As you may have gathered from other posts during this month, June of 2012 was not a good month for me. Well, all bad comes with a certain lining of good, but that is all that the good in this instance really amounts to. A lining. And that good is in the form of making one of the toughest, most painful decisions I have ever had to make.
For a couple of years now, I have been telling all and sundry that I have had a gutful of what I will be polite and use the local verancular for: Queensland. But you need to understand where I am coming from in order to understand why making this difficult choice and decision has taken so long. You see, as I am sure some readers can read between the lines and guess, I am very limited in my choices in terms of where I live. Prior to the move to Queensland, which I resisted for literally as long as I could, I was trying to make a new start in Melbourne. I wanted to go to Melbourne, leave behind all of the things I saw as having made my life difficult during my upbringing in Sydney (especially the people), and start over. Well, with some help and a few strokes of luck, the actual moving part ended up being pretty easy. But sustaining living there, and finding means to sustain it on my own, that proved the difficult part. I fully believe that services in all of the capital cities of Australia’s East Coast are not so much concerned with finding people meaningful employment as they are keeping people on their books as much as they can so that they can beg more funding out of the Federal government.
You see, like most so-called democracies have been whipped into during the last thirty years, Australia has this nagging belief that any unemployment is baaad. And the people who are unemployed are baaad, and lazy, and useless and blah blah blah. What a lot of these retards do not seem to get is that business, especially big business, benefits from keeping unemployment at or around a fairly constant rate. Six percent of the available workforce is where the usual beneficial rate is pegged. In an economy of zero percent unemployment, inflation would increase to the point of making many jobs meaningless to have. Or more so in the case of entry-level or essential-level jobs, the kind that the toffs will not go near for fear that they might get dirty.
In a nutshell, I ended up in Queensland because after being told “go to the mental hospital or we will send the police around to violently drag you there”, subjected to a second and very lengthy bout of priapism, and just generally having enough of living like shit, I had had enough. So what made me want to leave Queensland? Well, after being told I was the least typical person on the higher-higher end of the autistic spectrum a rehabilitation consultant I would like to strangle until their head pops off had ever encountered, I noticed and realised things. For one, a certain parental unit really had a raging hard-on for country hick fukktard things, like somehow being a slack-jawed yokel made one somehow better than the ilk of Einstein, Burton, or Heinlein. And no matter how he was told this was not the case, whether it be yells, demonstrations, or even the throwing of appliances down multiple stories, he would not take it for an answer.
Thomas McIntosh, look in the mirror. You are staring the only person who has ever aspired to be a country hick fukktard in the face. Literally. The only person. Was it not enough of a hint that all of the autism specialists worth a shit sandwich thrown at a wall were in a city? Or that the country hick fukktard shithole you think everyone should aspire to be in has no industry, no local business, and no real infrastructure work with which to support itself? Was it not enough of a hint that the biggest business in the place, other than overpriced real estate with rents that none of the locals can actually afford, is welfare?
Call me an idiot to your heart’s content, Thomas McIntosh, but the word for a man who prefers a place where the unemployment rate among the supposedly golden demographic, eighteen to thirty-five, is over fifty percent, to one where one can simply travel to another spot and try their luck, is waste. As in refuse, as in the stuff that we keep circulating through pipes under our streets to keep out of view, and to keep from making us sick.
This, combined with the unpleasant revelation that suburban and to a somewhat lesser extent urban Queenslands are rude, ignorant, stupid, and unaware to a degree that would get them killed around places I frequented as a young adult, has made up my mind. Given a choice between death and living in Queensland for the rest of my life, I choose death. And if that means the kind of death that Alex Murphy suffered in RoboCop, so be it. I cannot stress that enough. And of course, I am sure the Queenslanders will piss and moan about it, crying refains like “waaah Dean said something about me I did not like” (Thomas McIntosh‘s number one hit, in other words). But you see, in times gone by, when people said things about us that we did not like, we knew we had a number of options. One, we could piss, moan, and deny until we were blue in the face, just like Queenslanders have made an art form out of. The fact that Queensland has the worst healthcare outcomes, most overloaded health system, and highest level of relative poverty in the Eastern Coast cities, speaks for the effectiveness of that approach.
Or, we could do what generations in the middle of the previous century are on record as having done. Acknowledge that there are problems, that there is a stick in our society and too many people are getting the shit end of it, and do something about it. Think that we have come so far in the past sixty years, baby boomers? Let me tell you something. If Truman, Eisenhower, or indeed even Nixon, saw the housing industry as it exists in Queensland today, they would start to nationalise it. I am not kidding. Like the Great Depression, it would just be cleaning up of another private enterprise fukk-up to them.
Not that Sydney, or indeed much of New South Wales, is any better with regard to how much suffering and misery has been brought about by a lassiez-faire approach to the housing market. But Sydney has things that Queensland and Brisbane do not.
Like I said, if you took a thousand residents of Caboolture, teleported them to Wynyard Station, Pitt Street, or indeed even the Westfield Shoppingtown at Parramatta, and told them they had to physically walk to find a way out of that location, I would be surprised if even five percent survived. The vast majority, if not all of them, would get trampled, crushed, pushed, knifed, or even in some possible extreme cases shot, to death. Because if there is one thing that you learn very quickly in all of Sydney, especially when you go further in, it is that getting in peoples’ way and staying there is a very rude, very annoying, and in some cases very violence-inducing thing to do. In Lethal Weapon 3, a frustrated jaywalker asks Mel Gibson‘s character if he needs a walking license now. Well, if you think that is a valid response to getting called into question about jaywalking, I would like you to come and spend a few years living in varying parts of Queensland.
So I do not end this month with a total outpouring of hate, I would like to remind the audience that there have been, in my experience of life in Queensland and Brisbane, three tiers of people. The first, which constitutes the majority of the populace, is the kind I have devoted most of this entry to. People I would embrace the genocide of. It is sad, but there it is. The second tier is the kind of people I can deal with politely, especially on a business basis, but would just as soon not get too entangled with in terms of interdependence. Because if I end up getting to depend on them for too much, if I need their help in anything to a great enough degree, I will soon end up bumping them into the first category.
The last category, Queenslanders I would actually be aggrieved to hear about the distress, injury, or death of, I can sum up very simply. It consists of one person. Yes, you read that right. In near to a decade of interacting with Queenslanders of varying social strata, I have met one person whom I would be upset to hear of suffering in any manner. No, I am not going to name names. They know who they are, they know they have this exalted status, I do not even know if they bother to read this shit-arse journal at all, and what is more, I do not care. But I would like them to know the point I am trying to make here, which I began covering a few paragraphs ago. People like me do not simply wake up one day and out of the blue decide they hate an entire group of people for no readily apparent reason. Hate is like love, admiration, or sympathy. It has to be motivated by something.
What motivates me to hate Queenslanders the most, other than their ignorance, inability to efficiently create traffic flow, or understand a six-word sentence spoken to them in a manner they are not fully expecting, is their extreme denial. Every time, without fail, when I have raised an issue along these lines with Queenslanders, or imported Queenslanders like the idiot male parental unit I refer to (calling him anything relating to Sydney is not on, as Sydney has emphatically disowned him), child-like tantrum whining has always been the response. The problem is not with us, say the Queenslanders, the problem is all you, every bit of it your fault, et cetera and ad nauseum. But visits to places like a McDonald’s in Northern Brisbane tell a different story. Help me out here, residents of Parramatta. How deep does every line at every counter have to go before an experienced staffer at a Parramatta McDonald’s have to be before they will say they are having a busy shift? Around the time I left the area in 2001, I would have put the number at a dozen. And mind you, the counter at this McDonald’s when last I saw it was at least eight registers wide. Is the updated figure for 2012 that much different? Yet when you express amazement, disbelief, or just plain anger at a Queenslander telling his staff to slow down taking orders, the cooks are too busy, when there are a mere three counters with three or four people deep from each (if that), the problem is apparently you. Sorry, Queensland, no sale. Holding each other to higher standards, whether it is in service, academics, or physicality, is a large component of what has kept our species at the top of the pecking order on land for much of this past century, in spite of numerous sub-optimal characteristics.
In other, less… shall we say, modern, countries, Australians have a bit of a reputation for being rude thugs who will just as soon kill foreign visitors as look at them. Whilst there are parts of Sydney that sustain such a belief, such as Villawood or really far-West suburbs such as Mount Druitt, I would not be surprised to learn that such foreigners would agree with me when I say the overwhelming majority of the civilised Australian society lives in Sydney. Succession from the rest of Australia, declaration that Sydney (or even just Parramatta) is a separate republic, and that entry is forbidden to outsiders who do not have at least one living relative within Sydney’s limits, would be a move forward in my opinion. And thus, my decision that there is no place for me within Queensland, and never will be even if they give me the golden key to the downstairs lavatory, has been made.
And if you were wondering if there was a point to this entire text, here it is: Queenslanders have nobody to blame for this as far as I am concerned but themselves.
I Still Find It So Hard... 