Mad Chaos: Monday, May 17, 1999

The Neighbor’s Dispute

There was a guy just at my door a couple of minutes ago chasing a kid down the street who threw rocks at his house.  Hearing no car I thought it to be Pari and Osama.  But opening the door to an angry looking guy who looked like a laborer from his dirtied clothes, I knew I was wrong in my assumption.  

Asking me if I had a little brother, he then told me that a kid ran into my front yard to hide from his obvious crime.  Trying to help out the guy as best I could, I turned on the front light. We looked for him around the corner of the fence, but to no avail.  

The man lived up the street where the alleyway is.  I gather it’s not Blake’s house, or maybe it was.  That house situated on an alleyway is just prone to these kinds of attacks.  

Anyway, the angry guy was a tradesman.  After not being able to find the kid, he made his way further down the street, screaming at the top of his lungs for the kid to show up out of the dark.  Obviously he never did.

Parents Buy Me A New Heater

Monday we shall now begin, as it has been much pages of description already.  

I am happy to report first of all that my parents bought me a nice little heater today.  They have been looking around for a heater for quite a little while.  It does do a good job to warm me up when I am a little bit away from it, but when it comes to increasing the temperature in my room, it needs a bit of time and isn’t very efficient.  

Nevertheless, that’s what you get when both your parents look around for the bargains and don’t really worry about how much electricity it will be using up, or how easy it can cause an electric shock.  Nope, my parents only look as deep as the price tag.  The smallest they can go, the better.  

However, to be good on my parents, they did shop around for a little while to buy me a little $25 heater the size of a laptop screen.  But they didn’t recognize that it wastes lots of energy.  It is fan heated and is very easy to short-circuit the fan and get electrocuted.  

Keith Comes Over

Anyway, my Monday morning started at 9:00 a.m. by an eager Keith ready to head down to Centrelink so we could look for work like we had arranged.  Knowing that my appointment wasn’t until 11am, and still being sleepy, I asked him to head over at 10am, in which he agreed to.  

Some sleep later I woke myself up to have a shower, something to eat, and then wait for Keith to arrive.  When he actually did arrive, I was having some breakfast to eat.  So I invited him in for that duration.  

Whilst chatting, he talked of Tamsen and how he accepts her dumping him.

 What struck me as desperate and an idiosyncrasy that only Keith can pull off is how he’s going to wait until a month passes and pretend he’s found someone else, to see if it will shock Tamsen into going out with him.  This to me sounds like a pathetic attempt at having her back, but I know he’s only talking out of anxiety.  In one month those thoughts will be long gone from his mind.  

Job Search At Centrelink With Keith

When I had finished eating just after 10am we headed down to Centrelink.  There we started looking through the computers for a job.  

Keith was intent on finding a job.  For that reason, it wasn’t surprising to see that he had more than ten job referrals.  When 11am was arriving, I sat myself down to wait to be called by a case manager.  But when a couple of minutes passed and my name wasn’t called out, I decided to front the desk.  

Work For The Dole Interview In Mission Employment

With this I found out that I had to be at Mission Employment for the interview.  So off I headed there in search of the interview that would land me a job in ‘Work For The Dole’.  

Filling out a form for a little while, Keith looked on one of the lone computers.  I talked to an Asian guy that was at the seminar on Friday afternoon.  He was first to be interviewed.  After twenty minutes it was my turn.  

Handing them the form that I had to fill out before heading for the interview room, I stole their pen because it wrote exceptionally good.  Later I was told by Shawn and Keith that the pen was one of the cheaper pens, but I still think it writes exceptionally well.

The interview didn’t intimidate me at all because it was only with Mission Employment, somewhere where I have worked before.  The questions about where I wanted to work sprouted, but it seemed that she was only going to narrow it down to one organization, the council.  Therefore, I agreed for her to find me something within the council desks where I would be using my administrative and secretarial skills.  She seemed to agree.  

Cruising With Keith

After some chatting, laughing and confirmation later, I headed out towards Keith’s car.  We headed to Macdonald’s in his car.  

Hunger was feeding like worm to my glutton stomach.  So I bought an ice-cream cone, something I could afford.  

Driving up the main street of Campbelltown, we headed to the huge car-yard with the electric fence in Leumeah because Keith was told there were positions for car detailing available there.  

The trip was brisk.  We made our way to the man at the front gate who told us Keith had to call for an appointment.  Therefore, we headed back to Keith’s house.  But on the way we bought another ice-cream each and picked up Shawn.

Talking About Lake’s Suicide

When we headed for Keith’s house, I shall note that we also picked up Shawn along the way.  In any case, when arriving at Keith’s house, we weren’t so much there to comfort him for his pains but just to keep him company in his sorrowful hours.  

His mum seemed more concerned for Keith, as she rang him twice through the day thinking he was going to do something that consisted of him taking his own life.  As far away as that seems from the truth, Keith leveled with me and noted he knew now how Lake Curtis felt around the time that he killed himself.  

In Keith’s words, Lake spent his whole life with Nina.  He didn’t really have friends.  When Nina broke up with him, he thought that he had no one to turn to, and decided there was nothing left worth living for.  How wrong Lake was.  

When Keith put himself in the same thought as Lake’s death, it sounded a bit awkward and put on, to me.  I’m not going to say that Lake was wrong or dumb for what he had done but Keith would never stoop to that level, trying, as I said, not to demoralize Lake in any way.

Watching NRL At Keith’s House

While at Keith’s house we watched two games of football on Foxtel which I personally didn’t find to be interesting games.  The only comfort in watching the NRL was that Brisbane Broncos finally got themselves another win against a feeble opponent.  That opponent by Brisbane’s fickle year has been deemed formidable, at least for one game.  

The State of Origin is also only weeks away now.  The excitement is beginning to pound away at my heart with the anticipation of a maroon victory.  

Playing Cards With The Boys

When the football started to turn our respects, I suggested playing cards.  Both Shawn and Keith accepted.  

“These are Tamsen’s cards,” Keith uttered.

He digressed into his own little world before sadly uttering, “I’ll have to return them to her.”

I find it sad in breakups when the two people feel the urge and obligation to hand back personal possessions.  With Lyssa, she wanted back all the photos of her, the moon ring (which at one point she thought she had lost) and all other possessions she had given to me lovingly.  However, Lyssa’s forswearing of my possessions was an act of reprisal, not sorrow, as it should rightly be.  

It was on Monday that Shawn was told about Keith breaking up with Tamsen.  Shawn took it as I did, but with less bearing as I placed on such dubiety.

Hearing The Neighbors Fighting

When cards started to get boring, we headed out to Keith’s front yard to kick around his football.  

Ever since we arrived to Keith’s house, we could hear the people who moved into Tino’s old house squabbling.  As usually is the case, it was a husband and wife domestic argument.  They didn’t hold back on what they said loudly to each other.  

Even inside Keith’s house while watching television we could still hear them.  Keith noted that everyone on the street hates them.  Keith’s dad once called the police on them because he had to get to work early the next day.  

Kicking The Football With Keith

Kicking the football began in Keith’s front yard.  Although Keith is supposed to be a sportsman, his kicks were the most ungraceful.  Mine were mostly filled with jovial attempts to get past Shawn to grubber the ball into the shrubs and plants and then finally to Keith.  

There was one time when Shawn kicked the ball high.  I went up high over Keith’s head to mark the ball and done so accurately.  

Then there is the mishap of Keith accidentally slapping me in the face and then me unintentionally doing the same to him, only worse.  You see, I was in front of Keith and leaping up to catch a ball.  I swung my hand backward to push off his shoulder but smacked him right upside the head.  The slap to my face did register some red inflaming, but I’m sure my inadvertent cuff registered much more of an affliction.

Kicking The Ball Into The Neighbors

The game continued to his street where we kicked up and down to each other.  This resulted because Keith almost hit his own Foxtel beam on the roof.  But his aim didn’t fare any better once on the road.  Successfully booting the ball high off the embrace of his right stalwart foot, he made the air seem subordinate under the ball’s transcending presence.  

His bomb however did find desired altitude.  All our mouths lay agape as it began to plunge.  

Keith’s next door neighbors were working in their front garden as the ball began its aimless spiral towards ground, ever so closer towards them.  Despite our calculative beacons of distress, the Asian lady didn’t look up in time.  A ball that started descending from many meters up in the sky hit her hard in the lower back as she was bending over.  The whole street was in awe when it did happen.  As it did, we hoped she was alright under Keith’s misguided kick.  

Clutching her back with one hand, stunned, she turned around to see who it was, as her older husband tried to console her.  There wasn’t much more than joking expressions of pain on her face.  But after Keith apologized more than twenty times we headed back into his house.  More or less Keith was embarrassed and ashamed.