Reasons to Be Cheerful
‘How ’bout that oil slick?’ I said to the man who was noisily extruding me a cup of coffee at six-thirty in the morning. ‘What oil slick?’ he replied. ‘You haven’t seen this?’ I said, holding up his café’s already dishevelled complimentary paper. ‘Stopped reading it three weeks ago,’ he answered, explaining that he’d decided to give himself a break from all the Gloom and Doom by not reading the papers or watching the news for a full month. The man knew nothing of any hike in interest rates, failed terrorist attack, giant plume of volcanic ash or allegedly tasteless remark about Bindi Irwin.
I’ve heard this idea before: administering a kind of mental colonic by sequestering yourself from the flow of current events for a spell. I can’t manage it myself. After a couple of days, I start to feel antsy and disconnected and, besides, I need to know what’s going on in order to waste vast amounts of time composing snarky Tweets and coming up with half-baked ideas for this column.
Instead, as a counterweight to the endless, creeping lava of ‘G & D’ that threatens to engulf us all like so many mixed metaphors, I like to make daily additions to a long list of tiny things that somehow make me feel as though everything’s going to be fine. Don’t worry, I’m not going all Tuesdays with Morrie on you; I’m well aware that everything isn’t going to be fine and that we’ll all soon be regarding Mad Max 2 as a prescient documentary (save for the bits with Mike Preston). And I’m not talking about the kind of list that Woody Allen reels off at the end of Manhattan, full of Beethovens and Sidney Bechets and someone’s fucking smile. I’m talking about the really small things that never fail to put a skip in my step, or would do if I felt that were something I could pull off without looking like a goose.
Things like…
The feeling of satisfaction you experience when piercing with a breadknife the taut paper seal that stretches across the top of a jar of instant coffee. As a card-carrying Melbourne snob, I haven’t drunk a cup of instant coffee in over twenty years, but I never miss an opportunity to knife that seal, much to the annoyance of friends, neighbours and supermarket employees.
The way that, whenever you see footage or photographs of The Beatles in the studio, producer George Martin is always wearing a suit and tie. Even by the late-sixties White Album period, when ‘the boys’ were regularly fronting up for work dressed as though they were appearing in a Laugh-In hippy sketch, Martin was still dolled up like a 1950s BBC newsreader. Very occasionally, you’d see him sans jacket with the sleeves rolled up, presumably after a long night recording some of George Harrison’s endless sitar bollocks.
Discovering the DVD you’ve put on is one where you can skip past the copyright warnings!
That bit in the opening titles of The Adventures of Lano and Woodley where Frank gyrates his head as he sings ‘got a bit of an inkling’.
The trailer for 1977’s Viva Knievel (look it up in Leonard Maltin and tell me you don’t want to see it immediately). It starts with Evel, in the full gear, riding down a corridor on a motorbike fashioned to look like an eagle with stars-and-stripes wings, while using a handgun to shoot the lock off a door…and it only gets better!
When you’re listening to a song in your car and what you see through your windscreen perfectly synchs up with the music, creating a kind of real-life rock video. Last week, I was driving through Kensington and passed dozens of women in full burqas while the Isley Brothers’ ‘Who’s That Lady?’ was playing on the stereo. It was so perfect that I doubled back around the block to try to recreate the moment, but they’d vanished.
When you spot a really bizarre celebrity lookalike, point it out to someone else, and they say, ‘I was thinking that too!’ My most recent one of these was: Roberta Williams and Keanu Reeves (click here to see what I mean).
Getting a good result on your cholesterol test. As I see it, this immediately buys you a week where you can eat anything you want!
Discovering a stash of old, but still valid, one-cent stamps and then posting a single letter almost entirely plastered with fifty-five of them.
Discovering a new favourite word that you can’t stop slipping into conversation. I’d been hearing, and occasionally using, the word ‘slugabed’ since I was a kid, without ever bothering to look up what it meant. Fortunately, as it turned out to be one of those words that sound like what they mean (‘a lazy person who lies late in bed’), I’d actually been using it correctly. Unfortunately, I then proceeded to bore my current workmates with my new word and its definition. This was on a job where I was required to get up at six am. One morning, I slept in till quarter past. This, I was informed, makes me a slugabed.
…to name just ten.
Now you can go back to worrying about that oil slick, the economy, or, in my case, about whether the remaining series of Larry Sanders will ever come out on DVD.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Most recently, he directed new episodes of ‘The Librarians’, which returns to ABC1 on October 13.
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