Daydreams

Today I was eating a banana and daydreaming on the tram on my way down to lunch with a bunch of comedians. I had already finished my first banana and chucked the peel in the bin before I got on the tram, but I was about to be faced with the problem of what to do with the second peel: there are no bins on the tram, and it was looking like a solid ten minute wait between my projected banana finish-time and my stop, where I could get out and find a bin. Ten minutes holding a banana peel? Pffft... not likely, so I thought about throwing it out the window.

The tram coasted past the police station on the corner of Church St and Bridge Rd and I imagined throwing the peel out the half-open window and it landing on the bonnet of one of the three police cruisers parked on the side of the road. Glorious, I could see it there. To throw it out of the window accurately and make sure it landed on the car I would probably have had to stand up, turn around and aim my throw carefully, but if I did it deliberately then I'd run the risk of someone seeing – it was broad daylight and the tram was stopping at the lights and opening its doors. If someone – a police officer maybe? – saw me throw the peel intentionally onto their shiny police car, then I'd be in trouble. They probably couldn't pin me with much, maybe a fine for littering or at worst some trumped-up vandalism charge, but regardless, I don't need that right now. The fine for littering is probably over a hundred dollars, and I need to pay rent god DAMN it.

I imagined the police officer, just walking out to his car after grabbing a coffee or whatever police do in the station, when he sees a young, dark-haired, olive-skinned youth wearing a red Adidas jacket intentionally throw a banana peel out of a tram window at his vehicle. He would yell, “OI!”, drop his coffee on the ground and give chase. “Stop the tram! OI! YOU!”
At this point I'd be sitting in the tram, fretting and trying to think of how to get out of my fine, the cute couple sitting across from me would be smirking at me, having seen what I'd done, and now knowing they were about to see me get caught. I would run up to the front of the tram and beg the tram driver to keep going; “Pretend you didn't hear him! Please dude, just go!”

And he probably would go, because he's cool. He doesn't like cops either, and it's perfectly plausible that he didn't see or hear the police officer, who is now just an angry, but receding figure in his side-mirror, yell 'stop'. After another couple stops though, the tram driver would tell me that I had to get out, I couldn't stay in the tram – he'd be remembering his responsibility here, plus what if the cop called in another car to intercept the tram? He wouldn't want to get involved in this thing. But all the while I'd be reassuring myself that it was only a banana on a police car – how could he possibly care that much about a little, frivolous act of trivial civil disobedience. I'm sure police get that shit all the time...

I get out of the tram, and wonder where I'm going to walk now, because I still need to get to lunch, but before I can really do anything I hear more shouting, and see the angry, yelling figure running up the slight hill on Church St. Running right towards me. WHAT THE FUCK?! Overzealous motherfucker... so I run. Bolt down a side street and into the suburbs, but I know he saw where I was running, so I know I have to get away. I need to hide somewhere, I need to blend in. I stumble upon a sunny park at the end of the street with a playground and two single mums playing with their kids. Some guy in skins is doing laps of the oval before lunch and a girl is sitting on the hill reading a book with the midday sun on her back. I run, panting, up to her and sit down, still looking over my shoulder.
“We've been talking all morning.” I try to run her through my alibi.
“What? Who are you?
“It doesn't matter, look, we've been talking all morning, okay? I've been here with you all morning.”
The shouting comes from behind us and the cop charges over the little hill and runs down it, straight at me and dives, arms out and face red with fury. Tackle. He lands on top of me and we both go flying a good couple metres along the grass before he pins me to the ground and shouts something about a little prick. My ribs feel broken, I can't move, everything hurts.
“What the fuck?!” the girl jumps up and screams, looking accusingly at the officer.
“This young man is under arrest for wilfully vandalising police property! THE CHASE IS OVER BUD!”
“What chase, what are you talking about? We've been sitting here all morning!” She sticks to the script perfectly, and at that precise moment, I fall in love.

During the lengthy court proceedings that draw out over many long and arduous months, I learn her name, and her birthday, and her likes and dislikes and all her favourite things as we fight in the halls of justice against police brutality. I even remember the colour of her eyes: green. She is my witness and with her help I win a victory worth millions in compensation for the injuries I sustained, I was an innocent bystander randomly attacked by a deranged agent of the law. My injuries keep me from work and I lay a spurious claim to a life-long disability pension. Me and my beautiful witness kiss outside the courtroom, and then go off to spend our millions on eating, drinking, and being merry. I propose to her in the park where we met and for the rest of our lives we are happy, and in love.

I imagine this all, while I am sitting on the tram holding the now-finished banana peel in my hand. I imagine it, but it never happens, because I am way too scared of getting caught and fined for littering. Instead the peel goes under the seat, and I brush my hands clean, before pulling out my notebook and writing the story I am not yet brave enough to live.

Peace, Taco.

Paying Fines is Shithouse

There is something that instinctively irks me about bureaucratic hoop-jumping. Centrelink, taxes, court dates, fines, rent, uni enrolment; it all seems so over-complicated and every time one of these makes an appearance in my life I find myself walking down the streets muttering swear-words and sulking. Today, this happened.

A month and a half ago I was the unhappy recipient of a fine from the transport people, whatever they like to call themselves, for resting my feet on the seat of a train as I made my way out to Footscray to hit up a comedy gig. I gave them my ID (SA Driver's License) with my Adelaide address on it, and the conductors explained to me that if I just contested the fine as soon as it arrived then everything would be sweet and I'd be let off with a warning. That all seemed well and good at the time, but when Mum Dawgz called me the other day to let me know that my fine for two-hundred and seven Australian Currency Units had arrived, I shuddered with bilious anger at the fresh realisation of the exercise in futility that I was about to embark on – I was shaken from my peace.

I trudged into town, infringement notice in hand, to fix this shitiness – I am not paying a two-hundred and seven dollar fine for putting my feet on a fucking chair, this is the future and I REFUSE to be needlessly oppressed. First stop library: I went in to print my carefully worded letter at the library as my home, inhabited as it is by four young drifters, each in varying stages of emotional decay, does not have a printer. The letter contained phrases like: “to whom it may concern”, “excused having regard to exceptional circumstances”, and the always convincing, “I apologise for any inconvenience and I hope that this matter can be brought to a satisfactory close.” Filthy grovelling, really. I felt dirty, I still feel dirty in fact. I wrote those things, and I can't un-write them now... also I forgot the data cable to connect my phone to the printer, so things weren't looking up.

After obtaining a library printing card, putting a dollar of credit on it, re-typing the letter in notepad in a font that resembled a Soviet military dossier, and printing the thing off, I asked how to work the scanner. “Sorry, you can't scan straight to the photocopier, you have to scan to a USB and then print a copy from that.”
“Why?”
“That's just how it is.”
That's just how it is dude, just leave it – my internal monologue, always the voice of reason – that's just how they do things here. Just let it go... twitch... shudder... *%### … ok, so I left the library and went around the corner to Officeworks where I got another printing card, onto which I put another dollar, and printed off a scanned copy of my drivers license (my excuse for contesting the fine is “I'm from Adelaide, and I didn't know that 'feet-on-seats' was an offense here”... details, details). Armed with my two pieces of contesting evidence, I walked with purpose to the post office, arms swinging, eyes burning, and coins jangling in pocket.

After making it to the post office, past the big red sign hanging on the corner of Little Bourke and Elizabeth that says 'Shopping as Usual' (I could vomit a lake of dark sludge and still not be purged of my deep hatred for this consumerist placard, but that's neither here nor there is it) I wrote the address on a postage-paid envelope and sealed my letter within. I considered not paying for the envelope, but then I thought that maybe when you pay for the envelope they put some special stamp on it which validates it – what if I don't pay? My thingy won't reach the place this will all have been for naught!! – so I paid, because I'm a pussy. Turns out I was right, they do stamp it. Crime doesn't pay kids, stay in school.

I flushed it down the chute of the red mailbox after performing one last OCD-check and then it was gone. Finished. Now begins the extended waiting period while my appeal is processed and re-processed through the dripping annals of the machine before being rubber-stamped by some hooded beetle-man behind a desk in the Transport Department. Hopefully my name will be cleared and I will be merrily released from debt. I guess if I do eventually escape a two-hundred and seven dollar fine then all that running around and frustration at having to deal with the mind-numbing inefficiency of a system where appeals have to be submitted in written form and reasons are called 'excusory clauses' and and every telephone is answered by the same machine... if I get to keep my money then all of this hoop-jumping will have been worth it. I can't help being angry though, even though, if we're honest, it's my fault for not following the rules. What's so fucking precious about those train seats anyway?

Peace, Taco.

A Non-Racial Tram Ride (AKA How I escaped $380 worth of fines and danced the happy dance)

The most private times for me have always been on public transport. Or when I'm walking between the station and the destination – time spent in transit for me has always been when I get most of my serious thinking done, so stepping onto the tram is about as close as I get to going to a therapist. The sessions last as long as it takes me to get from A to B, and even then they are sometimes drowned out by music. If the song of the day is struggling to hold my attention though, or if I have made a conscious decision to allow my thoughts to bubble up in front of me today so that I can stand face-to-face with whatever I think might be on my mind, then public transport is the place where the thinking gets done. Public transport is my special place, and when I ride, I don't like to talk to anyone.

Yesterday I was sitting on a late night tram on my way home from a comedy show. I was listening to Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and enjoying the seats on Melbourne public transport that, unlike those of Adelaide trams – which I have always contended bare a closer resemblance to rocks with a thin layer of algae than to seats of the sitting variety – are actually comfortable and possess a generous a softness. I had my feet on the seat in front of me (the seats are arranged in booths so that a pair faces another pair and then backs onto the ones behind it and... fuck it you all know how chairs work) and was nodding my head to Mr West's magnum opus when the doors opened and two transit cops came on: a heavy set black dude whose eyes I would soon discover had a scarily large pupil to white-bit ratio (the white bit was clearly winning), and another guy with a ticket scanning machine whose race remains unknown.

I didn't notice them at first, although old mate white-eyes sat across from me and, seeing him in my peripheral vision, I politely removed my feet from the chair that he clearly intended to sit on. As I removed my feet though he continued to stare at me, as if expecting some further grace or acknowledgement of his entrance into the tram – I had no idea that he was a transit cop at this point and so I searchingly removed an ear phone and asked him in a cool, young-person way, “what's up man?” He then pulled out his big boy badge from under his coat and the penny dropped in my mind, “you're fucked dude, you do not have a ticket WHATSOEVER... NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT... here comes the shit”. I pulled out the other earphone (from memory, I took the right one out first) and heard him say something about a two-hundred dollar fine for having my feet on the seats. “GOD DAMN IT MOTHERFUCKER,” I thought to myself, “not only am I going to get completely James Blunted for not having my ticket, but I'm going to cop another fine for having my feet on the fucking chair... Jesus Christ this is the end, drink the Kool Aid now dude, let's have it over with.” I gave him my ID when he asked for it, and apologised in a regretful, defeated mutter, resigned to my fate and considering the ramifications this would have for my living situation. The fines together would total three-hundred and eighty dollars. Gobble, gobble, gobble mother fucker. Gobble, gobble, gobble.

As the indiscriminate race man (who is described thusly not because I took a good look at him and noticed a distinct racial ambiguity in his physical appearance, but precisely because I only got to notice him out of the corner of my eye, and race just seemed to be the order of the day for describing people with Samuel L. Wackson sitting across from me) paced down the aisle scanning people's tickets with his truth-telling machine I felt my bowels move, and then brace for the final evacuation. He had skipped me because I was talking to the glassy-eyed bear who was probably looking forward to using my limp body as a puppet once this was all over with, but I was sure that my fare evasion would come to light in due course. As my mind was busy making sums and my eyes were trying to avoid making contact with the decider with the fare-evasion-testing-kit so as to delay the eventual truth-telling, I heard something impossible. An insane sound made its way, first into my ears, then slowly through the side of my head and finally squeezing into my brain like a tube of toothpaste... “IIIIIIIIIIII'lllllllll juuuuuuuuuussssssstttttttttzzzzzzz lleeeeeeeeeehhhhhttttk yyyooouuuuu offfff wwwiith a warning this time.” The world snapped out of slow motion and the stern face belonging to the man with the tiny pupils sat in front of me, fully in focus. “People have to sit on these seats you know, think about it.” I heard myself saying, “sorry, yeah that's cool,” and behind my face some unnamed part of me was writhing and contorting in sheer horror at the situation that had just presented itself. The ticket guy was at the other end of the tram at this point and my hulking one-time foe had just gifted me what was most surely a chance at the most beautiful and timely escapes ever in the history of escaping since the time when people first thought up simple traps to catch birds, and a particularly crafty pigeon said, “fuck this, it's my kid's birthday tomorrow.”

So I jumped up as soon as I had calculated the optimal time of exit (quick note: it was RIGHT FUCKING NOW) and as luck would have it the tram was at a stop and the doors were already open. They closed just as I jumped out of the tram and even though I was still three blocks before my stop I turned down the nearest street to get off of Collins and make it look like that really was the stop I had meant to get off at. I don't know why I put on that little show for those two guys – to be honest, it was more for my racial friend than the other guy who I never had the chance to be introduced to – but one the tram was a fair way down the street I doubled back, and before turning my music back on I let fly a victorious scream. “FUCK YES, SUCK MY DICK MELBOURNE”. The kind of scream that I imagine all young travellers would release in such moments of pure relieved ecstasy. I am still undecided on whether I agree with the feet-on-seats rule over here... I sure as hell don't agree with it on the Adelaide trams, or even the trains, because the seats back home are only marginally better than sitting on the floor, and that margin is not significant enough to be worthwhile protecting from the two grains of sand or droplets of moisture on the bottom of my shoe. Over here though the seats are nice, squishy, soft, comfortable, friendly... they even look like they might just have souls.

I don't know about completely abstaining from resting my feet on those badboys, I mean a man's gotta have his man-space and I think we all know that public transport thinking is best performed in as close to horizontal orientation as can be practicably achieved at the time. But from now on, I think I might at least survey the chair to see if it's one of the nice ones before wacking my ole' size eight-and-a-halfs down on them. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.

Peace, Taco.