Category: Humour

Violent Illness: A Review

So people I spend time with had been passing this bug around like it was a fragrant joint, and just as obviously I could smell it coming my way. Although I tended to wake in the early AM hours and flee to the hermitage of my parent’s house, the contagion still got me. I was cruising round the backyard with my dad, learning by rote all the details of some dilapidated car he was restoring, when the sickness hit me. The dull g-forces in my stomach had, in one powerful moment, become a cyclone of queasy movement. I ran to a grassy area and left the history of my poor diet all over the blades.

“You’ve lost all your colour!” Dad remarked.

“No I haven’t. It’s right there being eaten by Cupid” (my sister’s dog), I blurted with the same vomitary action. There’s something DNA-deep that prevents a young man from revealing to his pop how bad he really feels. Some dumb machismo or something.

Anyway, this was a situation that was no peach, because I actually had to make a rare appearance at a dinner later that evening, one which I really didn’t want to go to. Being there with a chaos of seismic action in my stomach would not make it a more leisurely affair. There was literally no way I was getting out of this engagement without losing a limb or severing a major artery so I returned to cursing my fate– a habitual gripe by now.

Since I had only made the one piece of gastronomic art so far, I decided that I was some special breed of human that was immune to the ailments of others and that I must just have coincidentally needed to spew. Yes, that was it, I take fish oil and drink spirulina and am robustly healthy whereas everyone around me lives minute-by-minute or faster. I can’t get gastro. How can something just induce your body to vomit if you don’t want to? It can’t, I decided, and I resolved to be well.

I jumped in my car and headed out to my girlfriends house, where I would assure her I was fine to come to dinner, pale faced and reeking of nausea or not. Driving there, wondering if  I would spew over the relative clean of the car’s interior, I felt my temperature tangibly rising, like I was driving into the sun. Soon as I walked into my girlfriend’s room she gave me a knowing look that said, “You’re about to let me down again.”

Well, yeah, I was. I am, in fact, so good at this I can do it without trying– even going so far as to make myself explosively sick just to switch up my M.O. I think she saw that I was stoically trying to fight this minotaur though, as I promised to still come, that shattered her frustration so that her voice broke down into all tender care.

“You’ll be okay. It’ll only last for 12 hours.” She reassured me, speaking from experience.

“You bitch, don’t tell me that.” I said muttered.

Long story short, she heads to dinner and I head to a bucket that has been conveniently stationed beside the bed where I am sweating/shivering like a cat that picks an unwatched place to curl up and die. I am literally vomiting in ten minute intervals until my stomach is as empty as my will to live. The gentle silence of death would be preferable to the pornographic mess I am/ am making. I lose all sense of time in a febrile shapelessness. Hours pass into seconds and I fall asleep and dream for a thousand years to only wake up and reject the water I had drunk 5 minutes ago. I am so dehydrated but my body torturously refuses to let me drink.

Here’s the jewel in the ornament; the high point or crescendo of my free perdition: I go to get up and take my sea legs to the bathroom when I hear, from the bottom of the bucket of nameless contents, a CLUNK. Was it a lighter falling in? No, I suddenly realise with some nerve-response intuition. I plunge my hand into the ordure up to my forearm and extract my phone, which I can see it still working. I’m so unbelieving I don’t even curse my fate. I just wobble out to the kitchen and chuck it into a wok-ful of rice someone was preparing to cook. Mia Culpa but I’m in dire straits friend.

At sometime around 5 AM I manage to full into a species of sleep and get maybe an hour or two of rest. When dawn finally breaks and I leave the room, unaccountably feeling much better. Almost like I hadn’t just lived out the opening scene of Apocalypse Now as a budget Martin Sheen. Like I hadn’t just been up vomiting consistently through a beetle-dark night, losing every ounce of water my body had managed to hoard.

All in all it was a cleansing experience. I’m sure my body lost many harmful toxins as well as all it’s moisture, colour and ability to compartmentalise. I also lost a phone, the replacement phone that was filling in for my other, long gone one. So now I’m phoneless and happy again. Take the good with the bad, like a Ying Yang.

Final review: Although it saved me the pain of going to a dinner and masquerading as someone I’m not and never will be, it did cost me a phone, create many hours of near-death agony, and result in my having to get my own emesis on me. The post-ayahuasca cleanness afterward was nice though, as well as the hearty sympathy that was meted my way with injunctions to relax. I feel ambivalent about this occasion, and almost unqualified to grade the illness fairly as I haven’t had gastro since I was in primary school. It’s definitely stepped its aggression up, which is a nice touch, while reducing the actual duration of the sickness. I guess the only way you can tell if this illness is for you is to go sample it yourself. It may not be a symphony, but it’s damn catchy.  6/10 would conditionally recommend.

Optional Extras x NXT x Bodybuilding Bouncers

Had to go to the city to see some wrestling. At home spending hours homing in on the requisite state of drunk & high to catch the damn train. Arrive hours later and rush to the hotel to check in. Nice place, steady elevator with no smell, tiny narrow hallways that can’t possibly be as silent as they are. Tiny room that has more than enough space and frivolous bullshit for these rural boys. I thought the previous guests had left some casual drinks in the mini fridge which was safely encased between 2 inches of fake marble. I went to grab a Peroni and feel its malty refreshment. God how naive I was. Then my much more well-travelled friend told me I was a jerk off and that we’d have to pay for whatever we consumed afterward. That nothing was free once you left the hermitage of your bedroom, that they were trying to intrude costs into there as well. It turned out there was a small drinks menu (un-professionally typeset [noted]) on the counter in a plastic upright that you might see at a kitsch-as-fuck eatery where previous dining experience was not assumed. Even though my friend explained to me the rules of engagement out here in real life Parker Bros world, I continued to be stitched-up. Like, we’re in a room with two beds and when I see two water bottles on the bedside tables I think, What a lovey concession. Nope. They have specially designed and printed labels around the top saying they can cure your thirst and realign your bodies pH balance for just $2. As with the fruitbowl- life for a price.

There are iPhone chargers (with extensions for every other imaginable phone brand) provided which are free so I go off on an intelligence-gaining jaunt around the 12-foot room. It turns out it’s only things you need that cost money; i.e, all the food and drinks. All the unnecessary amenities are free. This is great marketing because everything you need to consume the pay-only items are free, but also bad because obviously you have to purchase a pay-only thing in order to employ them. It good for Quest because then you have to purchase a $9.20 beer to use the free can opener, or order over-priced food to use the free cutlery on the fake granite bench. I do a shit and wonder what it will cost me but it turns out flushing the toilet is free, as is the tiled glass-doored shower, which is in the same small room and only separated by an opaque green wall of glass. After pacing a circuit into the perimeter of the room my dogs are barking so I sit down on this fluffy chair in the corner that has gone lumpy from the passage of non-coordinated buttocks. My ass sinks in deep when I sit and I wonder if their isn’t some spring-loaded mechanism that’s gonna click and send a surreptitious message to the front desk that one of the patrons have sat on the comfy chair and will have to be billed later. I don’t care, I look out the unclean window panes at the free view.

Catch a silent uber to a crazy NXT show. Joe vs Nakamura in a cage, Dillinger, Roode, Regal, more $9 Heinekens, $7 buckets of chips, overpriced merchandise, $50 Strong Style hats, promo girls in black jeans and heels that make your heart feel vertigo handing out WWE store discounts. It’s all good business but god does it feel alienating. Not because you can’t get what you want, but because when you’re there you feel like you want things that you know you don’t, so you begin to feel isolated from yourself. Like, I’m pretty cocked when we get there yet I stand in a lengthy line to buy 4 beers that cost nearly $40 just because there is a line and there’s nothing else to do and I am out in the city for once. There’s sound and light and garish merchandise and other people running to their seats with trays of beers and it all engenders some sort of sperm competition to buy things you know you don’t want but think you’ll feel better when you have. As a result I’m standing there with my paper thin wallet and tray of beers considering buying the last ‘Glorious’ shirt in large knowing damn well a piddly L will never fit me. I find my seat and try to sit there without incurring extra costs.

After the show we head to a bar that has $5 Captain Morgans and bouncers that all apparently share the same HGH dealer. I can’t remember the name of the place but they are playing the WORST commercial pop from like 4-5 years ago. My friend goes put to the smokers area with his beer in hand and is nearly F-5’d by a bouncer who is downright incredulous someone could have made such an oblivious decision. We drink rounds of Cpt Morgs and spend spare change playing games of skill, silently acknowledging that we could be saving our money for the uber home. And I mean to the hotel room, not home.

 

Waterboarding x Short storying x Wine adoring

I have been drinking red wine lately because it makes me feel worse than smoking weed. The logic is that hopefully I’ll hit breaking point and drive myself to quit both soon. Aversion therapy. There’s nothing worse, for me, than the onrush of memory that assaults me everyday as I wake up. All the debauchery and impetuous decisions of the night before shown to me as if in a dream, a dream of a louche young thug destroying himself slowly and leaving nothing behind but a impecunious corpse. When I wake up still drunk from the wine this doesn’t mean anything to me. Good.

I haven’t been writing as many music reviews lately. There doesn’t seem to be much coming out that isn’t accorded either unanimous worship or revulsion, so what will my queer little voice add to the composition? Plus I’ve nearly finished a short story and, while it isn’t actually good, it made me feel better to write. I might post it on here soon if I can get fucked-up enough to re-read through it and do the necessary editing. If more reviews or reading this story interest you let me know.

Speaking of fucked up, at Earthcore this weekend someone (allegedly) got waterboarded. Like there’s footage of it happening so it’s not alleged, but I think they were just have a laugh with their mates so it’s alleged to me because part of torture is that it is intended to inflict pain on an unwilling participant. (Isn’t ‘unwilling participant’ an oxymoron? ‘Hostage’ seems to imply the same thing without the incongruity.) The good old Australian larrikin misrepresented by the paranoiacally afraid and out of touch media in this country. If anyone is glad they dropped out of journalism school it’s me. I’m just surprised they decided to bash the youth of this country with this piece and not angle for some headline-garnering anti-muslim fear mongering (very fashionable right now). How long ’til Andrew Bolt appears in the tabloids like the intermittent period stain he is and declares “Immigrants at music festivals torture fun-loving youth just trying to suck down nangs and GHB in peace.” People over forty seem to always need a (un)-common enemy. Anyone who’s just a little different from the 45 racist bumpkins they went to year 10 deb with back in ’63. The same people who think they’ve succeeded in life because they drive a new Senator (on payments of course) and get to hang a tribal-tattooed arm out of their driver’s window while they blast Pink or the Eagles in traffic and claim to be ‘free thinkers’ and anti-corporate. Bless ’em and their high speed drive-by vitriol and popular control of public ignorance.

Anyway this seems like it would have been one of the tamest highs a person could achieve Out There anyway. Out There in the middle of the Dread Bush, where all manner of illicit pleasures seem to pullulate in the arid soil. Couldn’t go unfortunately. What with being broke and trying to minimise my intake of mind altering molecules. Spent the weekend at home instead, yelling at the missus and watching nightly news, sharpening my pitchfork for fear that the neighbours would murder me. If you’ve never been to a Doof (Australian rave in the middle of the wilderness), it’s kind of like this doc from the 80’s called Threads, which is a docudrama about nuclear fallout. Besides being one of the most unflinching and un-glossy  portrayals of nuclear hysteria, it accurately sums up both the Id-satisfying immediacy of people going to doofs, and the jingoist attitude of people in small rural towns watching 1000’s of mesomorphs enter their gates with cars full of recherché chemicals. Everyone is so concerned with protecting their little patch (whether it be physical, metaphysical or metaphoric); everyone thinks that someone they don’t know is trying to take from them.  The only damage that occurs is to employability, and only because employers genuinely care about the reach of their influence and want their employees to bow down to not just what they say here and now, but years ago before they started working there too. The whole world is ran by imperialists wielding weapons of symbolic violence, so disempowered all their life they take to their platform like Mussolini. Welcome to modern Australia, where waterboarding is preferable to spending 20 minutes with anyone outside your limited demographic.

fuck-copy

 

I Just Want to be the Embittered Voice of my Generation

(This is something I wrote in October as therapy to help me stay sober but, things went awry and I was very un-sober for a while, so I re-wrote it in mid November. Hope it doesn’t inspire you, because i’m sick of giving advice and coughing up motivation.)

Nah, you never know what’s gonna happen when you let yourself have too much fun. Think about two already obese people fighting in bloated Sumo suits; they bush at each other with the rage of bulls and fall like corrupt governments.  There are faces in the background, flared in the sun, spitting brown goop and clutching $1 lemonades. Kids yell, older kids smoke, even older kids care for their own. There’s no point to this image, but hopefully your imagination worked, pulled its own against a pretty insipid vista. Mia Culpa, I’m writing to distract myself, and yet I have no idea what you I or want to hear. This year’s been a long one and I’m writing myself out of the resin; quitting smoking * in October after months of being on my arse and loping around town waiting to be either arrested or saved. Far too N-N-N-Notorious, this year, with all its prophecies of doom and my thoughts spilling onto the net with a characteristic abandon.

After all this time has anything really changed? Gillard’s still Prime Minister; the sky is overcast as of autumn; our little black staffy will never comply when you call it and I’m still afraid of the future.  That’s probably why I put myself through the looking glass, this year, to hide from it all- the martinets and doomsters and naysayers. But it’s not all negativity; the imagination is powerful and I think of a 16 year old wasting thousand of litres from a fire hose at 3am and my eyes sultry with the acid, just to get through.

The Beatles are on the radio telling me it’s gonna be alright, but there’s wind in the willows and humidity in my eyes. Where from here? Why can’t you just sit in your room, on an unmade bed moated by dirty clothes, and have life find you?  Despite that spring’s been in the flowers for over a month I’m still enduring the frigid walk to McDonalds every night for food, chilling myself to the bone-dry inside and feeling that great cavity. Succeeding in something positive- that which will move your life to a better place- is only interesting when you’re already wretched and no-one expects anything from you. What more could there be to life than eating peps*with the boys after punching cones.  You can live out of someone’s house for a while, but never out of their mind.

And now my revolution has come, and a great iron curtain has lifted from my eyes. Televangically, it’s as if I can See! I know I can’t be idle anymore- complaining about my problems won’t have the cosmos echo them back in laurels and lithe girls. The happiness I want has to be hunted, like the fabled beasts of the lands, or like the un-sucked corner of a lollipop when the mouth tastes like the underside of a Monk’s sandal. But it can be done.

So we’ll dance, and we’ll pour sweat, and our head’s will spin, but eventually we’ll all end up under the disco ball. Goodnight.

*and everything else

*Peperoni pizza (-a bargain at $5)The Mona Lisa

The Treachery of Orchys

Dear diary, mood: Joaquin Phoenix

The last few days I’ve been irreconcilably depressed; under the weather and without shelter. I don’t know what’s got me down. Sitting here, just me and my mind, thinking about this Russian all girl Euro-pop group who exist despite having no sex appeal and who look strong contenders to win Eurovision. The largest land mass in the world can’t come up with something better than 8 geriatrics lipsinking to Aqua songs? It just proves that pop-music invariably needs a gimmick to hold the attention of consumers. I’m imagining their pyrotechnic live show right now as I sit watching the hair on my legs grow one eight of a millionth of a millimetre each minute: their oestrogen supplemented performance setting heads a—wagging; merkins thrown onstage in a pique of offhand interest and energy- the most movement their demographic has shown since the last time their catheter was changed. But I don’t know why I dwell on these lass’, set to Susan Boyle the world. I’m probably just jealous because I have neither an image nor a vagina and thus am unable to sing pop tunes and have people clap and throw their pity my way. As the girl from The Ring would say, oh well.

I’m hungover so I’ll spend the day recovering the only way I know how: going around to orphanages and psychologically traumatizing the curs, diffusing some of my pain on to them via unreasonable sadism. Commencement. My gilt words dancing an inimical Charleston through their malleable minds, sending furrows like horrid rabbit warrens into youthful foreheads. Seeing the tears run down their coal darkened faces just makes my heart leap, my feet kick, and the tide change in my belly. Alcohol always makes me violent.

But in reality, I’m going to sit around watching old episodes of Las Vegas from like 2005 and constantly wonder whether I’m hungry enough to stomach food or not. Last night was hectic and I’m feeling the results like an evangelist feeling the Lord’s presence. I saw Hallower and Good Will Hunting. Helped cheer Northlane to an encore. Got reprimanded because there’s “no kicks” allowed in the pit. Resisted a full-fledged Big Ed Deline moment when my friend was kicked out of the club unjustly. Came home and vomited a handful of times in the sink. Woke up in a pool of self-disgust.  ‘Twas a bitchin’ night. The spirit of the bloodthirsty North is stewarded in this fey Irish body, it appears. My liver got more action than Ryan Gosling’s dick and I do feel like bragging.

Anyway, Las Vegas is the perfect over-polished tonic my body needs at this point- the cleverly convoluted plot lines and interweaving character ark, Big Ed’s avuncular dominance, Danny and Nick’s showmanship and competitive machismo, the bewbs. Lots of bewbs. More DD’s than the dark cellar where Magic: the Gathering is played. I mean, the production flatly endorses voyeurism, with the initiation point for almost every story line either Big Ed’s surveillance room, or some cooze’s whimsy. All the tanned, lissom bodies that look like home, if home was a better place. I might not understand the inner workings of the nested or visiting Nevadan, but I do understand that sex=consumer attention/awkward moments of furtive parent/child eye-contact. And ‘Television’s hottest drama’ wears its denim, button-covered cameo jacket with pride: Buble, Baldwin, Paris Hilton, Snoop, Sly, John ‘I like to watch’ Lovitz. I feel like I’ve died and gone to slightly outdated pop-culture heaven. It really is a TV party tonight.

Anyways, my head has started to spin and I know of no remedy apart from a line of credit I can squander on aspirins and teeth whitening. See you poolside.

In which our heroes discover that ‘Private’ does not just refer to a well groomed soldier.

A recent news article by The Sunday Times has unveiled Facebook as the lying, perfidious creature we always imagined: a social networking site(!) The article reveals that all along, instead of merely asking us what was on our mind and giving us the ability to share this, for free, with everyone we know, FB was demanding to know our details, hungry as a picketer for a right wing scheme.

Yes, this week Facebook (a chair big enough for him and his ego being finally sourced) admitted to reading the messages of smartphone users who downloaded the app. Shock horror when most of the messages intercepted regarded ‘lols’ (a presumed sub-atomic grouping which may be developed into nuclear arsenal), and ‘TTYLs”, which is some kind of venereal disease plaguing children.

I love that nearly 5 and a half thousand people have shared this on FB. Surely IT already knows that you’ve been going behind its back, and wants blood, HAL-style. This article makes beloved FB out to be some sanguine and malicious construct. Everyone may know how addictive it can be, not just the guy who told me at a Buried in Verona gig that he was going home to do lines of Facebook (?), but since we already share everything in a machine gun status’ updates, what is there for the entity to learn about us? Maybe what we don’t want to share is even more banal than what we do?

And FB’s crimes seem insignificant, like a fashion faux pas at a Midnight Oil concert, when compared to other internet juggernauts (flickr, Yahoo, Youtube). The height of irony, even a “security app” My Remote Lock accesses your personal data. In fact, apparently (so not at all in fact), Youtube can remotely control your device to film and take videos- presumably of the inside of your pocket. Goverment agencies recently sunk 15 billion dollars into battling this illicit control, with the best and most viable defence being to place a little foil hat over your phone’s aerial and to sit in your parent’s unlit basement listening to Journey.

In fact, am I the only one who saw in this the opportunity to deflect one’s girlfriend’s phone melees? -Sorry hon, not tonight, FB may be listening, and you know how angry he gets when we don’t talk about trifling nonsense.

Not only this, but fb will have to employ a cadre of encryption detectives if they want to know what my friend Andrew is saying. This offers a symbiotic and redeeming aspect to the case. I can forward them my messages and they can send me back the essence of his nonsense. For example, they could run unsorted dialect like “du y hav. a weab cam x” and tell me what to reply. In this instance the prudent answer was, “keep your clothes on and stay away from cameras”.

I’ll expect my nice residual to come promptly in the mail, Mark.