Confession
Wendy Price

I may have become terminally adversarial. The overwhelming awareness of this nature caused me to quit social media in March 2018. But you still attack me. You attack me via email and instant message when I've made it clear in these pages that I no longer use any of that trash...

And I do not truly know any of you. You may recognise my face but in reality you know nothing. Solely to my face have you attached an attitude...

I NO LONGER PARTICIPATE IN YOUR CYBER WORLD

So forgive me if I appear stubbornly contrarian. When you're constantly under attack you learn to defend yourself constantly.

Case in point: It's Tuesday morning. I'm at a sharehouse in Maylands listening to an old friend complain about the culture of the entire metropolitan area. They no longer live here. They claim to live in Melbourne. In truth it's in the cyber world that they are thoroughly entrenched.

And it was a disjointed attack; their evidence absurd:

It was then that I remembered why I haven't seen her for a while.

Hearing about as much as I can take of this nonsense I climb into my '93 Camry and via Seventh Avenue fly straight through at Guildford Road, layering the bitumen with skid marks simply because I can. I was angry. How fortunate then that I remembered a healthy and convenient outlet for these feelings; the impromptu Rage Room that had been assembled by Sarah Grant on the verge of her now-condemned Jolimont studio I'd wanted to use while I still had the chance. And this isn't any of that contrived, council-sanctioned rubbish either, the absence of which the cyber-world people raise when listing this city's deficiencies like they did with international tours, escape rooms, or Krispy Kreme. Grant's "room" is a rage room deconstructed; the regular smashing at the remains of Grant's studio that awaits dump-truck collection an organic, metro-wide community demonstration that a faceless bureaucracy will never suppress a healthy, thriving culture, despite what the Town of Cambridge thinks it can do.

I'm feeling good now; reinvigorated by 20 minutes of destruction; a porcelain toilet bowl ground into a thick dust across the otherwise-bland council verge. I feel ready for the evening's Outcome Unknown concert, highlighted by experimental songwriter Jenny Hickinbotham. Jenny has seen most of Australia from her van - it's in her songs - and it's Perth she's chosen to call home now. And her's tonight is the first of many "character" performances I have to choose from in the next seven days: a mega-lineup of primitive electro-acoustic headlined by Furchick at The Bird on Tuesday; a cappella versions of 80s hardcore by infamous street performer and dessert assassin The Wretch - in his first organised concert - at The Milk Bar on Saturday; and on Sunday at Beeches Tavern you can witness Clem Galea improvise blue [sic] music to the tune of the classics - à la Blowfly and Rodney Rude - until he's asked to leave the pub.

I do the right thing and make my friend aware of these happenings via a scribbled note left in the sharehouse mailbox. I thought they'd be pleasantly surprised. I thought they'd want to be involved. But I guess some people would rather be bored than wrong.

See you in the real world.