Dear family, friends and lost people looking for internet pornography,

Raphael has wassailed me with such an emcumbered lament - for I the bard of Brazil Fair has forsaken thee and refrained from sharing my stellar wit with those less fortunate, namely you mob! In other words - he told me to write something - anything - we need content Parker get me a shot of Spiderman! A.S.A.P.

And so I have written - in fact this should have gone in my blog but I as Raph has endevoured to reformulate the Segal site I decided to post this here - I call it my ode to procrastination or why we never seem to have time to finish things we start or in other words… I’ll tell you later. It is between a rant and a whinge with touches of pathos which should get me a good review on SBS if they still have those weird foreign movies on.

Once again it is good to be back but it is funny as I didn’t realise I had even gone away.

Beijos,

Damien in Brazil

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Well once again I am here with nothing to say and what is worse - a lot of it. Please fasten you seat belts and place all hand luggage in the overhead compartments - this is going to be a bumpy ride…

We dedicated bloggers wait for the perfect moment to write our scholarly tomes, with wit and worldly wile to instruct or better yet protect our fellow human beings yet it is a wait in vain. Ash we ponder the existence of life the washing machine starts banging against the wall, someone left the fridge open and it is filled with ice and the dog seems to have left a chocolate Mr. Whippy surprise on the living room carpet just as friends are arriving for dinner.

The observation that life is not how you live but rather how you have affected those around you seems unimportant next to the dog choking on a piece of my flip flop and finally passing out - followed by frantic calls to vet, the said vet rushing here on a Saturday night and the final result of Live dog 1 - flip flop 0 and a very relieved mother, father and vet and a dog oblivious to it all as the first thing it does after all the drams is attack the foam stuffing of the sofa.

The clarify of age as a way of gauging the rise and fall of society as a moral or even egalitarian community is a challenging one with observations of “When I was a lad we used to respect our elders” and “in my day men held doors open for women” as simple yet subtle examples of the failure of our education system and a damning of the Mtv generation as a whole pale into comparison with the fact the new computer suddenly stopped working because there was too much water in it (I know: Computer + Water = BAD), but how can one guard against excessive humidity when we are too concerned with simply not freezing to death in the sub zero temperatures (ok - not really sub-zero but it is cold) and now just when we wish to debate the merits of the disaster epic Cloverfield as the movie Godzilla should have been, we have to stop everything and fix the bloody shower as the wife is screaming with shampoo in her eyes as it is freezing and the dogs have decided to start barking in sympathy with the cruel and inhuman of it all or maybe it is just the noise from the neighbour next door coming back and banging his door which set them off and then I am torn between silencing the cacophony of barking dogs with a good old newspaper on the bum or saving the screaming missus from the cold blindness of no more tears shampoo. So what would you do? More on that later …

So we contemplate the cruelty of whining about how we are too commercialized and driven to consumer excess and never take the time anymore to stop and really smell the flowers (admit it, when WAS the last time???) and play the song Beautiful by Marillion endlessly for a week until the CD starts skipping and then decide it is time to get a new copy and so it begins whether or not to trade up to a DVD or go the whole hog and get and IPOD and then if you getting and IPOD why not and IPHONE or an ITOUCH as well and finally returning home with on IPOD and ITOUCH and a IPOD shuffle just to show off to the mates at work. And then one of them shows you his new Nokia N95 cell phone with GPS and then you start to feel like a fool for buying a stupid IPOD and start lusting after a Motorola V9 with expanded memory. Smell the flowers? Better yet I can show you video of them on my Sony Digital Camera with optical and digital zoom. Finally we stay up all night download shitloads of pirate MP3s in some kind of minor rebellion against all this consumerism forgetting the Radiohead CD was free in the first place and that we spent the best part of our next three salaries buying things we didn’t really need in the first place and add the icing to the cake by stealing the complete collection of Marillion albums downloaded on bit torrent and then we play Beautiful and think what a pretentious load of crap it is and forget the irony of it being a top selling single of its time. Maybe we should have listen to Luka and gone out a beaten up a few child abusers - would have a lot cheaper except we can’t as we have to drop everything and substitute a coworker who is out with the mysterious condition of “Women’s problems” and who know what the hell that is but the mere mention sends chills down many a man’s spine with horror images of strange tampon commercials and that Four Corners ABC special you saw as a kid about the Dalcon Shield and how many women died and stop being such a wuss about it - suck it up there boy, women are the weaker sex but then again they can stand 36 hours of labour without morphine and we cry like babies when our football teams lose.

So who is really taking advantage of whom in the great scheme of things and then, bugger! you just remembered you forgot to go to the supermarket and the little wife is going to string you up for forgetting her bloody chocolate bikkies and that crappy little fine herb cheese spread that costs more than imported caviar per gram - or is it millilitre for cheese spread - I mean, it is semi-solid but it is also semi-liquid. Well it is a moot point as you are going to get an earful anyway irrespective of the density and consistency of said cheese product and then you remember Life of Brian by Monty Python “Blessed are the cheesemakers” and think maybe they know something that we don’t. Smacks of conspiracy, if you ask me and don’t even mention Harold Holt!

And so it is, another month has passed and the blog lies abandoned like that old slip and slide that was ripped when you forgot to take your keys out of your pocket and did a crazy frog belly flop jumping slide and sliced the poor thing to bits and of course discovering the meaning of the word “groining” in the process. You know where it is on the web or in the garden shed next to the umpteen half-finished projects you started with your Dremel and gave up on for lack of time, talent, blood doners or fingers.

It is still there and then when everything is quiet, in the eye of the storm when the sky is still and you think that just maybe you are going to get a full 10 minutes of quality “ME” time to post a quirky epithet it happens! Quiet - Silence - and you slowly load up your Wordpress page, login and start thinking of a catchy title that is pithy but not a cliché and it hits you … Nirvana! The perfect blog title and you are really going to become a legend with this one and make it all the way to the Webby awards only to miss out to some cross dressing TRON/Peter Pan/ Chinese Lip synching duo.
You push enter and then life coming racing up to bit you on the bum again - it’s the missus screaming again the shower has gone cold and with her shampooey eyes she can’t see enough to turn off the taps and the dogs are barking in unity with their fallen comrade so recklessly lost to the cold ablution, so you close the blog page, get up and go turn off the shower all the while getting an earful for taking so bloody long and why couldn’t you have fixed it correctly the first time. The moment becomes an epiphany - you understand what to do - and then you realise you have soaked your arms and have to change your shirt and finally forgot all about your sudden a blinding moment of clarity - “Ah tomorrow I will do and update with that humerous picture of me in a lampshade at the office party, hoho very droll Mr. Segal, very droll indeed…” yet tomorrow never comes and our blog slowly dies from abandon and the war is lost.

So there is the reason for my lateness of updates, I hope that clears everything up, sorry can’t stay, the toilet has backed up and the validity of holding the moral high ground over China for human rights abuses seems just a bit less important in the context of the lost generations while the Olympic torch winds its sorry path around the globe as you have to decide whether it is worse to cough up $100 for a plumber of try and fish around down there in the soup of nightmares. What the hell, $100 isn’t so much really and you justify the cop out as a fear of contracting one of hundreds of nasty conditions from Typhoid to Beri Beri and even the Heebie Jeebies for having put your hand into all that crap with the knowledge that if you do it life will never be the same as the phrase will echo and haunt you - “I’ll never eat Kentucky Fried Chicken again!”.

But of course I digress, you should know the solution to the conundrum that I faced so bravely - do you stop the dogs barking or save the missus from the freezing shower first?

The answer my little snowflakes is simple: Spank the dogs and they will shut up immediately, the missus however won’t shut up for hours no matter what you do. Just grin and bear it - she’ll calm down … until she remembers you forgot the cheese spread. Oh crap!