Phone-ienza

In this day and age of ever expedient afluenza, consumer experts believe that your mobile phone says a lot about who you are and what you’re all about. Nielsen Media Research Associate Director, Mr Jody Loughlin, claimed recently that many Australians choose a phone that says something about them, and that the type of mobile you’re seen with could even be more important than the carrier you go with. This recent report went on to establish some commonalities between brand names, the types of people who normally go for the types and range fo phone on offer. From the corresponding reductive table I was able to deduce that, due to my long standing relationship with a Nokia mobile phone, I am a middle aged manager type, most likely 55+, with a penchant for health kicks and life balance. In this regard, I sit alongside affluent phone sistren Jennifer Lopez and Mary J. Blige.

However, what the table failed to include was whether or not the aforementioned Nokia phone, or other, was the initial choice of the consumer. What if they had inherited their mobile phone from not one, not two, not three but four other prior owners of the same phone, all whom decided it was no longer something they wanted to be seen with, and that the phone lacked so much class and hint of status that it might be described as an offensive abomination. On the surface, Nielsen Media seemed to have omitted this critical variable.

After two months of dealing with a Nokia phone whose battery, keypad, and front and back chassis would remain in tact only with the bonding aid of a rubber band, I feel I must distance myself from the Lopezes and J.Bliges of the world and go out on my own. In this regard, i can safely declare that when it comes to technology status, i am indeed a pioneer in a class of my own. What else could we really deduce about a man whose on/off button was snapped into the dark depths of his phone’s circuitry months ago, forcing him to carry a blue Artline fineliner around with him in order to jam the nib into the button cavity should the phone require re-activation? Many things can be said. ‘Complex, determined, problem solver, enjoys challenge. Likes antiques. Individual’. As well as, of course, ‘ladies man, showman, mover and shaker’.

But in all seriousness, lets get to the core of my inner being. How about this:
‘Refuses to give a shit about purported correlations between small pieces of technology and one’s inner self. Real. Remembers a day when you could deduce a personality by having a face to face conversation and doesn’t care much for a phone that works. Cheap bastard’.
Today I end my relationship with my Nokia 8310.
RIP, old girl. You’ve served me, and your four other owners well. For the agony and the pain I put you through in your dying years – all the the rubber bands and fineliner stabbings, I commend you. Your service is over. And now, it seems, I have little choice but to go and discover a new personality; but you can forget it if you think I’m going to pay money for it.

Laughing Man of Fitzroy

Shallow blue sky holds the fort as a breeze shoots through my system, curling and messing a clump of shaggy post nana-nap fringe. I sit up here on this newfound sanctuary, the corrugated roof outside the second story bathroom of our Fitzroy palace. You can see everything from up here – the Town Hall, the backstreets, the housing commission flats. Not to mention all the characters out and about doing their thing.

A man in fluoro yellow wally hat trundles down Condell St to my right with a blue shopping bag in his clutches. His pants are particularly high above waistline, not to mention a dubious shade of beige. He walks as if in desperate need for trouser readjustment and is no doubt an accountant. The yellow wally hat and high pants disappears around the corner. I hope for his sake the blue plastic bag contains a fresh pair of beige breeches.

I lie back, survey and breathe in the life coming and going. The city, its cranes and cheesegraters stare back at me as if parked right on my back doorstep; the neon signs slowly lighting up and out to party again. Sun gone, breeze chillier, I wait for another sign of life.

As if on cue, the laughing man of Fitzroy appears. This funny little cat loiters around my backstreets day and night without fail. Laughing man is Vietnamese, roughly four foot ten, somewhere within his fifties, sporting a little bum fluff moustache beneath his nostrils. Laughing man’s fashion is the direct inverse of high pant accountant - yellow shirt, white wally hat, and open toed brown sandals. No high pants to be found on laughing man. I very much doubt laughing man is, or ever was, an accountant. Though it might explain why he is now nuts. Laughing man’s daily agenda seems to be: wake up, hang around, drink from thermos, check out the Fitzroy scene and commence maniacal chuckling at nothing in particular. I can;t see what he's having a laugh at at but whatever it is, it’s gold material. Seriously funny stuff. Whenever i see him, laughing man rarely goes a few minutes without absolutely losing his bowel in a barrage of high pitched cackling.

Often I walk home to find laughing man at his favourite spot in the mid arvo sundrench at the foot of the weird Yoga ashram across the road. I too am a big fan of the sun, but rarely does it get me wetting myself. I’ve noticed recently that laughing man also likes to set up shop three doors up in the front yard of the abandoned old Californinan Bungalow. In unattended leaves and shrubbery, he reclines with a full thermos of hilarity drink, as burning smoke from a rolled cigarette filters away from his loose right hand. Laughing man sits there and chuckles madly to himself in constant bemusement of the world around him, his eyes glazed, his ability to communicate with words neutered by the one-track desire to piss himself silly.

His cackle has a certain tone that brings people together. It is like that of a cheeky infant, like a falsetto ewok or baby mogwai gremlin might pissing themselves after being repeatedly tickled with a massive feather. A girl on a bike rode nearby laughing man within my proximity the other day. We both looked at each other with a smile and shared a chuckle of our own. “He’s a character, isn’t he?”, I cheerfully prodded bike woman. Savvy with laughing man’s colloquial antics and reputation, bike woman nodded in knowing agreeance.

The sky has since turned a shade of sultry lilac as charcoal painsplotches of cloud disperse with the breeze heading east and fast. I watch the last of laughing man fade into the dusk distance. I try to picture where he sleeps at night. Does he have a house? Does he have a family? Do they sit around a lazy susan and huff down a big can of nitrous oxide for dinner? I wonder whether laughing man has much to laugh about when the warmth of the sun is gone. Maybe he laughs because that’s all he’s got. That, and his gleaming silver Thermos.

Or perhaps I’m being a little presumptuous. Maybe laughing man knows more than all of us combined; in on a secret that none of us can see.

‘Beatles Love’ filters through my laptop speakers and George Harrison’s magical voice tells me that the Sun is coming. It’s gone for the day, George, but it’ll be back. And when it does, I'll possibly be here sitting with a corrguated ridge defying my posterial comfort. I can pretty much guarantee laughing man will be swallowing it's rays at the foot of the weird yoga ashram hurling back skyward an artillery of rib-splitting guffaws, hee-hees and titters; with thermos chock full of nitrous and pants that sit just right upon his waistline, not too high, and not too beige.