I’ve never been very good with maths. No surprises there. Don’t get it, can’t do it, don’t care. When it comes to LISTS, however… I’m shit-keen like motherfuckin’ Schindler. So here we go – some nice integrated Numeracy components up in this bitch.

Year Six Camp
by Helen Smith.

10,000 – Miles. From anywhere. In any bloody direction.
100 – Kids. Two missing. Maybe.
99 – tiny shoes. One missing. Definitely.
69 – The age of the American ropes and archery instructor who hit on me repeatedly throughout the duration because I was such a wholesome country girl. I can’t drive a tractor, I don’t know shit about the relative positions of shoulder-bones and guns, and I’ve never heard the term ‘Widowmaker’ in my life. Dad was a dentist and Mum sold a lot of luncheon meat, so shut up.
6 – middle-aged teachers and under-showered cabin mates. I was the worst offender. How do you journey deep into the sphyncter of Arsefuck Nowhere for a week and manage to forget shampoo? I’m a moron.
5 – ‘Colour Groups.’ This was for ease of manageability of twerps, but with the added bonus of being relevant to a recent peer in-joke, because we were in a Forest. And my colour group was Orange. Only Jemma and Lizzie will take delight in this.
3 – Consecutive hours filming terrible amateur theatre on ‘Red Faces Night.’ Had no idea so many kids consider Diablo juggling a unique and interesting talent; by the same token, amazing they’d find Katy Perry’s Hot and Cold an appropriate soundtrack for the feather-boa-and-ugg-boots dance routine, when it quite obviously features the line you pms like a bitch.
1 – Awesome Asperger’s kids with fixations on Greek deities. Had to sit next to her on the bus twice because she has no friends, but man, I dig that chick. She and I have some hot Dionysus fandom in common.
0 – mobile reception. Well, duh.

Maybe there was something in the murky dam water, or maybe it was the fact that I got whacked repeatedly in the back of the head with an aluminium canoe paddle, but I actually had a great time. The kids were loud and obnoxious, but colourfully so, and I liked their raw enthusiasm for cabin inspections. It’s so rare, in the adult world, to come across people who’ll show you their freshly brushed teeth in exchange for the chance to win lollies which rot them.

I suppose you could have called it a baptism of fire, if I hadn’t already been biblically dunked in the reedy lake the day before.

Pilot Episode Piffle

Saturday night I bit the bullet belt and exposed G to a big patch of my Hobbies/Interests home turf: a crusty gig at the Legion’s Hall. G’s a punk (of the colourful street, oi! and ska variety), but I was still a bit nervous. In my experience, crusties aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Don’t get me wrong – sometimes it’s pretty good tea. If you like tea, and it’s organic vegan tea, and you’ve found the tea in a dumpster behind the Woolies at West End, and you don’t mind if the tea leaves a faint aftertaste of Eau de Squatter mixed with acrid dreadlock, then yeah, make like Amebix, drink the fuck up and be merry. I sure do. I’ve always liked crust music. It’s more technical, and a little more rapid, than traditional punk; it’s picked up the political/ ideological slack left by the 90′s skater and 00′s melodic flogging of that dead horse we call ’77. Plus, as a local ‘scene’ (hate that word), it’s relatively new. Yeah, yeah, I know all about Anarcho-Crust and the mid-80′s and Discharge, but do YOU know about Brisbane? How alternative cultures, already well established in other global areas, only make it here as an accidental trickle once some jerk’s older brother moves overseas for ten years and writes home on the crumpled back of an Antisect flyer. Even when I moved to Brisbane six or so years ago, ‘the Crusties’ were unheard of. But times changed, fevers spread, Misspent Youth became Cut Sick and the Fudge colour drained out of some patrons, replaced by black threads and D-beats and a borderline autistic fixation on thrashy Japanese exports. It happened to me. I was there. It felt good. It still does.

But G was not privy to any of this. He just knew it wasn’t very interesting. Not my best known attempt at social assimilation, then.

Twenty minutes or so after we arrived, I was complaining to Danii about some idiot blindsiding me on MSN with a webcam and shaved testicles, when her friend joined us. He was a heavily tattooed urban warrior type with fingerless gloves, and a cross of plastic bandaids holding his forehead together. I recognised him as the singer from Deathcage. Pleasantries were exchanged, the webchat ball story retold, and on went the night.

I wandered up the front while the band was tuning their instruments. G and Tommunist were engaged in witty repartee and I couldn’t bare to interrupt the bro-love, so I held a beer with one hand and text messaged petulently with the other. Suddenly, the band blasted to life and I looked up JUST in time to see the Deathcage singer parting the human sea like Moses on a fwockin’ surfboard – but not in time to do anything about it. His launch off the table up back, combined with his height and spry velocity as a HUGE FUCKING HARDCORE DUDE, meant he was a motherfucking wrecking ball and my slow arse (face) was mere fodder for flattening. The impact had me stumbling backwards. My phone flew halfway across the stage. The beer glass shot out of my hand, probably twirling dramatically in the air like some kind of 2001: Space Oddyssey tacky parody, before landing on my head and dousing me in liquid hops. My hair was wet, my cheekbone was aching, my eyeliner ran to Cradle o’ Filth perfection, I smelled like an American sailor and it was SO COOL! I stood and blinked for a second while I processed what had happened, then pissed myself laughing. Next weekend? Same thing.