It's morning in Philly

My head's feeling heavy

The sun makes me dizzy

You monkey you left me

-Veruca Salt, Shutterbug

Is it the times that we’ve been out fighting?
Well I tell you all those times we never really hurt anybody.
Or is it that we were eating while other people were starving?
Is this our crime?

-New Model Army

Okay, so my year 9's are designing a cover for a research project. One of them is doing the standby that is 'drugs'. She was drawing as many drugs on the cover that she could think of - She had got as far as cigarettes, and had run out of ideas, so had to ask me what other forms of drugs there were. She didn't even think of alcohol without help.

A couple of periods later, my year 11s were playing sexual hangman.

Here's how you play:

Student A has engaged in sinful coupling with Student B. Except for his own fine self, Student A does not know the sexual history of Student B. Student C does know the sexual history of Student B, but wants to make Student A guess.

Thus; a game of hangman.

I really like both of those classes. But for entirely different reasons.

Never wanted kids.

Actually, that’s not strictly true; When I was one myself, I always just assumed I would have some, because, hell, that’s what grown-ups did. However, after I started to give some thought to it, it started looking like a pretty poor option almost immediately.

A few of the reasons, in no particular order:

The time commitment is horrifying. I mean, we’re talking at least 18 years. And that’s if they’re in a mood to fuck off after high school. My parents didn’t get rid of me until just shy of my twenty-second birthday, and they had to sell the house and move to Australia to make it happen. And hell, just because your kids aren’t in the next room, they’re still your problem. I’m twenty five years old, I’m a teacher, I am one of the most grown up people I know. But if I run out of money these holidays, guess where I’m running to… Which brings me to;

Good lord have you seen how much money dependants hoover up? I mean, fuck, I can just about afford rent, food and the odd cd. I can’t afford summer clothes for myself. The idea of having to support another human being who needed food, clothes and cigarettes... It’s the difference between being able to afford what you want, or what your kids want. For someone quite as selfish as me(mememe) that’s not the hardest choice in the world.

When kids are little, they just kind of crap all over the show and make noise. Then they turn into teenagers. Now, speaking as an industry insider, teenagers are surly little bastards who spend waaay to much of their free time drinking and having dangerous sex just to piss off the people who spend all of their time and money supporting them. If I wanted a prick with an attitude problem to spend my money, use my things, take up my time, and then give me strife about it, I’d still be living with my first flatmate. The fact that I’m not should be taken as a signpost.

I am basically a good person – my parents did a decent job on me and my brother. But you know, I really can’t remember how. I don’t have the confidence that I could raise any child of mine to be a good person. How could I guarantee that my child wouldn’t become part of the problem? Short answer; I couldn’t. What if my kid became a surly bullying fuckup because I dropped the ball somewhere along the way. And that’s only their personality – What if they were born with messed up wiring, or they got sick, or even died? How would I cope? (Fairly badly, is the answer that anyone who knows me well would come up with I think.)

Every time I have thought about having children, I have come up with more and more reasons to not have any. The idea that anyone might actually want these little parasites actually became quite confusing to me.

Anyhoo, we had a school outing to the water park today. I planted myself on a chair with a book, and growled at any students who asked me why I wasn’t swimming.

As I was reading, I heard a series of short, high-pitched shrieks. They echoed in quick succession from one of the hydro slide tubes.

Well before the source came flying out, I knew who it was; One of my Year 9s. I recently wrote on her report that she is infectiously enthusiastic. She follows me around the classroom getting me to help her with the work. She is in running competition to clean my whiteboard. She constantly sings top twenty songs in during class. Drives her classmates nuts, but I find it so endearing that I don’t stop her, even when I’m yelling at the rest of the class to quieten down. Even the bad songs are cute.

Looking up, and seeing this girl coming off the slide, with such a look of happiness on her face, laughing and smiling, I just wanted to adopt her. Really, that was the first thought in my head.

Then, for the first time in my life, I realised what parents feel. I realised that all of the effort, the trials, the pain, they are voided by the happiness in the eyes of your child. Everything I’ve ranted on about above, it’s all valid. But seeing the happiness on your child’s face makes it all worthwhile. All of it.

Maybe I want kids one day.

"It had many shortcomings, but it was without doubt the very first true monolingual English dictionary, and it's publication remains a pivotal moment in the history of English lexicography."

-Simon Winchester, 'The Surgeon of Crowthorne'

Yeah boy - That is the sort of book an English teacher should be reading.
I feel all like, smart an' shit.

"Do you make your students write poetry?"
"Yep."
"What do they write about?"
"Depends. See, I'll set them the task of writing a poem about the ocean, so you'll have 29 kids struggling to come up with a rhyme for 'fishes'. Then there's the quiet girl who sits in the back corner writing a three page poem about how her brother touches her."
"Does that really happen?"
"Every fucking time."

There were thirty of us training to be English teachers back at University. I was the only one who wanted to be a teacher.

Not that the rest didn't want to be there as such, but they were there by default. They had graduated with an English degree, realised that they were as utterly unemployable as they had been a few years earlier, so had defaulted to the only job three years spent studying post modern American short fiction qualifies you for.

I haven't thought about this in a while - I've been a bit busy.

For example, yesterday; I was trying to track down the Councillor for advice on how to handle the girl I think is cutting herself. Then I had to deal with the girl I know is cutting herself. There's the pregnant fourteen year old, and the student who burst into tears in the middle of a conversation for no reason. Then there's the troubled kid who I've been monitoring, My special project, I've fought long and hard to get her to so much as attend class this year. She was coming right, going to all her classes, doing the work, not giving her teachers a hard time. But this week, one of her teachers jumped on her for a small uniform violation, and sent her off to the Deputy Principal to get a detention.

And she didn't come back for three days.

Oh, and did I mention that this was all in the space of a few hours on Friday?

And most of the people looking after these kids are there by default.

My job gets bigger every day.

"Hang on," said my neighbour. "That isn’t Lachlan Helm’s son, is it?"
"Sounds likely. Who’s Lachlan Helm?"
"The biggest slumlord in the city."

So, it turns out that not only is my landlord genetically descended from a line of slumlords, but he was raised to be one by his father. That’s nature and nurture both.

He probably doesn’t even know that what he’s doing is wrong...

As part of International Week at my school, each class was assigned a country. They had to make the flag of that country, being free to add any artistic extras they felt appropriate, such as traditional symbols, patterns and such forth.

I caught up with one of my students as he was painting a large swastika in the middle of India's flag. The idea has been in his head ever since I told him about the history of the symbol sometime last year.

I did point out that not everyone was aware of said history, and it could upset some people.

His response was simply that they would have to educate themselves.

The next period, another of my students wagged class (where, incidentally, we were discussing the concept of subversion) to add the finishing touches to his class's flag. He needed the extra time to get the flag in by deadline to be displayed in the staff room, and it does take time to neatly write "Fuck America" in Aramaic.

They make me so proud.

I’m not sure which part of my current existence worries me more; The fact that a student today came up to me at random and asked for a really sharp knife, or the fact that I immediately and unquestioningly went and fetched it for her...

"Alright, remember, this is due in at the end of English tomorrow."
"I don't think I'll be finished by then."
"Meh. You'll be sitting in my room the following period anyway."
"Why?"
"Are you going to Maths?"
"No."
"Exactly. And I'd rather have you in here finishing your assessment than roaming the corridors wasting 45 minutes."
"Sweet."

The state of the Union, children.

Things I hate.

? "She would've been quite pretty, but for the expression on her face, which spoke of boredom and blankness and defeat. People like that, they're wearing their problems on the outside, it makes me uncomfortable. I felt sorry for her."

I found this quote on Livejournal, written by a person who is, in their entirety, summed up by her own words.

? The fact that I still read Livejournal on a frequent basis. The lives of my former peer group are like the most boring car wreck in the world - glacially uninteresting, but I can't look away.

? The Catholic Church has to debate whether or not to impose a zero tolerance policy on priests found guilty of sexually assaulting small children.

? I was explaining to a friend that I hated basically all of her social circle. She told me that I should be more compassionate.

She thinks I should be more compassionate to a group that have treated her and those she called friends with a lack of compassion I can only describe as inhuman.
I have two responses to such blindness. One is sadness. The other ends with "...and the horse you rode in on."

? Goths.

Things I Like.

? When I can't stay out late because I have work in the morning, I can actually tell people "It's a school night."

? I've been reading Atlas Shrugged recently. Far from being the dry didactic essay I was expecting, it turns out to be an engaging, well-written didactic essay with many thought provoking ideas.

Of course, one of the characters decided to give his opinion of socialist leaning society, and the resultant monologue has been going strong and uninterrupted now for 22 pages, with no signs of slowing.

Reading this on the bus means that the stirring, emotive power of this speech has been spread over about three days, destroying any impact it may have had.

This is good, because that book's been making me think too much recently - a problem that doesn't occur when the philosophy is broken down into stilted semi-coherence.

? The fact that the above, when you look at it, basically makes me one of James Taggart's fellow looters as defined in said book. But hell, I think it's probably better to be a villain as defined by Ayn Rand. I mean, Libertarianism for fucks sake...

? My flat at the moment. Ever since Fuckhead got out (if anyone wants to find where he's moved to, he's under "F" in the white pages) this has been an overwhelmingly positive place to live.

I am particularly enamoured with my new flatmate's hobbies of doing his own dishes, keeping out of my room when I'm not home, and refraining from lengthy diatribes involving the New Zealand Labour Party and/or the shattered ruination of his so-called love life.

? Several minutes into first period, a year 11 stuck her head into my room to tell me that she was going to class for the first time in days. I don't even teach this girl, but she wanted me to be proud of her, which I was.

Now, of course, this sort of carryon is hugely detrimental to her education, but it makes me smile.

There are an absolute shirtload of things that I would change if I could, and I often fantasise about doing so. But more often than I would have imagined possible, I catch myself grinning and thinking "My life rules!"
That is all. You may return to your pornography and apathy.

Rolling Stone interviewed Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera on the first leg of their joint 'Justified and Stripped' tour.

Interviewed seperately, both go to great lengths to point out how little they see of each other - they are busy with their own parts of the show, their own schedules etc.

I will bet you cash money that they are fucking each other many, many times a day.

And they're both doing it to get back at Britney.

------------------------------------------------------------------

After exhaustive research, I've finally come across the most offensive thing I've ever seen in the twenty-six years I've been alive.

Depending on what channel you surf, the tATu video (you know it, the one with the teenage Russians in schoolgirl uniforms making out. Yes you do...) is crudely edited to remove all traces of homo-erocticism, and a few up-the-pleated-skirt-of-the-jailbait shots.

However, I had forgotten how seriously Top of the Pops takes its sponsorship dollars from the moral majority.

They perform live, not in schoolgirl outfits, but in their becoming-equally-as-famous white singlet, knickers and no bras combo.

Half way through the song, they move closer to each other, wrap their arms around one other, and the camera quickly pans away to a heterosexual couple kissing in the audience.

After several seconds on hot girl-on-boy action, it cuts back to Lena and Julia wiping their mouths, and then they get back to the singing.

Most offensive thing ever, I tells you...

------------------------------------------------------------------

"I like the idea of a Russian lesbians being at the top of the charts. I'm not too sure about the music, but I like the concept behind it."
-Noel Gallagher

------------------------------------------------------------------

Now I will readily admit that I am a bad man. As proof of this, I offer up the fact that the wallpaper of my computer is a picture of Lena and Julia tATu resplendent in transparent white clothing.

However, my question is this; Who is the worst person; Myself, for having this as my wallpaper, or my flatmate, who cons his way onto my computer with a disgracefully flimsy excuse, and then spends a while struggling loudly with said computer, trying to reshuffle the icons to see a nipple…?

------------------------------------------------------------------

Word Magazine: Did you hear t.A.T.u.'s version of "How Soon Is Now?"
Morissey: Yes, it was magnificent. Absolutely. Again, I don't know much about them.
Word Magazine: They are teenage Russian lesbians.
Morissey: Well, aren't we all?

Boring and old are things you’re told about the entire world.
Just wearing black won’t take care of that, don’t be stupid girl.

-Killing Heidi

However, every time I try to order my thoughts on the subject, my higher brain functions are swept away by an euphoric tsunami of love for the state of popular music.

I have named this phenomenon a ‘Christinagasm’ for no reasons worth dwelling on.

She likes listening to punk rock
Melancholic in her black frock
And she smiles when she sees me
Intoxicated by your company
-Elemeno P

Brilliant.

You’re like the sun
But you never shine

-Killing Heidi

No idea if that’s what they’re actually called, or if it’s just a phrase coined by internet people. Cellphones with camera attachments.

Apparently these are the source of a rapidly emerging social problem in Japan – People going into magazine shops, surreptitiously photographing pages they want to read, and sodding off home to read their freely acquired article.

Brilliant.

These futurephones have me excited – they fuel my belief that cellphones are soon to become the major piece of social technology. Right now cellphones can enable verbal communication, send and receive email, take photographs, download and upload information from and to the internet, play music, and, hell, they have Tetris on them.

Give it five years, and the fuckers will have the memory capacity of the hard drive you’re sitting next to right now (unless, of course, you’re reading this in plain text format from your phone, which is entirely possible). Phone banking is common, and it’s logical to assume that within a few years cashflow/ATM transactions will be able to be done by cellphone – your phone being wired into your bank account. Novels are being published online – you could read one on your phone if the urge took you. How long before the people playing ‘Snakes’ on the bus to work in the morning are reading a book, or even the newspaper? Or watching television?

Ten years. Books, landlines, maybe even televisions and stereos will be obsolete. Society won’t look anything like it does now, because of futurephone technology.

Of course, today some of my year 10s told me about a picture they had taken with a futurephone while at someone’s house. A picture one of my Year 12s having sex with his girlfriend, who I taught last year.

This will be the last update of the November 9 culture journal, as, shortly after I upload it, I am taking a hammer to my computer, and then systematically destroying every piece of technology more advanced than an abacus...

Sometimes I feel lonely and I crave human company
I miss sleep it's nice
Haven’t had much of it round here
Sometimes I feel sorrow and there's no way to release it
It wells up inside, don't have no one here with whom to share it
Except you. You're nice.

-Tadpole

Living above a funeral parlour has certain advantages. As someone recently pointed out, when you're casually musing "I wonder who died in 1978?", you'll usually have to do without an answer . However when one of your cupboards is filled with death records, that's not really a problem. And the place has never looked so classy as it did when that wreath was accidentally left on our stairwell.

The noise pollution is less in the side of the house I've recently relocated to. My old room was directly over the speakers of the bar which neighbors the funeral parlour. Now, I never did mind the noise – they played good music, and I didn’t have a stereo, so it all worked out quite nicely. But yes, the new room, over the parlour part of downstairs is generally quieter. There is just small source of sound I hadn’t anticipated.

I can hear the Death Phone.

This is the phone you ring to arrange the burial of a loved one. I’ve heard it often enough coming up the stairs, but there’s something new and slightly unsettling to it now.

Lying in bed at night, hearing the ring, and knowing that someone’s died.

I really must start lording this over more goths....

This is part of a much larger piece of drivel I wrote a year or two ago, sitting at the downtown bus terminal at six in the morning waiting to go to work. The rest of it was bollocks, and has since been binned, but I rather like this wee piece of description.

a motley scattering of people beginning their daily routines with the sort of resigned determination that somewhere along the way slid into ambivalent acceptance.

So I’m finishing off the major first-time-in-eleven-sodding-years clean of the flat, and I come to a realisation;

We have two completely superfluous rubbish bins.

I can actually feel the hot, dry breath of post-modernism on my neck as it screams “Do it! Do it damn your eyes!”

I wouldn’t even know where to begin…

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn't go away."

-Phillip K Dick

"Mick Foley, you've just had the crap beaten out of you in front of your children. You've terrified them, and they'll grow up to be serial killers - what are you going to do now?"
"I'm going to Disneyland!"

(Copied directly from the homepage of a sixteen year old goth girl)

I love watching the movie The Crow( the first one with Johnny Depp). I love Johnny Depp, he's just so hot and great at actting wierd people.

So I was in the Marae sorting things out after the school show.

A year 11 of my acquaintance told me she was ducking out to the front lawn for a smoke, but that she'd wait to see who was in the approaching car, because if it was a senior staff member, I might get into trouble.

I thanked her for being so considerate.

And I meant it.

I am so happy I don't teach at one of those plastic rich schools.

I don't have much in the way of old friends. The reasons for this are many and varied, but I can't think of any way to make them interesting to the casual reader, so they'll remain mercifully unsaid. I have maybe four people who have been in my life for more than half a decade, but (for, again, sundry reasons simply of no interest to the proletariat) they could all be defaulted off any given "friends" list with relative ease.

So anyway, went to McDonald's a few days ago. I recognised the person who served me. I first remember becoming aware of her as part of the staff at the small McD's I got breakfast at every day in my second year of university (ah, protesting against multi-nationalism and globalisation, then going to McDonald's and having your regular order ready for you before you got to the counter. It was good to be 19).

Now, I recognise this young woman, but I don't know her at all. I know that since she entered my consciousness she has worked at three inner city McDonald's that I've eaten at, ranking as manager in at least two of them, and I think she's been pregnant twice. Which, hell, is more than she knows about me - ie that I used to have long hair and I eat too much McDonald's. I don't know so much as her name, let alone anything else.

Then it occurred to me; This burger drone has been popping up in my day to day activities on and off for well over six years.

This McDonald's employee has been a constant in my life for longer than any of my friends.

I am the twenty-first century. Look upon my works ye mighty and tremble.

Alright, got to get this one off my hard drive, stop it cluttering up the place. It's about comics – Too long for Nov9, but too irrelevant to go anywhere else. If you're not interested in this sort of carryon, you could probably skip it. Have fun with the five minutes you've just saved...

It occurs to me that Marvel comics is unworkable. It has too many years of unwieldy continuity burdening it. Almost every character has had a dozen revamps and re-imaginings. I've always believed the line that if a character can't be explained in one sentence then it has too much baggage (Of course that is horribly restricting in adult narratives, but we're talking super heroes here - escapist spandex fantasies).

So here's my thinking. Marvel chooses it's top twenty, and gives everything else to Garth Ennis.

Run with this

This isn't to say they publish twenty ongoing series, but these are the twenty characters they're working with in one capacity or another.

There are some dire characters in Marvel's stores, which get constantly recycled.

Take as an example Cloak and Dagger. This dynamic duo have been around for twenty years, and, despite a dizzying number of attempts, have completely failed to sustain an ongoing series chronicling their adventures.

However, they are workable.

Pair the concept back to its base - ignore all of the strange continuity revisions forced on them when sales of their various series inevitably flagged.

Two runaways, on the streets for very different reasons, meet up and stick together out of isolation and need to survive. They are abducted by a pack of baddies who target the homeless because they won't be missed. The two, and many others, are used as guinea pigs for an experimental new drug. All of the other teens die after taking the drug, but these two are transfigured into beings of unearthly power. Consumed by fear and grief, and angry enough to kill their captors, they use their powers to clean up the streets of those who would hurt young people, in a campaign that is one third protecting the innocent, and two thirds getting vengeance for the pain caused to them.

Give this concept to Brian Michael Bendis, who has a history of writing solid crime stories, and solid super hero stories, and tell him he can start from a clean slate.

This has worked before. Look at the X-Men. Core concept - A group of people born with special powers and abilities (and occasionally accompanying deformities) are gathered together at a special school to learn to use their abilities to help a world that fears them.

Now, back in the seventies, this was a very nicely done allegory for racism, but in the last twenty years it has become an unwieldy collection of shallow ideas and bad costumes.

However, of late (in the face of a radical rethink of the moribund X line) Grant Morrison was given the flagship title. He kept the core concept, but reshuffled it, focussing the story on the almost completely ignored concept that their headquarters was also a school for mutants. He recast X Men into roles as alumnists and teachers, and focussed on what the political climate of a world where more and more babies were being born into this new species would look like. What would a classroom environment be like where all of the students were freaks and demi-gods. How would people react to this sort of organisation? How would politics, fashion, philosophy, be affected by this in-your-face evolutionary leap? Sure, the narrative is still driven by the "grown men in pervert suits punching each other" scenario, because, hell, it's a super hero comic. But it is very clear, the X Men do what they do for the good of their students, so that the world will be a safer place for the next generation of post humanity. Maybe I like that a bit too much because I'm a teacher, but that strikes me as being better than the meaningless slugfests I grew up reading.

This sort of re-imagining has worked elsewhere; The Black Panther, acknowledged as the first black superhero in comics has languished since the sixties, not even being that interesting a guest star. The core concept: An athletic super hero who is the king of a small African nation has, as part of the mantle of kingship, the physical prowess of the big cat after which he takes his name.

A background character for over 25 years, he has had a very successful continuing series since Christopher Priest recast him to focus on his role as the head of stare of his own country. Having as many, if not more stories that focussed on United Nations debates and trade agreements as focussed on "grown men, pervert suits etc" has seen the Panther support his own series for a couple of years now, which beats out all other attempts by more than double.

So anyway, five people - Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and whoever else is handy that day, need to sit down and figure out which twenty characters are being spared, and who will be writing what. Everything else they give to Garth Ennis.

Steven Grant once invited us to consider the idea d that there were no bad characters, only bad storytellers. He pointed out that this was not true, and offered up as an example Brother Power, the Geek. The star of this masterwork was a scarecrow like mannequin who was animated by lightening. Instead of deciding to use his new found life to become a super hero, as was the style of the time, he used it to become... wait for it... a hippy. This series lasted something like three issues back in the sixties.

Of course, many years later, Neil Gaiman brought this irredeemable dog of a character back for a special. Throwing him into Swamp Thing continuity, which had as it's base, the existence of fire, water, air and earth elementals, Gaiman had a mad wee story recasting Brother Power as the fifth of these beings; Earth's Doll Elemental. It was a crazed story that proved any character, no matter how dire, can have one good story written about them.

Every character has one good story in them. I think Ennis is the person to write that story.

Hands down best example: Nick Fury. Originally introduced in Marvels war comics, Fury was recast in the seventies as the ultimate super spy. The character was the embodiment of the cold war - a high tech super James Bond, taking on thinly disguised allegories for Russia and beating them with superior technology and good old American stamina.

But you know, the cold war's over. Has been for a bunch of years.. The WWII vet turned secret agent isn’t a viable genre.

So along comes Ennis

His Fury limited series had Nick Fury as a broken down anachronism, a bitter relic incredibly angry that some bastard's taken his war away from him.

The series has him fighting his mirror - a Russian soldier who misses the Cold War so much he mounts a terrorist power play to try to restart it. The final scene of the series is Fury in pyrrhic victory, having vanquished his foe, but realising that, had his enemy not jeopordised the stability of the world, then, out of boredom and a longing for the old ways, Fury himself would have.

Punisher. Back in the eighties, this character was fascinating. A true anti-hero, who, in a world of Spider Man and the Fantastic Four, brutally killed mobsters. But he became too unwieldy, lost focus, and the readers lost interest.

Along comes Garth.

His Punisher was a simple, back to basics roller-coaster ride of carnage that paired him back down to the basics. And at the end, the Punisher realised that what was once a quest to save innocents like his family, an ends-justifies-the-means horror for the sake of protecting the innocent, had changed. He no longer wanted to rid the streets of crime, because then he'd have no-one to kill. And years of his campaign had turned him into a card carrying psychopath. He loved murder too much to stop, and criminals were the only target he could kill in good conscience.

Both Nick Fury and Frank 'Punisher' Castle, should have, to my mind, been retired after these series (they weren't, and haven't been hugely interesting in the hands of other writers...). Ennis provided the ultimate final chapters to these old characters.

Give him Warlock, Captain Marvel, the Silver Surfer, and say "Garth, we don’t need them any more. Have fun." Sure, it probably wouldn’t be the most upbeat experience, but it would be a fun ride, and it would make the place a lot cleaner.

Then Marvel could get back to telling stories without having to have a full page of recaps explaining why this character turned evil in the 1970s until he changed his costume in the 80s and got married and divorced and became a Nazi and retired and was cloned and became a priest and a gun toting vigilante and everything the fuck else that twenty years if stagnation can force upon a narrative…

And remember, like Evan Dorkin says – Comics aren’t just for kids. They’re for socially retarded adults as well.