TONGUES ABROAD

“I have to go over in a couple months and I’ve got a weekend free. What did you do on your day?”

“Wandered around. The shops don’t open ‘til about eleven o’clock, so I just farted about ‘til then. Walked down to the bay. Went down some of the underground linkways, found myself going around in fucking circles between the same three shopping malls for about an hour and a half ‘til I figured out how to get where I wanted to go, which turned out was only  a block away from where I’d been anyway. Had a couple beers at Raffles – you know a pint of Tiger lager cost twenty bucks? Plus GST and a service charge. Alcohol’s fucking expensive over there, you wouldn’t want to run a tab without knowing first – then I went back to the hotel and had a lay down and watched a crappy Christian Slater movie* on Fox.”

They dub over the cuss words in movies in Singapore.

At one point in this memory-searing spectacular, one character tells another to “Get the tuck out of my car!”, and all I could think was, “Put a bit of bloody effort into it, at least.”

After that, I went down the hotel bar, had three gin and tonics and ate some nuts.

“I think I’d get bored if I had to stay much longer than three or four days”, says my boss.

“Mostly, all people seem to do is eat and go shopping”, I say. “You could stay around the hotel, watch some crappy Christian Slater movies, go for a swim in the pool. I was going to do that, but by the time I got back from buying some board shorts, I was too buggered to bother. There might be something at Changi to see, I know there’s a war museum somewhere. I didn’t really look into it, I only had a day, and I didn’t want to fartarse about like a lunatic trying to cram shit in.”

“I’m not really into the food, either. I don’t mind it … “

“I was out walking one night, came across this open mall about the size of Queen Street, all there was, shopfronts selling food on both sides. I saw so much food being made, eaten and bought while I was there, I lost my appetite the fourth day, had to force myself to eat half a burger about midnight at the airport before the flight back. They took us out for dinner one night, this steakhouse for some reason, a couple blocks from Chinatown. I had fish and chips. It was fucking awful. I think they’d put spackle in the batter and tried to soften it up by pouring oil over it.”

“I went to the zoo last time I was there”, says the boss.

“Did it have a foodcourt and a mall? Everything else has”, I say.

I had seen a place in a foodcourt up from the hotel couple days earlier called “Pig Organ Soup”, but, alas and alack, my normally robust spirit of gastronomic adventure failed to grasp my imagination at that time, and I settled for a hot and sour phở instead.

I thought I might buy a camera while I was there, so one night I ventured to the premises of a purveyor of fine image-making apparatus to make enquiries thereof, all of which were most eagerly received, encouraged and answered by an exceptionally polite and helpful salesperson, who not for one second hesitated to show me about a half dozen models, taking them all out of the box and out of the plastic and putting a battery in and taking a few shots and asking me to take a few shots too, and then I realised I didn’t want to buy a camera in Singapore just so I could make like a tourist for a day and take photographs of tourists hanging around all those places I’d be taking photographs of, so I hastily made my excuses and backed out of the purchase and then the store, leaving my poor, but exceptionally polite and helpful salesperson now looking truly clouded by defeat and disillusionment, all his enthusiastically well-intentioned efforts to earn a hundred and eighty bucks having now come to nought, and now he has to take all the cameras and all the batteries and the memory cards and put them all back into their bits of plastic and their boxes and back onto the shelf before he can go home, the time for which has now, for him, become a faraway thought and increasingly distant desire indeed.

I felt a right cunt for a short while after that.

I wandered back to the hotel, had a light meal at the café there and two glasses of wine, the second, much to my surprise, being pronounced ”on the house”, perhaps because it was late and they were beginning to set the tables for breakfast the next morning.

“You can have for free”, the exceptionally polite and helpful waitperson said to me, and off he went to fetch the bottle, leaving me to mutter, Bogart-like, under my breath, “Yeah, sure. Nothin’s free in this world, I know that much”, and perhaps he overheard, for upon his return he presented me the bill and said, “See? Free”, in an exceptionally polite and helpful way, if not positively cheerful almost.

“Oh. Yes”, I said, a little shamefacedly, “Thanks very much for that. Cheers.”

The power of positive thinking has never been a strength to which I have ever dared lay claim.

Ditto chirpiness.

On the flight back to Brisbane, the almost eight hour flight from Changi airport that left shortly after midnight Thursday, I watched a Jason Statham movie called “Killer Elite” which co-starred Robert De Niro and Clive Owen and about two dozen Australian actors, Ben Mendelssohn, Nick Tate, Grant Bowler, a whole bunch of others.

Christian Slater wasn’t in it.

Film Victoria was involved in the making, maybe they don’t like Christian Slater, who knows.

It was okay, I suppose.

Although that opinion is offered on the strict proviso  that it was about one a.m. in the morning and the airline had just served us fish, so I may well have been completely fucking delirious by that stage.

 

* Is there any other kind?**

** Possibly the nastiest thing I’ve ever written.

DO NOT CROSS

I’m waiting to cross the road.

As I do, I hear someone say, “You’d think it was bloody China, eh?”, and I look up and see a middle-aged man in tan shorts and long white socks, snappily pressed short-sleeve shirt, he’s looking at me, his fellow caucasian, and he nods in the direction of a single elderly Asian man wearing a traditional style of tunic carrying a couple bags of groceries …

It’s Brisbane on a Saturday morning.

And there’s no racism in Australia.

FLAGS

“Don’t forget to put a flag on the barbie, Lois.”

“It’ll catch fire, Len. I can’t put a flag on the bloody barbie.”

“PUT A FUCKIN’ FLAG ON THE FUCKIN’ BARBIE LOIS IT’S FUCKIN’ ‘STRAYA DAY AND I WANT ME FUCKIN’ FLAGS UP!!!! … s’what made this country great … FLAGS! … We’d be fucked without flags … Utterly fucked … “

Photo via Bronwyn Towson

THE JOY OF BOOKS

What happens in bookstores overnight? …

From the hard-working folk at Type Books in Toronto, this is pure magic. Original music by Grayson Matthews …

THIS SMELLY LIFE

Yesterday, I briefly considered posting about the Liberal Party’s citizenship spokesperson Teresa Gambaro and her comments on funny-smellin’ foreign people who don’t stand in line proper.

And then I thought to myself (for I cannot really think to another), “I don’t really want to invest an hour of my time trying to lampoon the brainfart of a fuckwit. I have work to do” …

… for the IT people have fucked everything up again, and now I have six months of data to input into an obsolete database in the space of a week and a half in order to meet a deadline.

That’s my life right now.

You see, funny-smellin’ foreign people aren’t quite the priority for most of us most of the time, if, that is, foreign people are funny-smellin’, which I seriously doubt, for …

WE. HAVE. WORK. TO. DO.

Unlike Teresa Gambaro, who appears to have fuck all to do with her day but make shit up and piss people off just so they won’t forget she’s there …

“Yoo-hoo!”, hollers Teresa over the back fence, “Remember me? I’m important! Listen to this! … ”

Nope.

Not worth the effort.

ASK A STUPID QUESTION

Can someone tell me precisely what Republicans are trying to “take their country back” to?

Because it’s got me buggered.

TONGUE OF THE YEAR

Dogs.

Sticking their heads out of cars.

In slow motion.

For 5 minutes …

Do you feel really, really good right now?

Thought so.

Have a Very Smelly Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Smelly Tongues will return in 2012.

TOO SOON

In the late 1990′s, I picked up an album by an artist I had not heard of, or heard, and I did so just because I liked the cover.

I have done this often, and perhaps you have as well, and I’ve found myself surprised more than once at the music that lay behind the art, surprised because there are no expectations, only mystery, and the thrill of the unknown.

The artist in this case was Lhasa de Sela, and the album, “La Llorona”.

de Sela was born in America, her father Mexican, her mother American and they grew up in a bus, travelling throughout Mexico and North America, educated at home.

Spent her adult life based out of Montreal.

Made 3 albums, the first in Spanish, the second in Spanish and French, and the third in English.

As I was loading the first album into my iPod recently, I thought to myself, I must get another disc or two from her, and so I went looking.

And I found this …

Lhasa de Sela died in January, 2010 at the age of 37 from breast cancer.

Here is de Sela at Quebec in 2005 …

The (translated) introduction is as follows …

The next song is a love song and the lyrics say:
I thank your body to have waited for me
I had to lose myself to get to you.
I thank your arms for reaching me
I had to move away to get to you.
I thank your hands for supporting me
I had to burn to get to you.

CBC Radio put a special show together last year in honour of her brief life and extraordinary talents and you can find it here.

Damn. Just damn.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

Dennis Hopper reads Rudyard Kipling’s “If” on “The Johnny Cash Show”, September 30, 1970 …

FUCK ASTRONAUTS

I have the ability to raise one eyebrow independent of the other.

I say this apropos of nothing beyond seeing this ability referred to recently on Facebook as a “singular” or “unique talent” by someone who, quite obviously, seems very easily impressed.

I do not know what “talent” has to do with it, but I work in a fucking office, and most days I’m bored off my nut, so I’m up for grabbing any points for “unique”-ness at this point in life even if it serves as nothing but momentary determent from stabbing myself in the fucking forehead with an icepick for a little entertainment during the course of the day.

You may rightly assume at this point in proceedings that I am in somewhat of a mood.

Anyway.

I have the ability to raise one eyebrow independent of the other, and I came to this ability through carefully studied attention to the eyebrow stylings of one man, and one man only.

Roger Moore as Simon Templar in “The Saint”.

I recall as a young teen, or almost-teen, or not quite-teen, whatever, I would lay on the bed of my grandmother’s room, my grandmother who had mostly raised me while my parents worked, and to whose room I would retreat while they fought in the kitchen almost every night, she would sit in a chair close to a small black and white television, milky cataracts gradually clouding her eyes, and we would watch Roger Moore as Simon Templar in “The Saint” together, and I became fascinated by his ability to raise one eyebrow independent of the other and I came to think, “I too, shall do this.”

Fuck astronauts.

And thus it was I set out to achieve my goal, through sheer determination and studied rehearsal over a period of time, and thus it came to be my goal achieved.

Many have remarked upon this ability at various times, this “talent” of mine, and this pleases me.*

My grandmother liked Roger Moore. She also liked Jack Lord in “Hawaii Five-0”.

I always thought his hair was weird.

I may have been young and impressionable, but I wasn’t completely stupid.

 

* My life feels so small right now.

NOISE AND PEACE

Years ago.

John Howard’s war on refugees is in full swing, there are children in camps, the foreigners are muck, they’ll kill us all, and our very own blackfellas want to take our backyards from us and barbecue our pasty, pure white babies on the Weber.

What country is this?

The Sydney Morning Herald run an edition with a wrap-around cover featuring thumbnail photographs of the refugee children we’ve shoved into camps, their ages range from baby to teen, and I sit on the train to work, seething, looking at these pages and feeling like I’ve just been punched in the face.

I get to work, and fire off a letter to the editor, the first time I’d ever sent a letter to a newspaper, and they publish it. It was sent from another computer, I don’t have a copy, but it went a little like this …

“If my objections to the institutionalisation of child abuse in this country as a so-called “security measure” mark me a Howard-hater, then I’m just fine with that.”

… It becomes a regular habit over the next few years, this writing of letters and their occasional publication, not so much now.

But it’s the NOISE.

Every day it seems, some new loudmouthed halfwit slouches into view to proudly bellow it’s bogan pride at all and sundry, “We’re just sayin’ what people are ‘fraid to say”, which is, in essence “We hate niggers and we hate wogs and they should all fuck off and die and if they don’t we’ll kill ‘em”.

Alan Jones approves.

Stan Zemanek nods his agreement.

He’s dead, Zemanek. Brain tumour.

One night, all these many years ago, I’m standing outside the cinema complex in George Street, Sydney, saying goodnight to a friend after we’ve caught up for dinner, I hail a cab, one pulls over, I get in.

Two things strike me.

The driver, his skin is indistinguishable from the night.

And he’s listening to commercial talkback radio. Stan Zemanek.

Why, I have no idea, but it strikes me as … incongruous, to say the least.

Blah, blah, blah, goes this vile noise in the background, “Boats! Refugees! Terror! Illegals! What’s becoming of our country! Send them all back!” Blah, blah, blah, I’m not listening to this shit, I start talking to the driver.

Small talk. “How’s work?”, “Busy night?”, that type of thing.

He tells me he is from Somalia, maybe somewhere else, but some hellhole, and has been here a little while now.

I wish he’d turn the fucking radio off. The NOISE.

I ask him what he makes of this place so far. What is it he likes, if anything.

“The peace”, he says, “Very peaceful here. I like that.”

I have been given perspective.

“Very peaceful here”, he said.

I suspect he would know what peace is, this man.

The rest of us? Not so much …

TONGUE OF THE DAY

User reviews of Defense Technology Red Band/Blue Band Pepper Spray on Amazon …

Dan – Despite Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s assurance that this harmless vegetable mist is a “food product”, I found it wholly unsuitable for eating. It caused an extraordinarily painful burning sensation in the mucous membranes of my upper respiratory tract and the tissue surrounding my eyes, resulting temporary blindness which lasted from 15-30 minutes, inflammation of the skin which lasted from 45 to 60 minutes, and upper body spasms which forced me to bend forward in fits of uncontrollable coughing that made it difficult to breathe or speak for between 3 and 15 minutes. While there are many pleasurable ways to ingest fruits of the genus Capsicum, a nice New Mexico-style green Chile sauce on a stuffed sopaipilla for example, I found this product unsatisfactory.

Wabash52 – Convenient, portable vegetable dispensing system. Schools, church suppers, family reunions. If it gets too hot, just wash it down with a waterboarding session.

SGW – I always try to find natural solutions to physical problems, and sinus congestion has been an ongoing issue with me, to the point where I have often lost nights of sleep due to difficulty breathing. Not wanting to buy over-the-counter medications, I have been using either cayenne pepper or nasal irrigation to free clogged sinus passages, but with only limited success. When I heard that the Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray was a food product via Fox News, I realized that it must be healthy and natural. I had been having great difficulty breathing, so I quickly purchased some and sprayed it up each nostril. Wow! The 56895 MK-9 Stream has it all over cayenne pepper!! First of all, I fainted and was unconscious for at least two hours, so that was really a boon in terms of catching up with lost sleep. But after I came to, I realized that my sinuses were completely clear!! No more congestion for me. Of course, I did experience some amount of tissue loss, but I feel that it just creates more space in my sinuses for easier breathing. I am wondering if I can have the same success using the 56895 on my next ear infection.

mocroidh – For Christmas this year I’m buying all my nieces and nephews a bottle of Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray. It’s never too early to start training your children to become agents of intolerance and repression. As that song from the classic musical “South Pacific” says, “You’ve got to be carefully taught.” And what more effective way for your kids to learn to inflict pain and humiliation upon their inferior classmates than to give them a bottle of Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray?

I only wish that such a product had been available when I was their age…I had to make due with the usual wedgies, atomic wedgies, swirlies in the 3rd floor bathroom, indian burns, and homophobic slurs. So inefficient… Now that I’ve channeled my considerable talents as a bully into a career in law enforcement, I can enjoy access to all the latest excessive force technology, including Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray. It’s the only pepper spray you’ll ever need!

S.J. Huse – Call me Old Fashioned but I prefer tried-and-true trailing edge technologies. Police dogs and fire hoses may be a bit larger than Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray but they certainly get the job done. And it’s nice to have a vicious dog around the police station.

But the biggest problem with police dogs and fire hoses is that it is not yet possible to buy them on Amazon. You have to go to ebay.

Word.

WHY TONY ABBOTT IS A FUCKWIT: PART 342 (c) (iv)

I lay claim to no great understanding of matters diplomatic, for the complexities of foreign policy and other such things are mostly a shapeless rattle of vanilla babble to my ears, but there are some basic things about these matters that I do have some grasp of …

Occasionally, the political leaders of various countries have need to meet up and talk a few things out, mostly about how much crap we can buy and how much of our crap we can sell and how we can rip each other off without seeming to be too brazen about it. Mostly it’s all bullshit, a dog and pony show of stiff-necked tricks and johns blowing one another’s egos for the sake of a couple money shots for the news, such as “news” is these days, which ain’t much.

But this type of thing is seen as a necessary thing to do, and so it is done and done on a fairly regular, let us say, scheduled basis. In some ways, these circuses of power and the overfed horses who prance and preen their way through such proceedings can be seen as a reassuring sign that, despite the fevered entreaties of your typically hysterical News Limited hack, we all live in a reasonably civilised world and most of us that are civilised aren’t all that interested in blowing the shit out of each other just for the fucking hell of it.

And so, Australia being a part of this world and not some “entity of other” plodding its weary way through time on the back of a turtle, the political leader of Australia, being of one party or the other, will be required to attend such soirees from time to time and be seen to do things while they are there.

What happens is they all turn up, and sit together in a big fucking room for a few days, it’s usually a circular room, wood panelling seems to be the go, they have name tags and jugs of water, it all looks very exciting, and when they first pile up, they introduce themselves to each other, or they have their “people” introduce them and then the introduced introduces another introductee and so it goes until everyone has forgotten everyone else’s name because there are just too fucking many of them to remember and they have to go through it all again tomorrow.

While all this shit is going on, and barely a one of them have got the foggiest what anyone else is saying because the interpreters have fucked off to the bar, a bunch of photographers are taking about forty thousand billion photographs of all this introducing, the photographs never being anything other than horribly dull shots of  really short people shaking hands for far too fucking long.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work, Tony. You don’t turn up to one of these things and then proceed to shuffle off to a corner to sit in the little chair and mope like a sullen child until one of the grown-ups starts to feel sorry for you and comes over and asks if you’d like a fire-engine and a biscuit and why don’t you come on over to the big chairs and talk with the older kids for a bit.

Grow the fuck up, you silly cunt.

MAGIC HOUR

Late afternoon, the bench by the front window, just talking, the way the light comes through the window, she glows in it.

Magic hour.

“I’ve put your shirt in the wash”, she says.

“Ah.”

“What?”

“Don’t wash my clothes.”

“I put it in with mine. What difference does it make?”

“That’s when it all begins to die. When people start washing each other’s underwear.”

“I’m not washing your underwear, I’m washing your fucking shirt”, she says. “I’ll let you hang it out later if it makes you feel better”, she adds, and then we both begin to giggle.

She has these little creases around the corners of her eyes.

A siren sounds in the distance, an ambulance, irregular, then regular, far off, then immediate, and then it’s gone, and she glances out the window and silently makes the sign of the Cross upon her body.

“What?”, she asks me, after a moment.

“Nothing.”

“What?”, she asks again, shoving me in the shoulder.

“Do you think that’s weird?”, she asks me.

“No”, I say.

She gets up from the bench, pale crumpled jeans and a white t-shirt picked up from the floor from where they were left last night, she goes to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator door, asks, “Do you want coffee?”.

“Okay”, and I watch her make coffee, her back to me, this girl who crosses herself at the sound of a siren, and I think, “I want to marry you.”

I didn’t.

BANNED

Early Sunday afternoon, the bar of the local.

Barmaid looks up, says, “Sorry love, you’re not allowed to be here, you’ve been banned for 12 months, last night”, and she looks past my shoulder to a woman who has been stopped in her tracks by this news, news she cannot appear to recall.

She might be in her early 50’s, more likely her late ‘30’s, she has a face that’s seen more punches than caresses, a body no one ever looked at with fondness and no one ever will, but one that more than likely got done over whenever the urge took someone, one of the boys back “home”, don’t mind her, she don’t, she ain’t none too bright, that one.

“ … wha’?”, she stutters.

“That’s just what they tell me Jane, I don’t know, but you’re banned, you can’t be here.”

“Whafor?”

“I don’t know, love, that’s what management tell me, you have to leave.”

“But we was just talkin’.”

“Sorry, love.”

And there’s an awkward silence for a minute or so, I look down at the bar, a little embarrassed, I find myself hoping a scene does not take place.

“I’m sorry, love”, says the barmaid again.

“What about me friends?”, says the banished woman, “All me friends’re here … “

“I’m sorry, Jane. But you can’t be here.”

“Where’m I gonna go? … I don’t know any … “, and she trails off, just standing there looking down at the floor for what seems a very long, long moment.

Then she turns to face the exit and she says, as much to herself as anyone else, “Alright, then. Alright, then. Alright, I’ll be alright. That’s okay … I’m sorry, love … I’m sorry … Alright, alright then, I’ll go, I’ll go. Sorry, love, I’m sorry … “, and she leaves the room, leaves the hotel.

And goes home, to wherever or whatever that may be.

Banned from the pub for a year.

At least they were paying attention.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

More like an excuse for an extremely lazy blog post, but NPR recently posted an article on how animals keep dry. By shaking themselves into a frenzy, of course. There are several highly amusing photographs accompanying the piece.

But this is quite extraordinary …

This month, Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez and Robert Dudley at the University of California, Berkeley, published a paper describing how an animal weighing about an eighth of an ounce does the same thing. The Anna’s hummingbird whips its head back and forth 202 degrees — which is more than half way around — at the amazing rate of 132 times every second, and not while standing in place, legs on the ground like a dog or a deer. No, it does this while flying through the air! So it’s shaking, navigating AND flapping at the same time. Take a look.

NOW, HOW DO YOU ECXPLAIN THAT WITH EVOLOMOLUTION, YOU GODLESS SHITEHEATHENS!?!!

…

Um. No, wait …

Who am I here?

BULLY

(A slightly different version of this post first appeared on Groupthink in May 2011. This version appeared in the October edition of The King’s Tribune) …

 

You’re eight or nine years old, slight and small of stature, asthmatic and allergic to a whole raft of things. Shy.

You have a friend, your best friend, a bullet-headed, nuggetty little scrapper named Fitz. They leave you alone when he’s around, but when he’s not, you’re a red rag.

The worst of them, once he picked you up and threw you from one end of the classroom to the other when the teacher was out of the room for a few minutes one day. You hit the floor with a thud and mostly just slid across the floor to the wall. It hurt.

It was like that.

Years later, someone tells you that this same guy wound up getting pinched for stealing cars and spent time inside for it. You think, “I hope he got the living shit beat out of him while he was there”.

You’d forgotten his name, and you’ll forget it again in an instant. You certainly can’t remember it now.

You wonder whatever became of Fitz.

You used to tell him stories that you made up during lunchtime. He liked those.

…..

Tumbleweeds, an imitation of life, everything recedes, fits and starts and flitting shadows and distant murmurs and this world does not seem real anymore and your mind turns in on itself and you are a Sebastiao Salgado pixel of shadow, indistinguishable from any other, and all the bad things keep coming back, night’s black agents caress you on the brightest of days with cruel cloaks of roughly hewn and battered cloth, on every day, and you are walking to work, your head down, every step a slow-motion trudge through molasses, there’s barely anything but body memory to keep you moving, and you think to yourself, “This is not normal behaviour”.

If you are always looking at the ground, how can you see where it is you are supposed to be going?

…..

High school.

They’re kicking your chair again from behind. Over and over. Every day, something.

Twenty minutes of it, if you had a gun, you’d turn around in your chair and shoot them both point blank in the face, thinking of nothing, no consequence other than “it would be quiet”.

You stand up and leave the room.

Yes, there is the teacher. You don’t care. You need to go and you do, and she begins, “What … ?”, but you’re out before she can finish.

Your refuge is the school library. You run. It’s quiet there.

Last time you picked out a book, “Welcome to the Monkeyhouse” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an author you’d not read or even heard of before. You liked the title. It seemed apt.

This time, you pick out “Advertisements for Myself” by Norman Mailer, another thing that is new to you, and you lose yourself.

You will be in this place for another three years. One thousand and ninety five days.

You do not want to be in this place.

You want to die.

It would be quiet then.

…..

They dangled you over a second storey school balcony once, about three of them, holding you by the wrists.

You looked down. That fear of heights thing you’ve had all these years, you think?

Afterward, you wished they had let you go.

There would be the fall. Yes.

But then there would be the peace.

…..

Wandering through a bookshop, shelf upon shelf of “self-help” books, “Conquer This”, “Unlock Something”, “Embrace this Blah!”, they make you grimace, these stinking, stupid things.

“Because it’s all about you now, isn’t it?”, you think, “We are all, each and every one of us, the centre of the universe now, that is how we are encouraged to regard ourselves in this brave new world  where we are all potential reality television stars. Me, me, me. Mine, mine, mine. I, I, I.”

Just. Fuck. Off.

Anything but that. That it be about you.

You are not here anymore.

You have not been here for years. That thing in the mirror is not you. Your eyes dart around the edge of your reflection, not long enough to see who or what it is you have become, just long enough to shave, to maintain the appearance of a person living in the world, to carry on with the charade.

You turn your back on the mirror to brush your teeth.

“This is not normal behaviour”, you think.

But that is all you have.

…..

Thirteen or fourteen years ago, in another galaxy far, far away, a young woman walks into my office and begins to tell me things.

She tells me about the way they speak to her. She tells me about the snide remarks, the comments, the subtle and not-so-subtle putdowns and slights. She tells me about the abuse, every day, something, the way she looks, the way she dresses, her life, her boyfriend, her taste in this thing and in that, it’s constant, it never lets up, and as she speaks, her face flushes and her lips tremble and her eyes dart about frantically, and then there is a sound, a hacking inhalation of a sob, and then it comes.

She crumples to the floor in a crouching position, tears pouring from her eyes, she holds herself and she cries out, “BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’VE DONE! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!”, and I sit, stunned into silence, not moving, not knowing what to do, clueless for what seems long, long minutes, but is surely only seconds.

She’s done nothing. I know that.

Another young woman passes the office. She’s had this, too. She comes in, puts her arm around the shoulder of this girl and says, “I know. I know. Shhh … Shhhhhhh … Come on, now”, and they both leave the office together, they leave the building, they go outside. Where there is quiet.

This other young woman, she has recently made the grievous misjudgement of telling one of her so-called “workmates” that she had been raped by her cousin some years back, a thing you would hope to tell a person in confidence, a thing that, were you to tell a person, you would think that they would listen and that they would care.

Not here.

They just laughed at her. Sniggers and whispers.

“I’ve really got to get out of this fucking place”, I think.

I do. Eventually. I had to wait about 18 months. I wanted the long service payout.

It wasn’t worth it.

…..

Let me tell you something …

These are not my words. I have paraphrased those of another man …

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I HAVE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE APPROXIMATELY ONE HUNDRED TRILLION CELLS THAT COMPRISE MY BODY. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH SINGLE NUCLEUS OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF CELLS IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU.”

Was that what you wanted?

FUCK. YOU.

That’s all you get.

…..

YOU.

Bully.

This is for you.

You are an emotionally underdeveloped, intellectually lightweight lump of barely human filth who should’ve been scraped, bagged and flushed into the toilet the moment the sperm met the egg in the womb of whatever five buck cum-soaked whore spat you out and dragged you up.

May your first born never draw a breath.

I no more want to understand why you are the person you are or how you became that person than I would want to know why a child pornographer does what it does.

FUCK. YOU.

I want nothing from you.

But to see you dead in a

FUCKING

DITCH.

Was that what you wanted?

That’s all you get.

…..

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the toxicity of the environment you found yourself in begins to seep into your psyche, gradually tearing strips of self-worth and regard, and your sense of self begins to shatter like a burst water balloon in slow-motion. “What the fuck have I done?”, you ask yourself and there is no answer to that. This is how it works here.

“Can’t you see what this job is doing to you?”, a friend asks you one night as, yet again, you’ve managed to fly into another incoherent, half-drunk rant about some thing or another, and you just sit on the floor staring at nothing and saying nothing because yes, you know what it’s doing, you know full well, but it’s not long away now, just another short year before you can grab what money is owed to you and run.

They keep dishing it out and you begin dishing it back, every word a bullet, lashing out at everything and everyone in such a manner that you shock yourself with the ferocity of your own bile and how base you can become when pushed to it, but to no end as they appear to enjoy this, that you have finally buckled under and begun to play this game, this stupid, stupid game and you begin to loathe yourself for it.

“I am not this person”, you think. “This is not me.”

You begin to push all the people away from you, everyone is a threat now, friend and foe alike, you need to push them all out, and you do.

Until there is nobody left.

…..

It took years. The persistent, constant stream of verbal abuse, intimidation, veiled threats and derogatory slights, all of it designed to break you down and tear you apart and keep you in a place from which you would never be allowed to escape. You recall how, when you finally got your ten years and you told them to shove their miserable job and their miserable selves and their miserable industry up their collective miserable arses, you were finished with it all, that the General Manager wandered into your office half-tanked after a liquid lunch and plopped himself into the chair opposite yours and said to you, “So you think you’re fucking leaving do you? I’ll tell you one thing, you bald-headed cunt, if you go through with this, you’ll never work again, I’ll make fucking sure of that mate, I’ll make fucking sure life will be difficult for you, mark my fucking words”, and you flew off the deep end, the top of your voice, using language that would melt the head of a sailor.

The hundreds and hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime over all those years, the work you took on that was never supposed to be your work in the first place that one person who knew about such things told you would’ve been worth about one hundred and twenty thousand dollars and for which you were barely even acknowledged, and after all this and all this time, the best you get is a threat to fuck up the rest of your working life, and when you do get out, it’s with a long service payout and a one hundred and fifty dollar gift voucher.

You bought yourself a new clothes iron and a portable CD player.

One thing begins to crowd in upon another, all of this and more, that thing you wanted so badly that slipped away, and that other thing you wanted so badly for so long and wound up getting, and then it all fell apart, and then you fell apart and then you simply stopped caring.

You lose yourself in drugs and alcohol.

Time passes.

And then the drugs and alcohol lose you.

And time passes.

You see your reflection in a mirror and it puzzles you, because this is not a person you recognise.

You’ve finally disappeared.

…..

You’re coughing, hacking and dry-retching into a towel on your lap because you drank yourself into a coma again and forgot to eat third night in a row. Sweat streams down your face, tears, you shake and sputter and sink back into the couch exhausted, bent so far out of shape you can barely lift a glass of water.

An hour passes. Two.

“This is not normal behaviour,” you think.

You just sit, your mind a blank, struggling to find a thought to hang onto, and time just slips away.

You go to the bathroom to rinse your mouth and catch yourself in the mirror and think, “You worthless sack of shit”, and you turn around and go back to the living room and another hour passes and you realise that all this must now come to an end.

You pick up your phone, select a number and press “call”.

“****** Medical Centre”, is the reply.

“Yes. My name is Ross Sharp. I need to sort some things. I need to make an appointment.”

ADVENTURES IN RICK PIXIELAND

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a former US President, President Lyndon B. Johnson had a grand vision of a thing for the country over which he presided, and he called it “The Great Society” …

“The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

… And so he set about doing all manner of frightening things to bring this vision of his to fat, juicy fruition, declaring “War on Poverty” for example …

 

 

… although only a few short years later, nobody paid much attention to the “War on Poverty” anymore as Milhouse declared “War on Drugs” instead, poor people be fucked, let ‘em sleep in their own shit, it’s the hippies and the pot, we’re sending those cunts to Vietnam and if they don’t want to go, we’ll just shoot the fuckers …

 

 

As you do.

Anyway, during his time as President, Johnson indulged himself in an awful frenzied flurry of legislative activity, signing into law the Civil Rights Act and the Wilderness Protection Act and creating Medicare and Medicaid and a whole bunch of other horrid things designed to help various people with various things, the whole varied variety of which you can read about over here and various other various places if you’re of a  mind to.

But mostly, Johnson thought making people smart was a smart thing to do and I most definitely do concur, for stupid people scare the flaming shit out of me, especially when they’re put in charge of stuff.

So there was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act, the Bilingual Education Act and programs to help people in poor areas get teachers and for disadvantaged children in various scummy circumstances beyond their control to get assistance and be taught this and be taught that about all manner of things and lo and behold and Lordy be, before you know it, the whole of the country be swarmin’ with smart people actin’ smart and doin’ smart stuff and sayin’ smart things.

At least, I think that may have been the plan.

And then, and then … came “Forrest Gump”.

A treacly ode to the warm-hearted joys of cretinism, chocolates and the simpler entertainments life has to offer, like smearing one’s poo on the sanatorium walls or peeing one’s name in the snow and magic shoes and such, there weren’t no smart about Forrest, no sirree …

And pretty soon, all across the United States of America,  whole swathes of American people began cocking their ears and lending them to this endearingly simple-minded chewer of chocolates and runner of runs and they thought to themselves, “Fuck this smart shit an’ learnin’ an’ such, you don’t get no chocolates that way”, and they learnt to embrace and celebrate and elevate to grand positions of public office and influence some of the greatest practitioners and speakers of staggeringly stupid things that have ever been spat from the womb of woman to walk upon the face of this Earth.

Mama always said, God is mysterious.

Which brings us to Rick Perry.

Rick Perry has some problems with evolution, which I can well understand, for, if I were him, I’d be feeling a little shortchanged, but he also has a problem with education, maybe it’s just jealousy, but he’d like to get rid of it …

 

 

I can understand that, too.

It’s hard to compete with educamated people if you don’t has brain ‘cos if you don’t has brain, tongue don’t know whats to do.

And that’s all I have to say about that …

 

IN MY OFFICE …

We have an I.T. department that is not called an I.T. department, it is called something else.

We have an Accounts department that is not called an Accounts department, it is called something else too, and we have three groups who were once called “this group” or “that group”, until somebody decided that it would be better to call them “units” and then somebody decided to call them “divisions” and now they’re all back to being called “groups” again.

We once had a Managing Director but he left and we got somebody else, but they weren’t called a Managing Director anymore, they were called something else and it wasn’t “CEO” because that’s some bloke in the States. Then we got another Managing Director to replace the Managing Director who wasn’t called a Managing Director anymore and this new person was called something completely different again and that is because they reported into somebody different from the last one and they couldn’t be called a Managing Director if they reported to that person, they could only be called a Managing Director if they reported to this person instead, only this person wasn’t the least bit interested having that person reporting into them, they’d rather they pissed off out of it and reported to that other person and leave them the fuck alone to watch videos on YouTube and fart about on Facebook all afternoon.

As you do.

It’s a very complex organism, an office, and it takes a lot of fucking effort to make one work, especially when it comes down to that vital business of figuring out what to call a thing.

I hope you all appreciate that.

I know I fucking do.

I DO NOT WANT …

Celery.

No, I do not want celery.

For the point of celery, it is lost on me.

The taste of celery, for want of nothing better to call it, could best be described as “random plant” too often thoughtlessly tossed into a stir fry to bulk it up or used as a dipping stick at those parties where the host is too fucking cheap to fork out for a decent couple packs of bread sticks, and every single time you make the grievous misjudgement of eating this crap the only thing you will ever be guaranteed to get from it is an elusive piece of celery string stuck between your back teeth after lunch when you don’t have a toothpick and you don’t have any floss and you wind up flicking your tongue around your fucking mouth for the rest of the afternoon looking like a cud-chewin’ country buffoon pinin’ for a wad of chewin’ tobaccy and a squirrel or three to skin.

And  you will never hear, for no one has ever said, and no one ever will, “Ooh, I could go a nice piece of celery right now” or, “That dish lacked celery, how disappointing”, for such a thing is beyond the realm of intelligent thought or probability and could only ever take place in those most helplessly feeble of minds, Daily Telegraph readers most probably, Piers Akerman fans for certain.

And there is no restaurant that would ever trumpet the presence or presentation of a piece of fucking celery on any plate of anything as something worthy of your attention, and if any restaurant ever did or even so much as think of such a thing, you would immediately make it a chief point of honour never to go there, and if you were already in such an establishment you would demand to see the Head Chef and when you do you would call him a pretentious dipshit and beat him about the head for a minute or three with his menu of shit and then go home and say cruel and derogatory things about his mother’s family heritage on Facebook.

No.

Not celery.

No celery for me.

You can take your apium graveolens

And hold it between your knees.