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FLUXX:
THE SHANE CUBIS STORY
I am on the constant cusp of change. Born in the year 1980, it seems I am always arriving just in time to see off another era. Pictures of me in the first year or so of my life show people around me dressed abominably, e.g. crushed velvet and white shoes. Over the course of the next decade, fashion became steadily worse. Labor settled in for its longest ever run at the top. Classic rock was invented, and so was ‘Back to the Future’. In those days computers were still new, and in the movies even a TRS-80 could be rigged up as a full colour secret camera in the girls’ locker room. A movie like ‘Weird Science’ would never be accepted now. Just ask the producers of ‘S1M0NE’. The first recorded example of this lifetime phenomenon took place in kindergarten, where the long-serving teacher, Mrs Bazeos, passed away not far into the first term. A scant few years later, we saw off the benevolent principal Mr Salisbury, who lied to us by saying that tucking your shirt in cools you down and how to bowl in cricket. We swapped him for the entirely more cranky and strict Mr Long, who got angry at a scripture teacher for taking our class to McDonalds. When I began high school, at Smith’s Hill, years 11 and 12 were non-selective, and the atmosphere of the place was still very much public rather than blazers and ‘Promoting Excellence in a Spirit of Trust and Co-operation’. I started off out hanging around with nerds and Daptoids, before graduating to nerds and Daptoids with a better developed sense of humour. When I arrived at university, in 1998, Wollongong was not yet the back-to-back winner of the University of the Year Title Bout. Wumpus was all about ascii and telnet, and the fancypants computer lab still had some classic black screens with green writing. There were constant protests on the lawn to an apathetic lunch crowd, the Duck Inn with kebabs, a dingy dive of a bar instead of a lightsabre-motifed architect’s wet dream (just to clarify: the metaphorical wet dream is lightsabre-motifed, not the architect), and a carpeted food hall without trendy names like ‘Bamboo Fiction’ and ‘rice’. Life was good. One of my first memories of Wollongong itself is the building of the mall, with its awesome salmon pink entryway. My brother has a piece of that entryway. He says its just like owning a part of the Berlin Wall. Our family used to go and eat in the cafeteria at David Jones or Waltons. Or soemtimes we’d eat in the one at K-Mart in Figtree, where they would put ice in your milkshake. Lunacy. You don’t see that anymore. I don’t know. That last paragraph seems to have killed my argument. I really segued into sentimentality over dodgy eateries there for a bit. Maybe this ebb and flow of time happens to everyone. I don’t care really. Mostly I just like to talk about myself, and how important I am. Anyway, I’d best be off. |