Tag: sunset

1993: Shorn Right!

Bad hair days be damned and seeking other solutions!

(updated: 16 February 2025)

[ Light Blue, issue 113, Feb 2024, p8-9 ]

I was never sure what to do about my hair when I arrived at Timbertop. I liked my hair but wanted something lower maintenance so decided to get a “blade 2.”

In my hike group, “Lozenge” (below middle, black t-shirt) took the photo above left and ended up getting a blade 1, I think a couple of weeks after me. It was insane.

But both our hair grew back by term 4 to the point where I was asked to get it cut.

I still can’t wrap my head around how Owen Wilson (above, yellow T-shirt) ended up in the group without anyone batting an eyelid. Or was it his twin/doppelganger?

#UnDíaComoHoy 1968: nace el actor #OwenWilson (Shanghai Noon, Zoolander, You, Me and Dupree, The Big Year). pic.twitter.com/w2Ogm5NM1a

— Culturizando (@Culturizando) November 18, 2014

Whatever we did, it worked and I picked up equal first in the photo competition (with Sight Regained t-shirt) at the end of Term 1.

Also, our hike group of 6 people picked up 3rd place at the hiking awards for the distance we traveled at the end of the year with our group leader (above, Dolphins cap) receiving a free jacket. In that group, to the best of my knowledge, I did most of the navigation, sometimes with Lozenge. I was the designated navigator, was I not? Yet roles weren’t really important. I had already been navigating at Mount Buller with the ski map for many years prior, so it wasn’t hard for me.

So “Dolph” chimed in sometimes yet maybe he was navigating too, but was less vocal about it. Same with “The Big Dipper” (wearing glasses.) We very rarely got lost or needed to do a triangulation. If lost, the idea is to just stop and retrace steps and with good visibility, that’s pretty easy. I think the key is to always be working with the map and land simultaneously as much as possible by merging the two within the mind. That leaves the others to crack jokes and think about water. I think we aimed for ~30kms per day in pre-planning but also took into account terrain to obtain a time target instead of distance one.

Maybe the secret to our “success” was that 4 of the guys were all from the same unit, so had more cohesion. I also knew Lozenge from before Timbertop. In the long-runs, I was usually coming in 18-25th place – I think the best from our group. Maybe Lozenge did better on a couple of occasions. None of us were laggards. The most difficult groups are ones where there is a super-fast person with a super-slow person. Also, we were good with setup and takedowns of camp – that can really be a time sink.

D’s group scored first place – they all got jackets and a girl’s group led by a Japanese girl came in second. I think that was the case.

Getting a blade 2 before anyone else was the tough thing to do and a lot of people were checking it out.

• pic 2,3,4 – unit master and science teacher S.
• pic 5,6 –  “Passover or Passout?” with M and FT, 5 April 1993. [pic 5 was also in the school magazine with a description]

M’s not technically Jewish and it was very gracious of him to attend. More could be said about the passover but I’d have to double check with a few others first.

Speaking of which, I met W at Timbertop and he lived near me and we actually hung out a few times in the subsequent years. I hope he’s doing well. The last time I saw him was in late 1999 when I encountered him at the end of Huntingfield Road by chance with PJ (I am pretty sure that that is what occurred.)

Looking back at my life, I’ve missed so many formal occasions, I can only see it as character-building and a means of differentiation – Rites of Passage or Rites of Destruction? Religion divides as much as it unifies in this day and age. And for some, a Jewish guy married to a gentile is not even seen as married at all and that the wife could/should convert. As such, I’m not doing too badly. It’s also impossible to convert to another religion – you’re just confused.

There’s no map to the promised land – for me at least. Does one swim upstream or downstream? Is there even a choice? And I met a religious guy in Israel that aimed to do away with all the mitzvot and just attain the wisdom behind their underlying sefirot – a different kind of observance – but even that knowledge has been corrupted I suspect. Some people think that this life is all about attaining rebirth in the World-To-Come. Beam me up, Scotty!

Anyway, so my haircut was also a rebellion from my younger years when I refused to even get a haircut.

[Tasmania – first plane trip away from Melbourne]

With the curls, random women would come up and tell me how much they loved my hair and I would say that I hated it – probably due to the compliments but I still didn’t want to get a cut: I thought it would hurt! Something like that attention then happened at school but due to the lack of hair.

Due to the attention, after the blade 2, and until it grew out a bit, I covered my head with a beanie and picked up the nickname “Champ” in the process. That was from big ‘G’ who had just tried it on and was with R at the time.

— pic 2,3 – Bluff Hut for unit campout

It was actually a really empowering nickname – I kind of had to live up to it. I’m not sure many girls used it. And there was another Champ there at the time who was Thai and that was his real name but I don’t think we ever spoke.

G and R both got really short haircuts some time later (when visible underneath their cowboy hats) and perhaps the nickname came about more from their admiration of the cut, than of me. G played drums too. I was relieved people weren’t calling me AIDS like some had 5 years prior – alongside a few calling me ‘Einstein’ such as J. Only G knew what AIDS stood for backwards. I heard him reveal it one night in the San(atorium) in passing conversation. Shocking stuff.

The Champion brand was unknown to Australia at the time and my mum brought it back from Chicago a couple of years earlier. The shop had said that it was the hottest brand at the time. K-Ci can be seen below wearing it on stage in New York in 1991 (vid here.)

In the 1980’s I used to listen to American Top 40 (Casey Kasem) on the radio, and so got a headstart on what was going to be coming down the pipe from the USA ahead of time. Here he is announcing Huey Lewis as #1 in October, 1986. But if you mentioned 80’s music in 1993, people would think something was seriously wrong with you.

“J” took the photo below with my camera and has since become a professional portrait photographer.

I ended up leaving Geelong Grammar as my plan was always to do the International Baccalaureate there, but it was shorn out of the syllabus.

What did I expect?

But I never ended up doing IB anyway due to poor French performance, and I did do VCE Media (1+2) in Year 10 which was new at the time. A few other people ended up at Wesley like PJ and a few girls. I had trouble sleeping in a roomful of people… those damn sleepwalkers – maybe that was it. But hey, I snored sometimes. So on many a night I was the last person to “depart” so I departed myself.

Going back to board – all aboard!

[ 1993 – waiting to get onboard the bus at Spencer Street station with M who I knew from my earlier Glamorgan stint whereby I came into the school already knowing good people. ]

[ 1988 –  arrive at school early enough and there’d be tons of guys on the tennis court playing an elimination game – a few girls but not many. Another chap W also went to the same school from down the street and he rode there too. ]

Quality of sleep is something I should discuss at a later point as I had nightmares for many years starting in the early-mid-2000s I think. But not really anymore. There were also dreams of euphoria, and then various combinations of the two as the mind-body complex healed and purified from the soul outward. Healed from what, though?

1. Original sin?
2. Nanotechnology infiltration with a biblical past?
3. Individual or collective pain-body?
4. Unfulfilled Jungian archetypes?
5. Not resonating with past lives and the soul’s journey?

…with those perspectives being in response to a foreign yet innate self-regulating process contained within my perception. Opening up the hurt-locker for a spring clean.

Current reads: “Dreams of Being Eaten Alive” by David Rosenberg pic.twitter.com/iDWnYnY7VK

— Frater J (@AnothrGayJustin) March 8, 2019

In our unit in 1993, G was very apt at hitting the snooze button and he did it a lot, and he also ended up school captain a few years later.

[ G – far right checker shirt + red t-shirt, further up, behind wheelbarrow. “S” above with the broom who G really helped out and S picked up an endeavour award that year.]

These days I prefer to see myself as waking-up more than anything else, and creating my own version of “woke,” if it’s possible. The beauty of life is that any type of meaning can be attached to it, it seems, but for how long remains in question. But I am always happy to laugh at how seriously I take myself.

King Charles could visit Australia later this year, and the federal government is wondering where to take him https://t.co/X1bQSPA2wc

— ABC News (@abcnews) March 3, 2024

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