Back in the day we had this little ditty that we had written about being on the dole and going up to the local DSS office - the precursor to the modern day Centrelink - to hand in the form in exchange for unemployment benefit payments. It's long ago and from the era when Australia had such things as recessions and economic downturns and 17% youth unemployment. It was a certain way of life. It certainly was grungy and presaged Nirvana and all that grungiest alienation. Nobody thinks at the time it lasts for ever but I know some cases where it's gone on for a long time. Should one judge? Depends on how wedded you are to capitalism and neo-liberalism, I imagine. If you can make it last, maybe that's an eminently epicurean way of life? Not everybody's built for this capitalist, dog-gets-mortgage sort of world.
Anyway, Chatswood was the centre of this kind of stupid existence being a NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) and just living an indolent lifestyle. It wasn't exactly me, but there were people in our orbit living that dope-smoke-filled life of the indolent ne'er-do-well, living in mum's basement, turning it into an orc's den and just skating along on this thin ice of government and social largesse. The easy consumerism of Chatswood was sort of enticing as well as laughable. Hence the original song, which, this is not that song.
Fast forward a few decades and I found myself working in Chatswood and of course everything has materially changed. It's simply not the town in which I grew up any longer. It's very alien and exotic. I can see some of the structures but they are buried in the mass of newfangled developments that have doubtless helped commerce but not so much the culture.
Okay, I complain because I'm a being obtuse. But this song, I assure you, is not.
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