only got to watch it occasionally cos it was rated M.

The first MA film I watched was Scary Movie. I was in grade 5 or 6 and my brother got to rent it out cos he was 2 years older than me. I couldn't wait to go to school the next day and tell my friends about it.

The thing about not seeing adult stuff until later is, at the time I felt like I was missing out a bit. But in hindsight it's actually good. I mean I wouldn't have been able to see the subtle nuanced humour of Robocop or understood the levels of something like Fight Club as a kid. Hell, I know adults who don't understand that stuff now.

Now as a 32 year old, I watch some insanely gorey and disgusting horror movies. Stuff I would've been terrified of as a kid. But I think that all the early stuff I watched has led to where I am. But that's just how life is in general. Your early experiences inform your future stuff. I still love the Marx Brothers and still love Daria and Thunderbirds. I also now enjoy watching films where people are sewn arse to mouth or have limbs cut off with electric bread knives. That's how personal growth works. I guess. 

Last weekend my girlfriends brother helped me put new speakers in my car. The rear speakers have been blown since I purchased it second-hand over 12 months ago. Its an old car and it was owned by an old couple and they probably only ever listened to AM radio in it so had no idea they were blown out.

On a side note: AM radio is such a funny medium to still be around. If you've ever driven near powerlines while listening to AM radio, some sort of weird science fiction, dubstep, static, floats over the top of the old people calling in to answer a quiz or be casually racist.

I've always liked listening to music in a car. It's like a special sound cocoon. There's something warm a snuggly about listening to something way too loud in the car that you don't get anywhere else. I love solo road trips for this reason. Even just driving an hour or so down the road to the nearest city, is an hour where I can listen to music unreasonably loud.

I still pride myself on being able to put together great driving playlists. When I was a kid I would put together mix tapes for drives with Dad who had a cassette player in his car. When I got a bit older and Mum had a car with a CD player I remember waiting for her to go into the supermarket, so I could play my music in the car really loudly. On a couple of occasions I ran the car battery flat doing this. But Mum has a habit of stopping to talk to everyone in there so it's a 50/50 who's to blame I reckon.

But when you finally get old enough to get your own licence and car, there's few things in life better them cruising down the highway with music blasting. Songs hit you differently.

I remember once pulling over to the side of the road with my girlfriend because a cow was giving birth right next to the fence near the road. Bitter-sweet Symphony by The Verve was playing and there was something about the beautiful day, the new life and the sing that just connected perfectly with how I was feeling.

I also remember driving back from an event, again with my girlfriend, and she was singing along to and giving a full blown performance of songs from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack. We were both laughing hysterically. Right up until I missed a temporary speed sign to indicate roadworks and got pulled over by the cops. I was going about 87ish in and 80 zone. I had already slowed down a bit luckily. But it was a long weekend and there was no roadworks to be seen. There's a whole other story there for another time. Incidentally, in the end, the stero was about the only thing that worked properly in that car. RIP.

I've been journalling a lot, thanks to getting a fountain pen and it making me actually want to write. I've also been flat out at work. We're even more short staffed than normal, and it's been getting more hectic so that's been draining my creativity, ability to find time to write and general enthusiasm for everything, but I'm making some changes and working on my typewriters more which is also encouraging me to write some more. I picked up a Canon Typestar 10-ii which is an electronic typewriter that prints using thermal ink, like a receipt printer, so it's virtually silent which means I can write late at night without waking people and it's super portable and runs on batteries so I can literally use it anywhere. And it prints super clearly so it'll be easy to take photos of what I write to put up on here.

Anyways, I'm working super hard on getting some more stuff written and will be getting back to regular blogs, stories and whatnot very, very soon.

In the meantime enjoy this photo of the aforementioned journal, fountain pen and typewriter.

He's incredibly cute and small and last night we got to have a trial sleepover with him before he comes home for good in a couple of weeks. He slept pretty well for his first night away from home and only grumbled and whined a few times but was very easy to get back to bed.

I have had a few dogs over the years. Flick was my first and was a Border Collie/Kelpie cross who wasa bit much for me to handle but was great, then I got Scribble who was a Jack Russell and was so nice and quiet but for the last few years I've just had Socks and Brian, my two cats.

I'm pretty excited to have a new puppy. Especially one as cute as Pickles is.

So yesterday was the 1st of January 2023.

I already shanked my New Years Resolution to 'be more organised' and 'write more' but being too unorganised to write a blog post yesterday.

That and I spent about 5 hours playing Sonic Frontiers.

Anyways. I plan on doing a bunch of stuff this year and, touch wood, I may actually do it this year. It's amazing how much more productive one can be when not struggling with crippling depression and anxiety. Who woulda thunk?

I am going to be making some zines, and attending the Zine Fair in Melbourne. Whether as a stall holder or a punter the zines and attending the zine fair are going to happen. I have already organised my leave at work. It looks like I'll be using a bunch of it up early this year to attend fashionable events (go to gigs and shit) and I'm keenish to see some live music again. Keen for the music, ish for the crowds of people but we'll see how I go. I'm too old for the pit but I'm moving into my 'stand in one spot and watch the band with a lemon lime and bitters' phase. Not 'stand up the back' though. I'm not there yet.

So basically this is just a quick message to anyone who has read or even onjoyed my stuff this year. Thanks for that. Feel free to give any of it a share if you reckon it's alright. I'm doing this cos it's fun and working on the theory of if more people see it it is fun.

So yesterday was the 1st of January 2023.

I already shanked my New Years Resolution to 'be more organised' and 'write more' but being too unorganised to write a blog post yesterday.

That and I spent about 5 hours playing Sonic Frontiers.

Anyways. I plan on doing a bunch of stuff this year and, touch wood, I may actually do it this year. It's amazing how much more productive one can be when not struggling with crippling depression and anxiety. Who woulda thunk?

I am going to be making some zines, and attending the Zine Fair in Melbourne. Whether as a stall holder or a punter the zines and attending the zine fair are going to happen. I have already organised my leave at work. It looks like I'll be using a bunch of it up early this year to attend fashionable events (go to gigs and shit) and I'm keenish to see some live music again. Keen for the music, ish for the crowds of people but we'll see how I go. I'm too old for the pit but I'm moving into my 'stand in one spot and watch the band with a lemon lime and bitters' phase. Not 'stand up the back' though. I'm not there yet.

So basically this is just a quick message to anyone who has read or even onjoyed my stuff this year. Thanks for that. Feel free to give any of it a share if you reckon it's alright. I'm doing this cos it's fun and working on the theory of if more people see it it is fun.

Two weeks behind on my weekly blog but I have been busy doing the lighting for my local theatre group. They did a few one act plays which were fun.

I have been involved with the local theatre group for ages. Maybe 2008? I first got involved in the lighting for work experience with my RMIT course. It was a play that one of the local people had written, and it was aimed for more of a youth cast. After that, I did the lighting for Enchanted April, then Robin Hood, Our Town, then I think the one fter that was Tartuffe, which I acted in.

That was a big thing for me. It sounds wanky to say 'I was hand picked by the director' but the director was a good guy and wanted me to have a go at acting. It was only a small part and basically had 3 scenes where I barged in super angry, yelled my chunks of lines, then left in a huff. Then, after that, I did a bit more acting in Murdered to Death, which was heaps of fun. I basically got to fuck around and act like an idiot on stage. Lots of unsubtle, big physical humour stuff, which I really enjoyed. The director of that play let me really ham it up and improvise bits. Then I did a couple of short plays, then wrote a radio play, which was something very new. Having someone read out my dumb ideas on stage was daunting and exciting. You always have an idea of how it's meant to be in your head but then it takes on its own form when other people get involved which is really cool to see the all pan out.

I have a couple more play ideas that I need to finish, or start, writing. It's great to have a local theatre group. This one turns 80 next year. That's a good effort.

Highly recommend getting involved in your local theatre group. You get to do a bit of everything. I've done; lighting, sound, backstage, acting, stage managing, and tonnes of other stuff.

I made a list of mg favourite movies from each year I've been alive on letterboxd.

It's pretty horror heavy but a lot of my honourable mentions are a bit lighter in tone.

So we had a very fun Haunted House fund-raiser for Halloween and then my girlfriend and I got to see Five or 5ive if you use the late 90s spelling.

For those that don't remember or were likely not even born back then, 5ive were a boy band. If you were a boy band in the 90s that was pretty much the coolest version of a band you could be in. Or the least cool if you were a kid like me who thought Nu-Metal was the coolest band you could be in. They were the polar opposites of what bands could be. Backstreet Boys, 5ive, N*Sync vs Korn, Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit. As I said I was in Primary School at the time and thought Nu-Metal was the best and only form of entertainment and if you listened to pop music you were a loser.

But..... secretly..... I liked some pop songs.... Everybody (Backstreets Back) - Backstreet Boys, If Ya Gettin Down - Five and a bunch of other pop songs in the 90s were great! They still are. I was just too much of a loser at the time to admit that they were good.

So yeah. 5ive and S2S (an Australian sister/pop duo) were both great.

Made a weekend of it and watched Smile as well which was excellent.

Unfortunately my gf got the spicy cough but we're both vaxxed and she's doing ok and I haven't caught it this time around.

So yeah, pop on a mask while you're out and let's reign this thing in before Christmas for the sake of everyone and kick back and enjoy some 90s nostalgia.