This is what I'm working with here

Don't enjoy your life, you fat looser.

To be fair, this was out the front of Dan Murphy's/

This is in the toilets of a shopping centre called "Cockburn Central". Everyone else pronouces is "Coburn"
NOT ME.

This dolphin statue was modeled on the most popular hip tattoo of Rockingham's female population

Rockingham is gorgeous. When you are looking out to sea.

This is a Little Corella. I live near a golf course and there are heaps of awesome native birds nearby.

Special K is reading this. I think it's safe to judge this book by it's cover.

Smurf. Stop washing yourself SO LOUDLY

OH GOD this has poo in it.

Tonight Special K made Caramel Slice and she offered me some. For those of you who know my stand-up, I have a bit about a woman offering me Caramel Slice and then questioning my manhood when I reject it but this is not it. The background is that I have a dairy allergy, but I LOVE dairy. Especially cheese and especially especially Sweetened Condensed Milk. Eating it is like volunteering to take a sleeping tablet, something to clog your freckle and get kicked in the kidneys by a donkey.

So of course I ate the Caramel Slice. And it was delicious. BUT Special K hasn't cooked anything in the time I've lived here and she kept saying "Help yourself to as much as you like, because I don't even eat sweet things", so I asked her why she made it. She said she "just wanted to try it out". In my brain, an alarm bell went off and I thought "oh god, this has poo in it" but by this stage it was too late, I was already eating it and telling her how delicious it was. Then she said "well they say that food is the way to a man's heart". EEP!

I didn't panic enough to vomit, which is a good thing because then she said "So I hope it works on INSERT BOGAN NAME HERE", her husbogand who she is separated from, "he bloody loves the stuff". Husbogand, let's call him Warren, lives in Mandurah, which is further South and I'm sure even more deeply Boganated than Rockingham. Although I lack proof, I genuinely hope she is more complex than she seems. Like, imagine if she genuinely thinks that Caramel Slice is what's going to win back her estranged husband. That is both sad and extra sad but not, imo, entirely out of the question.

LATER I was doing my invoices in the lounge room while Special K was watching Revenge. The cat, Smurf, got up onto the couch and wanted to sit on her lap. 
"God, you're so sooky" is what she said to it. The cat didn't seem to understand but as it was removed from her lap it stood on a little coffee table and began washing itself.
"Can you not do that in here? You wash yourself TOO LOUDLY"
Judging by the look on it's face, the cat STILL cant understand English. I'm not even sure it's trying to learn. So she got up, picked up the cat and put it in the kitchen. Which is great because of all the places I want a cat de-lousing itself, near my food is probably the first one that springs to mind. The cat must just be baffled most of the time, like anyone who has English as a second language coming to somewhere like this where BogAus (Bogan Australian) English includes phrases such as "yeah nah yeah cunt, ay", "got any durries?" and "Jaidyn! Stop fingerblastin' your sister and tell the hairdresser how long you want your rat's tail". I've lived in Australia my whole life and still struggle some days.

Clomping Day 2: The Clompening

Today was Clomping Day. There was a new world record set. And the reason was totes valid.
Special K could not locate one particular pillow case that desperately NEEDED. TO BE FOUND. Because imagine making a bed where everything matched and not being able to complete the look because you were short one pillowcase. The horror. Actually, as a guy, I cant imagine making the bed where any two things actually match. But this isn't about me.
So what this mystery called for was a good clomping. Followed by a complete emptying of the linen cupboard, which is directly outside my bedroom door. Everything was emptied onto the floor and sorted through loudly. "Where the fuck is this cunting pillowcase? How the fuck do you lose a pillowcase anyway?".
Unfortunately, after each item was loudly sorted and most of it sworn at, the runaway pillowcase still was not located. So the clomping continued. Clomping into the laundry where cupboards were opened and loudly closed. Clomping into the back yard to loudly look if the escaped pillowcase was in fact on the washing line. It loudly wasn't.
Then she knocked on Not Gary & C Girl's door. "Have you guys got an extra pillowcase? What pillowcases have you got on your bed right now?"
"We're using our own" was C Girl's blunt reply.
"Oh. Well I guess they're not in your room then" was what she said but through my bedroom door I am pretty sure I could hear her eyes scouring their room through the open door.
Then she importantly clomped off somewhere else and clomped back again. And knocked on my door. I was not yet out of bed, was wearing only a t-shirt and jocks and was watching The Boy Who Could Fly. So, obviously, I had a boner. OK, NO I DIDN'T. But I still didn't want her in my room when I was that disheveled. So I closed my laptop with the speedy guilt of a 14 year old who's mum is about to walk in on him watching porn and pulled the doona up over me.
"Hello?" I called
She opened the door and walked in. "Hey. What pillow cases have you got on your pillows?"
"uh..these ones", I said and sat up. They're just a light blue kind of colour.
"Huh. Yeah, they're not it. I'm looking for a kind of purpley one, have you seen it?"
"No"
"Ok, well, no worries" she said and clomped out of my room.
The kind-of purpley pillowcase, in my opinion, doesn't want to be found.

Cats Do Not Understand English. And showers cannot heal.

I had a big night last night. I had a gig at this cool bar called Deville's Pad, a joint kitted out like a demon's lair, all dark and red-lit and full of devil imagery. They haven't tried comedy there before and generally the place is trying to work out what they want to do with their dinner-time entertainment. Anyway, it was fun and they shouted me dinner and drinks and I didn't leave til closing. Then I didn't sleep much and when I got home today I went straight to bed at about 3. I was woken up by interesting things.

The neglected cat and even more neglected dog get fed every day at around 7.30. I'm not here during the day most of the time but I am pretty sure that this is the only time the dog gets any attention at all. So it gets pretty excited and runs around and jumps up and all the usual things. She immediately scolds it for behaving like an energetic 2 year old dog that hasn't seen anyone all day. She shouts its name and says something like "Don't jump up on me please, its very annoying" Obviously the dog continues to jump up and she will then say "What did I just say?"
The cat then gets fed and when it does it has a habit of giving out a couple of small meows, maybe in appreciation, who knows. It meows once. "Oh shut up"
It meows again "Look, if youre going to complain, you can get a smack on the arse". How did she know it was complaining? Maybe it was saying "You should pay more attention to that poor dog, you gigantic fucking idiot"
Or maybe it was saying thanks for dinner? It's a very cute cat and the only times I have heard it meow, it seems like it is actually trying to communicate something to you. Cats think they're people, which I like,

ALSO apparently the shower is still leaking. My bedroom is right opposite the bathroom and I cant hear it. But she can hear it from down the hall where the two open doors oddly still dont seem to block any noise. She was talking at it loud enough to wake me up.
I heard "Ugh this fucking thing is STILL leaking!"
Because most showers can fix themselves automatically.
"That's IT. EVERYONE is banned from showering until its fixed"

Take a pinch of Passion, a punch of Aggression and mix

I woke up early this morning and it was great. I was wide awake, it was 6am, I was able to play Angry Birds for like a good couple of hours before needing to move from my bed. Which I did. It was excellent. I listened as Kieren/Leith/Keith ...or is it Gary? Nah, no-one young is named Gary. Anyway, I listened as Not Gary attended to his Clomping and Shower Coughing duties and then I heard as he left. And then the house was quiet for a while.
THEN I heard other people beginning to awaken. I wasn't sure who it was but someone went into the shower. Then I heard the other person approach the bathroom door. When she realised there was already someone in there, she said "oh for fuck sake", loud enough for the person in the shower to hear and clomped back into her bedroom. I now knew that the girl whose name I still don't know but who has cancer was the one in the shower. And the owner of the house was the jilted. Her name starts with K, So from now on I will call her Special K. It couldn't be more apt.
After about half an hour, after everyone had managed to shower without blowing a brain valve, Cancer Girl received a phone call. It was about a hospital visit or some such that required some details being passed back and forth for a while. This was done initially in her bedroom, then out the front of the house where she could smoke. She already has cancer so whats the worst that could happen? Double Cancer?
Regardless of the importance of that call, all of this talking was too much for Special K. While C Girl was outside on the phone, Special K was inside, angrily putting washing into the dryer, muttering loud enough for the neighbours to hear. "I never need to YELL down the phone, I don't know why SHE does"
Then C Girl got off the phone and went back to her room. The clomping from Special K continued. THEN C Girl got a second phone all, this time from a friend or a really funny doctor. Maybe a Clown Dr? Whoever, the call was notable because for the first time since I moved in I heard C Girl laughing. She was having a great time catching up and with each excitable sentence, was getting louder and louder, laughing harder and harder, behaving like a normal person who is happy to hear from a friend. BUT All this normal behaviour was TOO MUCH for Special K. The anger returned. I guess the shower incident and then that first phone call were just too much to bear. She started clomping, slamming doors that aren't normally closed and muttering even louder than before. I don't think C Girl heard, because the conversation continued at the same volume. Then the door to the main bedroom was slammed SO HARD it could be heard on the International Space Station and then Special K YELLED from her bedroom, and it was one of those yells that was done through gritted teeth where all of your neck muscles are tense "Talk!. QUIETER!".
It was a pleasant morning at Casa del Passivo Agresso.

By the way, this is the book Special K is reading atm

The shower leaks and it caused a meltdown, of course

Today at work I finished everything I needed to earlier than expected so I went for a drive around the local area and took some cool pics of stuff. Follow me on Instagram @BertGoldsmith if you want, its pretty awesome, there are a lot of pics of cats and food. But today I wanted to take some nice pics to show you the Rockingham area because its really pretty beautiful if you can see past the bogans. Natural beauty is wasted on people who will fight you if you answer "Ford or Holden?" wrong.
Like, check this shit out. This is Rockingham beach.

This is the sunset from Kwinana Beach. Seriously this place is like living in Home & Away.

Then I went home. I walked in and without saying a word I was abruptly asked "How do you stop a shower from leaking?"
"Uh...depends"
She got up and stormed into the bathroom. I sighed and followed. She had placed towels into the bottom of the shower and when they got wet from the dripping, they were making what was probably a louder dripping noise than before."I HAVE to Stop. This. DRIPPING. It's doing my head in. I'm going to go INSANE."
The shower was indeed dripping but that didn't answer MY question... Can you go DOUBLE insane?
If it was just the washers, as it is in 95% of dripping tap cases, I could fix it in 3 minutes but it was already 7.30 and Bunnings was shut.
"I just cant deal with it. It never used to leak before I had housemates"
"Its probably just a washer, I can.."
"THIS is why I like living along, I just can't afford it" AND THEN SHE STORMED OFF like she had got in the last word in an argument. It was pretty funny.
I pushed the showerhead down so the it was touching the wall and the noise stopped. The bathroom is down a hallway from where she was sitting. There are two doors between that shower and her and both were open. I can only help so much.
Then she spent the next while CLOMPING around the house sighing, muttering and performing domestic tasks including angrily feeding the dog. Her scolding of it led to me finding out the dog's name. Karma. Thank god she doesn't have any kids.

What is the Pentagon hiding!? Weaponised AIDS.

I love it when people use big words to try to make themselves sound smarter than they are. And usually it's a similar word to the word they should have used. When I came home today I found my housemate watching Outbreak, that virus/panic movie with Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo and a bunch of other people in it, including a youngish Kevin Spacey with a dreadful dye job. I say "youngish" but Kevin Spacey was never really young. I think he was born in his late twenties but had a really hard life in the womb. For me the best part of that movie is watching Patrick Dempsey die and fantasising that without him Grey's Anatomy would never have been made. But it was and the world is a worse place for it. So I noticed the movie was on and said "Oh is this that virus movie from years ago where the monkey kills Patri..."
"Outbreak. Movies that deal with the desecration of the human race just appeal to me sometimes"
I guess if you take "desecration" to mean "violation", then she is sort of right.

Anyway, the movie kicks on and people intestines start melting in a hospital and she says "And that's why it's better to stay at home in your house sometimes"
Yes. It IS better to stay at home in your house in case of a sudden outbreak of a fictional strain of an Ebola-like virus that melts your organs within 24 hours.

The movie goes on and now the military are involved in quarantining a town.
"It makes you wonder what they've got hidden at the bottom of the pentagon doesn't it? You know, like what viruses they've got down there and weapons and that. It's scary to think they could basically make a weapon out of the AIDS virus"
"I guess"

All of a sudden, she is an AIDS expert.
"You know they have finally worked out who Patient Zero is for the AIDS virus was?
"No, I did not kno..."
"Yeah it was someone from in the Congo from back in like 1930 or something."

EDIT* So she may have been right about Patient Zero. http://www.radiolab.org/story/169879-patient-zero/

Comedy Masterclass PLUS Bee Movie SPOILERS

I HATE having the first thing I tell people about myself be anything to do with comedy. Ask any comedian why. I don't tell most people that I'm a comedian at all. Especially people I work with and randoms. I worked at my last job for a year and a half and they never knew. I consider the people I live with to be randoms, so I would rather they don't know anything about me at all. I would just rather choose who knows stuff about me, like people on the internet I'll probably never meet. Unfortunately I had a gig the other night and I let it slip. Mistake. Except for this exchange
"Where do you get your material?"
"Well" was all I said before she interjected "I could never do it but I've got some stories. There are a lot of real idiots out there".
She's right about that.

Later on we were watching Bee Movie in the lounge room and I was typing down all the amazing things she was saying. I can literally just sit there and transcribe them as they happen. Now, bear in mind that Bee Movie is an animated film about a talking bee which sues Big Food for ownership of all honey at the same time as romancing a florist, so it would be pretty hard to mistake it for a documentary. Plus doesn't that Bee sound JUST like Jerry Seinfeld.  About 10 minutes from the end there is a scene with a Jumbo Jet about to crash and a million bees fly under it and lift it out of trouble to which my housemate said "yeah, as if".

But then she asked me what I was typing. I said I was working on some new material, which is a statement that could not have been more true. Then the Masterclass began.

"Comedy is hard", she stated. With all of her years of experience, she should know. I took in a breath and got ready to type as fast as I could.
"It's really hard to judge what people are going to find funny."
I wanted to laugh now but no way was I going to stop this.
"I went to a comedy club once and this kid got up and some people in the crowd were really cruel. His work definitely needed improvement, his stuff, you know, it needed work. I cant really remember what happened but yeah".
So it was a good story all round and I learned a lot.

Sharehousing is carehousing. No, that's not true.

Sharehousing with randoms is a negative, in general. Unless you need a new stock of comedy material. This time, the people in this house are both positive and negative. They're positive ironically. Living in a place like this is CHEAP. The rent I pay is less than Melbourne (as it should be) but it also includes a furnished room and all bills. ALL of the BILLS. ALL OF THEM. Unheard of! This is only the second share house I've ever lived in with people I didn't previously know and so far I have worked out these apparent rules of sharehousing.
1. What's mine is mine, what's yours is mine. This may include your teethbrush*
2. Except my dirty dishes, they're not mine.
3. I might be the only one here with a vagina, but that used tampon on the floor of the bathroom is not mine. (Yes, this is based on an actual incident, not in this house though)

I don't know where Leith/Keith (wait, maybe it's Kieran?) works but he gets up very early and gets his early morning noise-making done quite thoroughly. He is very proficient in "clomping". Also, he has definitely reached his targets in "Hacking Cough In The Shower".  I'm pretty sure he has Cert IV in "loud door closing and then forgetting something and opening the door again, clomping in to grab it and then closing the door loudly again" because you don't get skills like that without going to TAFE. He wears a lot of singlets, has one of those moustaches made up of eight or nine sweaty lip hairs and a DELIBERATE MULLET that looks at least 4 years in. What possible reason could there be for this hairstyle except that he wants to make himself as unattractive as possible to the rest of the human race? I doubt anyone with a mullet has ever been raped, so maybe he thinks he is too pretty without it. Yeah, that's definitely it.

The woman who owns the house, well, she doesn't own the house, her parents own the house for REASONS that are so interesting I was forced to stop listening, is 36 years old. She has a dead tooth in the front and has been separated from her husband for eight months but still hopes to work it out with him, even though they haven't spoken for seven months. She tells me about people I will never meet and whom I have no background knowledge about using their first names. 
"So it ended up just being me, Troy and Karla waking up in the ute. And none of us have any idea how we even got into that deer farm in the first place". That is an actual quote. 
She watches shit TV like repeats of Charmed, The Big Bang Theory and The Bachelor, hasn't heard of Q&A and believes all kinds of dumb stuff that people stopped believing when the internet was invented. We had a brief one-sided conversation about horror movies before she said "that little girl from the Exorcist went crazy, you know". Which, of course, Linda Blair didn't, but it doesn't matter. She seems to suffer from "No-one is listening to me" syndrome, which is actually very accurate because you learn to stop listening very quickly, and she compensates by saying a constant stream of words that people have no choice but to hear her saying. I mean, I know she was saying THINGS but I had tuned out so I have no idea what those things were. She constantly talks at the television and to the room in general. An ad for the the Robert Downey Jnr Sherlock Holmes movie came on and she said this "Did you hear they worked out who Jack The Ripper is?
I said "Yeah , I read someth" but she continued.
"I heard a theory that the real Jack the Ripper ended up in Australia, After all the murders he got transported here for some minor crime. But its hard to believe that when there were no further murders here, you know, like the ones over there."

Last night we watched Bee Movie, that animated movie about Bees. That's next on Welcome To Not Melbourne

*Yes, TEETHbrush. Unless you use it to only brush one tooth, it's a teethbrush.

Homelessness and Hopelessness, a quick catch up to where it's at

So, just as a catch-up to where I am at, when I first got to Perth, I was staying with a girl I was seeing. Part of the incentive to move in the first place was that she was here, of course AND that her uncle had gotten me a job. The DAY before I was supposed to start the job, I got a phone call saying it was no longer available for some bullshit reason. Then, less than two weeks in, she changed her mind about the relationship and within 24 hours I had to leave the house I had just moved all my stuff into. Which seemed a tad harsh to me at the time. Actually, it still seems harsh to me. Because it is. Here you are, in the city which you drove 3000+ kms to in order to be with me and where you hardly know anyone and I want you out of my house. Tomorrow. Yeah, I was right, that is bullshit.

Anyway, it lead to me sleeping in my car for a couple of nights, which I do not recommend. Luckily I have a couple of other friends in Perth, one of whom let me sleep on her couch for a couple of nights (thanks Michelle, you are a champion) and another one who I didnt feel like I could impose on and whom missed the million subtle hints I dropped. I ended up sleeping on the couch cushions of a guy I know through the comedy scene, an absolute fucking legend named Dave Cronin. If it wasn't for Dave and his awesome brother Mitch and their awesome mate Luke, I would have had to sleep in my car for more nights than the two I did and would probably just have driven my car straight back across the Nullabor. Then a Melbourne friend of mine named Serena offered me some work on a property she owns down in a place near Rockingham (about 50km South of Perth) so I had some money coming in. Life saving champion legend of all time. Then the real estate agent liked the work/couldn't get anyone better, so she offered me work as a handyman and I have been busy ever since. Which means, as my sister said, that I'm not charging enough.

So now you're up to speed. Except for my new living arrangements. And this is where it gets good.

In order to be closer to the work, I decided to live down here, near Rockingham. The Real Estate agent I am working for is in a place called Kwinana. I'm choosing to pronounce it the same as Quinoa: "Keenwa". So far what I've learned about living in Kwinana is this.
1. The Coffee is terrible. If I use Beanhunter in Kwinana, it doesn't show a single hit. The best cup of coffee in Kwinana is from a vending machine in a service station. This is not so much coffee as "brown drink". You know, like Orange Drink instead of Orange Juice. Luckily, Rockingham is only 10 minutes drive away and there is a one good coffee place there that I have found so far.
2. Woolworths is not open 24 hours a day. In fact, I'm not even sure it's open 12 hours a day.
3. If you stand in the carpark of Woolies here, you can see FOUR pizza shops, McDonald's, KFC and Chicken Treat**. There are NO other actual restaurants in the town. (The pub has a bistro). This is not a good thing.
4. It's CHEAP! And being near work means I can sleep til 5 minutes before I need to be there and I save money on petrol.
5. There are no comedy gigs here, which means driving to Freo or Perth when I have a gig.

Since arriving I've done some gigs and gotten an agent who has lined up some proper paying gigs. So it's starting to get good, although it's been hard this far. If it wasn't for my family giving me money, I would be homeless. Literally. Two nights of it was bad enough. So I'm in the next suburb to Quinoa - Calista - in a sharehouse with 3 incredible bogans from what I can only imagine is the highest tier of bogan society. Actually, bogan society probably only has one level. Entry Level. These people, as specimens of the human race, could almost pass as normal. But there are things that give away that they are not normal. The woman who owns the house almost always talks OVER what you are trying to say. She asks you questions and before you have managed to squeeze out a syllable she has started talking again so that nothing you say gets heard. You quickly learn not to say anything. Most of the time I just smirk, nod and say things like "oh, right". And she says incredible things most of the time that are loosely based on things she has heard second or third hand, like she gets all of her news through Chinese Whispers. Watching TV or a film with her is a gold mine but I'll get to that. 

The other two people who live in the house are a young couple. They sleep in the room next to mine and I usually only know they are home because I can hear them fighting through the wall. The first time I met either of them was memorable. The day I cam to check out the house I walked in and the female of the mating pair was sitting on the couch in pink tracksuit pants and a pink hoodie. It was only later that I found out that the tracksuit pants had "Playboy" printed across the butt. The first conversation I had with her went like this.

ME - "Hi, how are you going?"

HER - "Not great, I have cancer"

I can sympathise with that but as a first thing to say to someone, it's probably a little full on.
WHAT DO YOU SAY TO THAT? "Oh! What kind? Breast? Cervical? Pancreas?" Aside from it being TMI, I also DRC.

I didn't meet the boyfriend until the next day when I came home to be confronted by the pair sitting on the couch eating a brown gloop. I shook his hand and said "Hey, how are you. Bert.". He replied "Good, man, GRUNT/NAME" and that was it. I missed his name and still do not know it. I think it was either Keith or Leith. I would normally have asked him to repeat it but I had only one thing on my mind. His Mullet. He DELIBERATELY grows a mullet. The hairstyle, not the fish. Ok, look, maybe he has the fish too, I'm not sure. But the hairstyle would win a championship. Probably the thing I like about them the most is that they are not interested in being social.

So its been interesting so far. Watching TV with the woman who owns the house is my new favourite pastime. My favourite thing so far has been when we watched an ad selling shares in the offspring of Black Caviar. The voice over said "...will it run like the wind?" and she said "it probably won't be any good because that kind of thing can skip a generation". I've only been here about a week and I have an amazing backlog of quotes that I will update as they happen. 

Stay tuned because from here on in, this pretty much becomes me telling you what the housemates have been saying. And judging from the material I have already been handed, its going to be good.

In The Boganing...

In August, I decided that I needed a change. Not like change my hairstyle or say Im going to join a gym where I actually join a gym and then pay for not using it kind of change, I needed DRASTIC change in my life. So I decided to move to the other side of the country and see what happened. And things have happened and continue to happen, which, for the purposes of a blog, is pretty great. I knew things would be different here, I just didnt expect them to be THIS different. Which is all-at-once great and shit and weird and slightly frightening and hilarious. Because I have moved from the fantastic everything of Melbourne to what is best described as the opposite of art. This is what Im sure was once the promordial pool of Bundy Rum from which crawled the first Bogan. And when it crawled out, it liked what it saw, bought a cookie-cutter house and bred. Or rather, it in-bred. If this is NOT the actual spawning point of Boganistic Culture, and if I wasnt likely to get bashed for mentioning art more than once, I'd say that Boganing here is at least an artform.

It would make an interesting anthropological study, to note the differences between the bogan tribes of the east and west coasts. The main one I have seen so far is the growing of mullets. It's...how do I describe this? They grow them DELIBERATELY.

If they had museums here, but they don't what are ya a bloody poof, I'm sure they'd be studying their earliest ancestor, the first Bogan - "Loosey". How would they identify that this was the first Bogan? Fuck knows cunt, scients or some shit ay. Actually it would probably be a very well preserved site because everything would be covered in chrome. Other clues would be that Loosey's primitive cave would be mostly painted yellow but have a blue feature wall. There would be a massive painting of frangipanis, a "licence plate" ornament that says "I'm The Princess" and an entire area of the cave would have been filled with useless ornaments of frogs or dolphins or some shit Loosey had long-ago decided was her "thing". You know the kind of arbitrary crap I'm talking about; Little glossy statues of frogs smoking, cartoonish smitten-looking frogs holding hands with other frogs while love-hearts bubble around their heads. A frustrated-looking frog sitting behind a computer holding a sign that says "You dont have to be mad to work here DOT DOT DOT but it helps!" LOLkillme. The kind of thing someone can collect for an entire lifetime that does literally NOTHING but take up more and more space in your house but never fill the void in your hollow existence like you expected it to much like any material possession really until you die and your kids chuck it all in the bin without a second thought KIND OF THING. Loosey herself would have been discovered next to a fossilised six pack of Woody & Cola, her matted mullet extensions intact, rudimentary butterfly tat on her hip and the butt of a Winnie Blue wedged firmly between her yellow fossilised fingers. The main hint however, in knowing that this was the birthplace of the Boganic peoples would be the lack of evidence to suggest that this primitive culture ever invented the wheel. No, because they bypassed it entirely and went straight to Mag Wheels. That's right, I'm living in Rockingham, Western Australia.

In case you aren't sure, I have been having an amazing time since I got here. I'm not going to deride everything about the place because some of it is truly awesome. Sure there was a girl and a job waiting for me when I got here and they both instantly evaporated when I arrived but I'll not dwell on them since they are not important. Instead I'll tell you of the other stuff that has occasionally seen me stare, slack-jawed, in amazement. I'll cover things like the job I'm now doing, the comedy and MCing gigs, the wonder of the share-house I'm living in and you'll go with me as I endeavour to find a coffee worth drinking. This is Not Melbourne. But that can be a great thing.