Succulents, you succ.

I feel life this isn't my best blog post - it's maybe in the top 490 - but the brain wants to write what the brain wants to write.

When it comes to sticking my fingers in dirt with the intention of growing little green things into big green things, I fail like a fat kid trying to get excited by a stick of broccolini; which is just more of the many types of green vegetable things that I can not grow at all with a very high success rate.

And the absolute pinnacle of plant growth impossibility is the ruthlessness that is succulent propagation, which is really just plant porn with fancy science name. Propagation is the act of breeding specimens of a plant or animal by natural processes by the mummy and daddy. Apart from trying to illegally download the U.S. version of Netflix, there are fewer challenges that you will face in your adult life that will be tougher than trying to propagate succulents.

Herein lies the problem. Succulents do not like water. They do not care to be fussed over. They don’t want you serenading them with Bing Crosby tunes or to cover them with a thermal baby blanket when it gets a bit cool in the night hours or give them some sunscreen when it’s a bit too sunny. They want you to leave them the fuck alone. They can manage all the life things by themselves please. As a chronic overwaterer, I can't cope with this.

It’s unnatural. It’s inhumane. The only people who should be comfortable leaving a poor little succulent leaf to flounder are sociopaths. It goes against human nature.

Humans are nurturers. If a human can’t water something, or wrap it in a blanky, or give it benzos when it can't sleep in its pot, their head will spin on it’s axis until it explodes. Succulents lure you in with their charisma and magnetism and then, once you get to know their cold hearts, they end up destroying the lives of all they touch.

If a living thing doesn’t require water and shelter from you, because it's already stored it in its body when you were sleeping in a Freddie Kruger type scenario, then I put it to you that they are in fact zombies, and we all know how well zombies can be controlled by anyone who isn’t already dead. They are corpses. And they will stop at nothing until they suck all the joy and happy out of the world.

In the human world, one can become a plant zombie by having your brain’s sucked out by another zombie plant or by getting a job in the public sector, but how does one possibly make a second plant, without turning it into the undead? Does anybody on the mothership earth know.

#InstagrammableCrumpets

In 2010, two guys - probably two nerdy, but now detestably wealthy beyond their wildest instagrammable imaginings type-of-guys – unleashed on the world their online photo sharing portal that we all should have just known from the get-go was going to play right into the most narcissistic human tendencies in the history of humankind. Selfies. These jerks invented the platform that allowed selfies to breed, through their creation of Instagram, and now there is no return. Internet is hashtag forever.

Aside from the nation states that are weirdly not signatories to the Mass Selfie Treaty, the last time the collective world lost their egotistical minds over a modern advancement was following the creation and unveiling of the phonograph, the 1877 innovation of the first device to record and play back audio. 

Believe it or not, the phonograph was not invented by the ubiquitous Apple. Or Samsung. As if it was invented by Samsung. They are still struggling to work out a reliable method of searching GIFs to add to text messages.

No, it was little known light enthusiast, Dr Thomas Edison, and it made him a celebrity. He even Broke the Telegram when he posed naked with just a light bulb covering his…brain.

Sponsor me. We can be great together. How can I butter you up?

Edison was involved in the invention of the electric light and the telephone, which was just the start of the master plan to ensure  future generations had as many options as possible to communicate with people they hated in high school.

His first recording on the phonograph was of Mary had a Little Lamb, and then it all went major slippery slope when rappers got hold of it, a-yo bitches. Instagram and its social media peers could potentially be a vehicle to viscerally change the world, but find me someone who hasn’t whiled away important hours of their day looking at baby goat Youtube clips. Someone other than Thomas Edison.

Anyway, I’m a keen purveyor of going off on tangents, so back to Instagram. The other morning I decided to Instagram my food, because a few reasons:

(a) I have a Mickey Mouse-inspired toast cutter, which trims the bread to the shape of Mickey’s noggan, and that requires worldwide showcasing;
(b) all the cool kids are doing it;
(c) sometimes I naively want to be one of the cool kids;
but mostly (d), I accidently woke up at 0445 and I must have been profusely sleep-deprived.

I have a new appreciation (I don’t) for the Instagram-obsessed who walk among us, and then into lightposts and trees because their heads are literally in an iPhone app. I want to start a new meme trend which will entail taking photos of iPhone users with their head in the iCloud and then superimposing it onto a cliff edge, or walking off the rim of a firey volcano, or into the mouths of sharks. Just positive stuff like that to make non-wankers feel good.

There’s so much to think about re. planning any foray into Instafoodland.

The Right Light
First, you must wait until the light is right. The right light is all of the things that are important. Given my early rise, I had to wait about eight hours before the damn dawn happened, so I just inhaled five cups of coffee and waited. 

If I had an extra three hours and the schedule of a celebrity - which seems to be remarkably similar to that of an unemployed person - I could have riddled my crumpet with sun flecks that would make the butter shimmer and mouths drool with insta-envy, but I didn’t, so I didn’t, and the only people who suffer are everyone on Instagram. 

Hashtags
You gonna need a hashtag son; you gonna need a real good one. There is absolutely no point at all in any socially acceptable way in creating an Instagram post if you don’t use witty, pithy words and phrases that make people laugh out loud or cry tears of self-pity. 

The number sign, or hash, aka “#”, used to be the most boring symbol in the whole symbol world. Now, thanks to it’s elevation as Instagram’s global superstar, it is outrageously famous, hangs out with The Kim Kardashian, and, like Prince, insists that people refer to it as a symbol. 

My only hope for the future is that one day it remembers where it came from, and goes back to its birth name, Gary. Personally, I believe hashtags have #jumpedtheshark, which incidentally has over 3,000 posters at present, which is just mocking what I just said. I'm mocking you Instagram, not the other way around.

Likes equals self-esteem
Don’t fall for this. If people don’t like your post it means they are living their own life at that point in time. I know! - they be weirdos. But I’m sure the time will come when they are 100% invested in your life (it won’t). People like other people’s posts in the hope that the “favour” will be returned. You know there’s a problem on planet self-esteem when there are apps where you can buy “likes”.  Yes you can.

1,000 draft photos
How many photos do we need to take until the creation is perfect? Oh, the crumpet is in the dark. There’s too much shade. Why is there a crumb on the plate - this crumpet cannot have crumbs. Should the coffee be in there too. That’s not the crumpet’s good side - don’t upset the talent. It’s all just too hard so eventually I gave in and hired a cherry picker from a construction company for an hour to get the right height and perspective. Money well spent.

When you start to think of people who make money from their Instagram by taking off their clothes as a bunch of talent-free, antisocial pariahs who are genetically incapable of feeling shame or self-respect, it makes it quite enjoyable. 

Some social media tarts have come out to tell the world how hard their inst-life is, and how long it takes to set up a photo and how many they have to take to get a good one and it just makes me really sad for them because my proper job isn’t hard at all. I just wish there was a way I could help their plight that involved somehow making their suffering so much worse.

Delete that post and move on with your life
After 23 hours of Crumpet Time, I eventually deleted the post because I didn’t want my conceptual art, replete with mockumentary hashes, to offend anyone who takes instaphotos of food for a living, especially not the people who use the hashtag conceptual art.

Musings from the Seaside

I’m been presenting myself for weekend penance at the South Coast, New South Wales, quite a bit lately. The South Coast, if you are unfamiliar, is the coastal belt between Sydney to the north to the Victorian border to the south.

My location of choice for optimal sun and sand experiences occasioning sunburn is Broulee, just south of Bateman’s Bay, which is often branded as Canberra by the Sea. Broulee, population of just over 1,700, is so laidback and blasé about life that it's on the brink of toppling over.

It feels like the place is a refugee of the 1950s or 60s, whichever decade was the last one with unobtrusive capitalism and a laissez faire attitude and I do not hate this. Sure, internet reception is scant (but very curiously receptive on the beach), there is not a lot to do if you don’t want to devote the entire day to sand worship, and there is just one takeaway shop, which has implausible opening hours for an operational small business. 

On the flip side, there are no loud and kitschy billboards encouraging food or services, just sporadic signage of a small business courteously and respectfully expressing the purpose of their existence.

If you need to uber-advertise your goods and services to the market for a price to do capitalism properly, Broulee doesn't really care a whoop-de-doop.

What commodity are they selling in Broulee, then? If anyone cared, it would be lifestyle of ye olde days, by effortlessly laidback means.

I don’t care how current your hipster status is, how many mason jars containing salad you have in your arsenal, how many trimmed bearded men work for your ironically named business, you cannot engineer ye olde days. Thank goodness the hipsters haven't gotten their conceited mittens on this seaside haven.

Walking in the direction of the ocean I can smell it's briny aroma, but it’s not always that way. The wind has to be blowing from the east, or at least from the north. 

October in Broulee? It’s all about cold sandcastles and iced water. I go there for the simplicity, the ease of life. Minimalism. 

Also, there are birds. Lots of them. David Attenborough would be able to tell you more. Or anything. The birds are arguing about bird things. Or just being interactive in a shared space. Who knows the ways of birds.

Painted whores of the plant world

The first of the summer flies harass me as I walk past all the painted whores of the plant world (A Homer or Bart Simpson reference to flowers) on the way to the beach. 

Teenage boys ride their bikes past me on the footpath, precariously balancing their beloved surfboards in their strong arm, forgetting that when they recklessly spin around to chat to their friends the board whips around too and there goes my ribs if I wasn’t quick like a butterfly.

And then I see the offending sign, which is always there; a picture of a dog with a cross through it. DOGS NOT ALLOWED. Seriously, if you a barbarian who does not like watching dogs playing on the beach then we have nothing to say to each other and move along from this planet please.

I love watching people playfully encouraging their dog to do instagrammable tricksies for photographs, which they obligingly do, through a volley of barks which ricochet for kilometres along the beach.

This visit, to the beach, I had to be vigilant. There are brutal brutes seaside who will find you. And then they will hurt you. But they are so pretty, so one must get up as close and personal as possible to their tentacles to admire their bright hues. Bluebottles. Lots of ‘em.

The statistics are not in your favour when it comes to avoiding their sting, and the little suckers pack quite a punch. I imagine it is their vengeance for being purged from the ocean.