“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.

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.

“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

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

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.

Because it’s got me buggered.

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.

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.

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.