Xavier Toby

This article first appeared in the Brisbane Courier Mail

The internet sucks and so do we.

There was so much promise. The finest literature, historical texts, scholarly research and artworks are all available for free online. The best of human history and its more widely available than ever before, but nobody, including myself, is looking at it.

Instead we’re on social media, getting jealous of lives people are pretending to lead.

Browser window shopping, for stuff we don’t need.

Checking medical advice, so we can obsess over ailments we don’t have.

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This article first appeared in the Herald Sun

and the Daily Telegraph

‘Let’s go to the beach!’, is that really code for, ‘We can’t sit inside staring at screens for our entire lives, and I don’t have any better ideas’.

I’ve had some unpopular ideas in the past. A tax on sugar, climate change exists, and cafes shouldn’t charge extra for soy milk, but calling beaches overrated could be my most controversial.

Any hot holiday, everyone has the same idea – beach. Although we all know what’s waiting. Crawling along in traffic and circling until you find a spot, like a big stupid land shark. Then it’s a long walk over foot-melting roads, footpaths, gravel and sand, to a minefield of unfortunate bodies covered in worse tattoos, dotted with trash and the uncoordinated diving for balls and frisbees, set to the melody of arguments and music tortured by mobile phone speakers, all reeking of sunscreen and sweat.

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This article first appeared in the Herald Sun

You can sleep when you’re dead. He will drink you under the table. You snooze you lose. She can really hold her drink.

All catchcries of the modern-day gladiator. Genetically superior humans who go hard and rarely go home, and leave mere mortals like myself crumpled at their feet and looking up in awe.

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This article first appeared in the Sunday Herald Sun

‘Stop being a pathetic little victim. That’s so Gen X of you!’ my wife yelled.

‘What the what?’ I replied.

She explained that Generation X is a term made popular by Canadian author Douglas Coupland, to describe those born roughly between 1965 and 1979.

I told her I knew that, she wondered if I already knew why did I ask, so I told her I was going out.

‘Running away. So typically Gen-X,’ she said.

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This article first appeared on The Big Smoke

The public’s outrage to Barnaby Joyce’s affair has been understandable, but gazing at the history of similar actions, don’t be surprised if nothing happens to him.

Barnaby Joyce and Vikki Campion have officially been outed for swapping gravy, dancing the forbidden Polka, and indulging in gland-to-gland combat, and I’ve got two questions:

• Who gives a shit?
• Will anything actually come of it?

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This article first appeared in the Herald Sun

Are shopping centers quieter than they used to be? I remember twenty years ago parking on a piece of grass a ten-minute walk from Highpoint, and it being fifty-fifty if my car would be there when I got back. Or going to Chadstone and spending an hour shopping, and two hours in the carpark.

The last time I went to a shopping center, on a Saturday in December while it was raining, I thought it’d take at least thirty minutes to find a parking spot. It took zero, my toes did not get crushed by one stroller, nor did I repeatedly get stuck behind waddling couples in tracksuits, and I only saw a handful of distraught males waiting on the benches outside of Myer and David Jones. I only knew it was a shopping center due to the retirement village décor, charity muggers, and all the 80s saddest water features.

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