Lessons from the school of W.

Me, Apprx. 4am: Could you burp for me?  Please?  Daddy would really love to go back to bed right now.*

Dubya: Rrraaarghh!!

Me: Really, this would be better for all concerned if you didn’t guzzle your bottle, and burped quickly.  So much more comfortable for you, and we would all be so much happier.

D: *Headbut* (Which I interpret as: “do you honestly believe this is up for negotiation?  It’s my party, and I’ll spew if I want to!”)  Rraaarghh!

*This conversation actually took place.  Well… my part, anyway.

Filed under: Family, dribble, experiences , fatherhood, newborns

Petrol prices

My two cents.  Read this this morning, reporting that almost 80% of voters would like the government to actively cut petrol prices.  The sample wasn’t that big, and who knows where it was taken from – but really, do they think that will change anything?

Pricing doesn’t work on the cost price of goods.  It works on what the market will pay – and people are still paying for petrol.  Any cut in excise and the market price will gradually grow to what it has been… and keep growing.

I’m sure that people’s wallets might be feeling the pinch, but as long as we have 100’s of DVD’s on our shelves, flat screen televisions on our walls and up-to-date wardrobes, then there is still room to move.  Time to start adjusting our lives to living with high petrol prices.  Walking more, using public transport more, and shopping close to home.  Car pool. Ride a bike.  Grow your own food.  Defer your wish for indulgence, live in a simpler fashion, take the time to enjoy the basic things of life that require no petrol.  You might find high petrol prices don’t hurt so much after all.

One last thought: Why do we insist on seeing the various governments of our country as so many older brothers or fathers who will get us out of a fix?  This sees the role of government as being to maintain my standard of living, thankyou very much.  Can we not act, adapt and change regardless of their position?  Do you need a car?  Do you need to own a house or apartment?  Why is it the government’s responsibility to do something about this?  Instead, can we not revise our own expectations?

Sorry for the rant, but I can’t believe that neither the SMH, nor whomever conducts the polling cannot imagine some more creative things to poll on.  Of course people will answer yes to the question of ‘would you like to pay less for X?’.

Filed under: Politics, dribble, economics, experiences, green, madness, marketing, observations, random thoughts , Australian federal government, housing prices for that matter too, petrol prices, rant

grind baby grind

Churn it out like clock work. Off to work, the same way, everyday. Trailing behind a guy half asleep at the wheel travelling twenty kilometres below the speed limit. Either he’s lost, or the coffee that is sitting in his centre console in a battered travel-mug has yet to take effect. It might also explain the dents on his car. Is he any different to me?

The loss of inspiration in a world where everything becomes a cliche sooner, rather than later, where freedom means being chained to a desk producing things nobody needs to survive, except for the fact that if you didn’t, the next person down the chain would have nothing to sell and so would be out of a job. The real of our world – we need useless things. More and more of them. And we hate them as much as we are addicted to them.

It shuts down thought. One spark of a moment when you are yourself and you rise above the trash and scum and humdrum but then, oh no, it’s gone, and you lower your head back below the sides of your cubicle. What is freedom in all of this? Where has it gone? Was it a mirage, an ethereal miasma that hangs tantalisingly around your head in a pale cloud like someone else’s cigarette smoke? Was it ever there to begin with, I wonder, or is it the small, the weak, the overlooked thing, like a small half-crushed nutshell, that once inside, stretches on to the infinite. Oh yes, I could be bounded in that nutshell and be a king. If only you will help me look for it…

Filed under: dribble, random thoughts