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Written by Garry

Created: 11 February 2010

As early as the mid nineties, when I was thirteen years old and half way through year eight, it became fairly clear to me and a quite a few people around me that my life was headed down the rocky, sporadically lit and capsicum flavoured (not really, I just felt I needed a third descriptor in order to generate the right cadence, which I have now, ironically, destroyed) road that is the life of a worship musician.

The problem was, even in the mid nineties, the most advanced musical instrument Darwin Memorial Uniting Church owned was a Casio keyboard which had been constructed sometime in the early seventies. It got the job done in terms of accompanying the Sunday School sing along each Sunday morning, but once I graduated to playing in the real service, it was clear I was going to need something a little more sophisticated. Although I will say this: When the church got rid of the old Casio, my dad bought it off them for about twenty bucks. It still works.

This was the time of the great DMUC bakesale of ’95. Basically a posse of church leaders, figureheaded by my mum, went bananas cooking shortbread, apricot slice, rum balls without the rum (it was church, after all) and about a billion different variations on lamingtons. Every Sunday morning after church we’d sell them to the congregation and put the money into a fund to buy a new keyboard. It was a hectic few weeks, but when the shaved coconut settled we had put enough cash together for the glory that was the Yamaha PSR 225.

Two hundred voices. Sixty-one touch sensitive keys. Ninety-nine different rhythmic accompaniments. I was in my own worship musician Nirvana, which is the stupidest cross-religious metaphor I’ve ever tried to get away with. The point is I loved that old keyboard. I knew every voice inside out, and exactly what sound I should use for whatever songs they picked for any Sunday service. Although it technically didn’t belong to me, we took it home most weeks so I could practise. All through high school, that old Yamaha was close enough to being a part of who I was. It wasn’t just regular church services either; That baby handled camping trips, Scripture Union mega youth services, school concerts and birthday parties. I think I even used her for a couple of gigs with the rock band we formed in year twelve. That keyboard rocked.

But, as the Oracle (not the one from Delphi, the one from the Matrix) so wisely declared, "Everything that has a beginning has an end". The time came for me to move to university in Queensland. I passed the Yamaha on to the next generation of church DMUC musos, knowing full well that none of them could ever love her the same way I had.

Once I got to Brisbane, I decided it was time to get serious, so I got myself what was, at the time, a top of the line Korg Triton named Samantha. Sam is basically the best thing ever, and is still sitting in my room next to me as I write this, but I never did forget the Yamaha that started it all.

I’m back living in Darwin now, and last weekend my mother came through town to visit me. We decided to head into DMUC to catch up with old friends. DMUC have bought a new electric piano with weighted keys and a good stereo sound they can run through the sound system. Things really have changed since the old days.

Having said that, some things seem to be immovable constants of the universe. Mrs S., the same woman who taught me in Sunday school is still running that side of things. She called me aside after church and asked if I could have a go at fixing a problem the current Sunday School musos were having with their keyboard. I couldn’t believe my eyes when we opened to the cupboard to check things out. There she was; my old Yamaha, just as I remembered her. She’s got some loose connections now, so the onboard speakers (Samantha thinks those things are so quaint) cut in and out. Mrs S. said I could take the keyboard home if I wanted to try to fix her.

I’m absolutely useless at all things electronic, but there was no way I was passing this one up, especially after they threatened to put her in the op shop if she couldn’t be fixed. So I put the old cover on, tucked her up under my arm like I always did, and carried her out to my mum's car like it was 1999 all over again.

The Oracle can shove it; the PSR rides again! Now all I have to do is find a way to keep her from fighting with Samantha.

And since I still haven’t settled on a usable new sign-off line of my own, I can think of no better way to end this post than with the benediction we used to say every week after Sunday School (for all I know, they still do).

May the Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent one from the other.

Amen.

Garry with 2 Rs

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Written by Garry

Created: 27 January 2010

I had the best Australia Day that I’ve had for a good many years. Brunch with the closest thing I have to family in Darwin, and then a barbeque and game of cricket at Lee Point, followed by a critical review of the Triple J hottest 100, and a public discussion on how much more awesome than England we are. It wasn’t extravagant, deeply-moving or particularly well organised, but as I stood with my cold coke at deep mid on and watched my friends and compatriots trying to bowl outswingers with a tennis ball, found myself thinking

“Yeah, this is the way it should be.”

It was such a gloriously simple affair that it made me realise how simple it can be to have the absolute time of your life. All we needed was some crude sports equipment and a critical mass of friends around and we were set. To me, it was all the evidence I needed that Australian culture, while unable to be defined by academics or social commentators who think they’re academics or self-opinionated bloggers who think they’re social commentators (Yes, I do include myself in that last category) is actually tangible.

It’s hard to believe that all that was just 24 hours ago as I now sit here at my desk at work. I’ve once again come to the end of my list of things to achieve today (it’s currently 10:00am as I write this) but all my supervisors are too busy and important to set me anything new to do.

The simplest answer would be to just sit here and browse the internet and make myself look just as busy and important as everyone else. Unfortunately my desk is immediately adjacent to the HR manager’s desk. My HR manager (who, by the way, is English; make of that what you will) has been known in the past to make less than subtle observations to me if she hasn’t heard my keyboard making any noise for a while. So now I’m writing a blog post at work, because in order to keep HR off my back, I need to make sure my keyboard is making noise.

“Yeah, this is the opposite of the way it should be”.

I realise that most people don’t like having to work for a living, but I’ve come to the realisation that I really don’t like my job. The idea of what I’m supposed to be employed to do sounds magnificent, but the amount of time I spend actually doing that seems to be minimal.

To top it off, my car is still sitting in the Ford mechanic’s car park waiting to be dealt with. There’s a whole other post coming on that epic and tragic saga, but suffice it to say that despite my grand dreams of a new decade in which I’d be zipping all over the city working on outlandish schemes for whoever needed me, four weeks in I’m still grounded and now spend my weekends whinging about my job to… whoever happens to bother reading this (I’m going to go with… no-one, with the possible exception of my sister who will get a link on her blogger dashboard).

Furthermore, I still haven’t generated a convincing sign-off line, so for this week I’m going to have to borrow someone else’s. I promise I’ll give it back when I’m finished with it.

Thanks for watching Spicks and Specks. My name's Adam Hills. Goodnight Australia.

Garry with 2 Rs

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Written by Garry

Created: 02 February 2010

At the risk of presenting myself as some sort of over-bearing, self-indulgent whinger (an O.B.S.I.W. with a blog? Perish the thought.), I would like once again to touch on the subject of the fate of my car, the increasingly ironically named GSS Tarrdis. I realise I’ve already devoted one post to her purchase, and another to the fateful night when we crashed into a humpbacked whale. But the saga of my struggle to have the damage addressed by some combination of mechanics and insurance assessors is one that will be sung long and loud in the halls of… people who have little else to sing about. Dentists or something, I don’t know. Unfortunately, singing loud and long in my office is generally frowned upon, so instead I whinge silently yet long-windedly on my blog, which is of course what Cum Tacent Clament is all about.

Anyway, to bring you up to speed, I’ve prepared a montage of the basic gist of previous entries, in prose form. Try to imagine it with the mystic “Eeeeeh-eeeeh” music from Heroes in the background if you can. It makes it all sound much more spiritual.

Previously on Cum Tacent Clament:

…Finally, after a three week ordeal, here are the specs for my brand new spacesh… I mean… car…

…At the time, I believed it to be a dog, but closer inspection of the dent in my car suggested it may have been a hippo. Either way, there wasn’t much left of it after it stepped into my headlights as I approached at 100 km/h…

…Monday morning I called the Ford service centre and had the Tarrdis towed in to start the fun. The mechanic was a little confused…

…She had a strange look in her eye as I approached. I couldn’t decipher whether it was a look that said “Oh good grief, what is it now?” or one that said “Hmm… perhaps he’ll bring me flowers this time.” Maybe both…

…Our environmentally friendly calico shopping bags cost two dollars fifty each. And you'll get the added satisfaction of knowing you're saving the world…

…the insurance assessor then travels to the workshop to inspect the damage and approve the plans of the mechanics to repair it. The mechanics can’t touch the car until they get approval from the assessor. A week later I’m still waiting to hear back from this mysterious and apparently prohibitively busy assessor…

… Um, here’s your pancake sir…

Sorry, I drifted a bit at the end there. And now: the stunning conclusion to “What happened to Garry after he hit the whatever-it-was.”

So to start with, I contacted AAMI. The AAMI girl contacted the insurance assessor. The insurance assessor contacted the Ford mechanics for a quote. The Ford mechanics rang me, which was weird. I rang my mum, just to break what might have otherwise resulted in a vicious cycle that would have doomed us all to spend eternity trapped in a telephonic causal loop.

The crux of the issue was this: Because the oil filter had been torn off the undercarriage and the radiator had been knocked around, it was almost a foregone conclusion that there had been damage to the engine. That was always going to be an expensive problem, which wasn’t such a big deal for me as I had comprehensive insurance.

No, the real dilemma was the tug-o-war between Ford and AAMI over the quote to fix it. AAMI have a policy that if the cost of repairing a car is more than 75% of the value the car is insured for, then they write the car off and buy you a new one. This actually works out well for them, because they keep the remains of old one and sell the surviving parts off, which in my case is most of the car.

Ford, I suspect, were fully aware of this, and aimed to keep the quote as low as possible so that they would get the job of rebuilding it instead of handing it over to AAMI, who were understandably keen to reach a write off deal. So every quote that came back to AAMI via the assessor got sent back in order to obtain a more ‘comprehensive’ quote. This went on for two weeks. Eventually I got sick of the whole charade and stopped smiling mysteriously at the AAMI girl and told her exactly what I thought of the whole process.

At this point, they got over trying to bully Ford into a higher quote and offered to move the car to NT Auto, who were much easier to deal with, apparently. So the assessor restarted negotiations with NT Auto for a quote to repair my dog-smashed Focus.

Here’s the best bit. The Ford service centre in Berrimah is not actually authorised by Ford Australia to sell new Ford engines, unless they are faulty under warranty. So, while the original Ford dealer couldn’t actually quote to replace the engine, some other local mechanic (NT Auto) could, but in order to do it he needed to contact his Ford supplier, which was located in Adelaide.

I’m sure you can imagine just how thrilled I was to be dealing once again with Adelaide, the city which had imbued me with so much commercial confidence in the past. “What could possibly be worse?” I asked myself. I shouldn’t have asked.

“We’ve been able to locate a suitable replacement engine,” said the NT Auto lady. We’re just waiting on a quote for the engine and the cost of shipping it here.”

“Where is it being shipped from?”

“England.”

So now, here I am one month on, waiting on a quote from a city I can’t stomach on shipping an engine from a country widely acknowledged as being entirely populated by useless prats. My confidence is not the highest it’s ever been, to put it lightly. Meanwhile, what is left of my car (that is, most of it) still languishes in the car park of the Ford Service (huh?) Centre, where it has been since I had it towed there after New Year's Eve. So I’m going in again this week to whinge to AAMI, only this time I think I will actually take some flowers.

After all, it’s our one month anniversary on Thursday.

So it just remains for me to thank Tony Slattery, Mike McShane, Josie Lawrence and Ryan Stiles. This is me, Clive Anderson, saying goodnight. Goodnight.

Garry with 2 Rs

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Written by Garry

Created: 13 January 2010

Okay. So I’ve settled into my new life in Darwin. I’ve landed a job which, while not the most stimulating or challenging role I’ve ever filled, is keeping me out of mischief (or at least, forcing me to concentrate my mischief on weekends). I’ve bought myself a car (and then smashed it into the beast from Marlow’s Lagoon – still waiting on the quote from the insurance assessor to come through). I’ve come to grips with the fact that I live in Palmerston. So I guess it’s time to come clean on what I’m really doing here.

In the spring of 1976 a Dutch mathematician named Hans Flueber theorised that for all X where X is acted upon by an exterior force (let’s call that force “Garry with 2 Rs”), the probability that Garry with 2 Rs would act upon X was inversely proportional to the number of well meaning friends telling him he should totally act upon X.

Obviously old Hans faced a few challenges when it came to proving his theory. Firstly, it didn’t have any numbers in it, so all his mathematician friends started laughing at him. Secondly, I (Garry with 2 Rs) wasn’t born until 1983, which, while proving how far ahead of his time Flueber was, made it difficult to define a meaningful set of testable variables. Also, he was mute, invisible, a pirate and made of grape flavoured jelly, so people tended not to take him seriously.

The point is (yeah, believe it or not, there is one) I’ve decided that while I’m here and not suffering from the same shackles and obligations that many of my friends do (spouses, children, a social or biological imperative to grow up and act responsibly, etc.) now is the perfect time to launch a theory of my own (this time it’s real. I’m not made of jelly or any other sort of desert as far as I know. I do really like ice cream though).

Wait… I just read back over the second paragraph. I think I should clarify; X is not a woman. X is more abstract, and basically stands for the stuff everyone tells you that you should do, because it’s established social convention, or popular ‘wisdom’ dictates it as the appropriate choice.

Where was I?

Yes. My theory is that in a city the size of Darwin, for a citizen of that city as well known to many of its other citizens as I am and for someone who’s been bouncing around the Christian scene for as long as I have, it is not necessary to limit one’s abilities and influences to the service of just one branch thereof. If that didn’t make any sense to you, don’t panic. It’s only just starting to make sense to me. For now, I’ll just introduce you to my first running total for this year. It’s over there on the right hand side of the blog, under my profile description (maybe I should update that too… although I think all that stuff is still true).

I had my first conversation with someone who told me I needed to get planted last weekend. While I respect the opinion of the man who told me this, he’s completely wrong. I'm convinced that it's possible to be a functional member of the Church of Darwin without confining myself to membership of just one congregation. This year, I intend to prove it.

I aim to misbehave

Garry with 2 Rs

(Yeah, I know I can’t actually use that as my new sign off, since it’s already been done by Captain Reynolds. It would be awesome though…)