He watches when you're sleeping.

So on Christmas eve for the first time in my life I was the witness to someone’s will. It was a very strange experience. I’m up in the country at my parents house and my whole family is there for Christmas. For the first time in a few days I was alone in the house for about five minutes when the phone rang. It was a friend of my parents, someone whom I’ve known for years whom I shall refer to as David. His wife, a very good friend of my mothers, is currently in the last stages of her life after a hard fight against a particularly aggressive cancer. “Are your parents home?” he asked, but not like that, we made small talk ‘n’shit. I told him that weirdly, both of them were gone. “The thing is,” he said, “is that we need a witness to sign Janets will. Are you busy? I’ll come over and pick you up and we can do it now.”

“Of course,” I replied, “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

I hung up, brushed my teeth and removed the comb from my hair that my niece had stuck there as a centrepiece earlier that morning when she had styled my hair into some sort of exotic sculpture.    

He arrived, picked me up and we went to his house. As we arrived a person who I did not recognise was throwing up into a plastic bowl as another lady dry retched into a garden.

“David, help Janet” yelled the lady in the garden between retches. I realised that the person who I had not recognised was in fact Janet, a woman whom I had had known for nearly twenty years. The disease had ravaged her body. Her once blond hair is gone, now she has a short grey fuzz. To say she looked thin would be understating the severity of the toll it had taken on her. David took her bowl, emptied it and bought it back while I stood there in shock. I asked if I could do anything, “Just take a seat inside, I’ll be with you in a minute” David told me. I went inside and sat down. After a while Janet came inside and we signed her will.  Under my occupation I put ‘unemployed’, in reflection it seems rather disrespectful. Then David drove me home. We chatted briefly on the two minute drive, about how he was starting to accept her death and all the legal rigmarole that they had to go through, how he and Janet had only recently started to talk about the fact that she was dying. We arrived home and he left, I went out the back of the house and saw my mother and I couldn’t hold it in any longer and I cried. I hugged my mother and I felt how tiny and thin she is, like a little bird. When I was at the Alfred I saw lot of very very sick people but it didn’t seem to bother me so much, but seeing someone that I knew, someone whom I considered fairly robust whose health had been attacked so savagely broke my heart. I thought of David on the drive home, completely manic, pushed almost to the brink of insanity watching his wife fight and lose. Watching her die and being completely and totally unable to do anything about it. I thought of my mother and how she had watched her best friend die slowly over the last few years and how before that another one of her friends had died a fairly slow and painful death. My mother is a very small woman and I don’t know how she manages to bare the weight of it all. We were talking and she said that Janet only had a few weeks left of being lucid before the drugs took their toll. “She will probably die of a chest infection. The cancer doesn’t get them, their immune system is weakened and something else gets in”. Her voice was almost totally empty, I say almost because in the depths you could hear resignation and a deep, deep sadness.

Christmas day was one of the best Christmas’s I’ve ever had. There was food and 4 generations of my family around the table and hardly any ring ins. Just my sister and her kids one of whom has a kid of their own (my grand nephew), my cousin, my folks and I. There was a retarded amount of food and all I did all day was smoke joints, eat ridiculous amounts of food and fall asleep in my chair. I also pooped a lot. I think I ate too much food which I didn’t know was a thing. I felt fat happy and content for most of the day. It was nice.

On boxing day one of my other cousins came out and stayed the night at my parents house. He’s a weird kid, I can’t deny it. Sometimes I think he might have a learning disability and other times I think he might be one of the most profound people I’ve ever met. One time we went to the pool together and I said that I hated pissing in the pool because I felt like I was just pissing my pants. He sat there quiet for a moment and then said, with all solemnity, “It’s not just your pants you’re pissing though is it, it’s every one else’s”. From that moment on I took great pleasure in pissing in the pool, knowing full well that I’m not just pissing my own pants. Anyway, so this time we hung out and at one stage we were hanging out watching the ducks. I looked over at him and his brow was furrowed like he was thinking deeply. “What’s up?” I asked him. “Have you ever wondered what a duck would look like with a monobrow?” he asked. I wondered how he had arrived at that particular platform on his train of thought, had he started with regular hair and worked his way down or had he started at eyebrows and then thought ‘Ah ha, monobrow, fucking nailed it”. Anyway, he had stayed the night and in the morning we were sitting with my mother having a cuppa when we heard the front gate clang open, my ma went around the corner to investigate and then we heard her call “Boys, can you come and help” so we leapt up and ran around and there was my mothers neighbour bawling her eyes out with a dead dog in her arms. My cousin bravely took the dog from her arms and I ran to grab an old sheet to wrap it in. My mother drove her neighbour to the local vet where the neighbour insisted that the vet listen to its heart in case it was just unconscious. There was no hope, the dog was well and truly dead. I could tell before they left by the tiny bugs that had stuck to its eyeballs.  

So that’s my Christmas, bookended by death, with babies and food in between. We still have no idea what killed the dog.   

ICU

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I’ve been doing this course for the last nine weeks, learning how to become a Health Services Assistant, which is basically like a hospital orderly. For the last two weeks I’ve been doing my placement at a big hospital in the city. I’ve basically been working from 7am till 3 everyday, unpaid, on what has got to be the longest job interview in the world. And I don’t care, because the things that I am doing and the things that I am learning are so incredible that I feel like I am going to shit my pants every time I walk through the doors. I get up at 4.30am, willingly, and I call people sir and ma’am and I mean it. It’s weird, I know, but not as weird as some of the things that I have witnessed in the last two weeks. My placement lasts for three weeks but the last week will be spent working in the kitchens and it’s really not as exciting as the rest of it. Anyway, on with the show.

So on my first day I rocked up, did my induction, then they rostered me on as a cleaner and took me to a ward and I began. I have only been in a hospital about five times in my life and never as a patient. The first ward I went to was the burns unit. If you’ve never seen injured people up close this is a good introduction. You want to look, you want to stare so bad it feels like your eyes have taken control of your body. Some are connected to machines and swathed in bandages. Some are up and mobile. All have pink new scar tissue and lots of it. I talked to a few people as I cleaned up around them. I really didn’t know what to say but I soon fell into the old retail patter. The rest of the day is a blur, as is much of the first week. On the first and second day of my second week I worked in the Intensive Care Unit. I cleaned around unconscious people and their grieving families and saw some things that I’d like to forget but are probably very import that I saw them in the first place. I saw a man sitting next to his wives bed, holding her hand in his, lowering his face to it as he wept. I thought they only do that in the movies, I said to myself as I watched. I watched the nurses turn a patient over so that they could clean their soiled bedclothes as and they turned them they continued to defecate. There is a line from a Louis C.K. piece where he asks “Have you ever seen an ass just shit?” and I had always found the image funny and when it happened in front of me I admit I had to turn away and look at the roof for a while. Also, there were a lot of wet farts which did nothing to help my inappropriate and maniacal grinning.

The two days that I spent in ICU were probably two of the most incredible days of my life. They are a bit of a blur as I’m pretty sure the entire time my eyes were like golf balls. It was like a spigot that stimulation shot out of and I could only catch so much before I had to move away in case I drowned. No one died whilst I was there but as I said to a friend, it was like they were in competition to see how close they could get. I watched them turn one guy and whenever they touched him his vitals would spike and we’d have to wait a few minutes before they could move him again. For someone who thinks about death a lot it certainly made me reconsider some of the notions that I previously held, it also confirmed a lot of things that I had thought about myself. I felt my heart break so many time on those two days that I thought that there was no way that I could go on with it, that there was no way in hell that I could do this for a living. And then I had a couple of really amazing positive experiences and I thought to myself, ‘Why would I want to do any thing else?’

Humans are funny creatures. The human body is an amazing machine, the mind a fragile network of synapses. We all process things differently, we can never be sure how we’ll react to a situation until we are presented with it. Quite often the situation will be a surprise and it will shock us somehow, lurch us off the familiar rails into areas previously unknown, previously unconsidered. This is my favourite territory. The outer limits. Quite often it will be a place of unimaginable misery but there is something to be said about pulling yourself out of the fire to emerge pink and clean. You can either kid yourself and pretend that life is beautiful and full of wonder and see everything with child like amazement, which is fine, because life is beautiful and full of wonder and deserves to be amazed at, but there is that other side, that thing where if you look at anyone, anyone at all, you can be certain that they are dying. Not now, maybe not anytime soon, but they are, inextricably marching towards the night. We all are. We can be scared of it and try and pretend that it doesn’t happen but I have found it better to confront it head on, look it right in the eyes and say OK. By agreeing to life we are agreeing to at some stage die and we are also agreeing to all the shitty little things that happen in between. Buy the ticket take the ride kind of deal. It’s a lot to take on and by the time we have realised that these are the terms and conditions it is too late, we are adults or teenagers and suicide is such poor form, so passé in these modern times.

I walked past a room during the week and glanced inside and saw a middle aged woman sitting on the edge of her bed. One leg had been amputated just below the knee and the other leg just above the ankle.  He bandaged stumps hung unevenly and she was just sitting there, staring down at the ground. It was so awful, so heart wrenching, so terrible that it gave me a sense of wonder, like I had seen something that not many people get to see. My own private horror show, a misery en scène, if you were.

In ICU I helped turn a patient who was quite distressed, possibly suffering from advanced dementia, maybe he was just crazy. As we tried to roll him over so the nurses could clean him he struck out at me and started trying to swat me away. I held him gently and let him have at it, talking to him the whole time, trying to ease his distress. His eyes were full of fear and as I talked to him I could feel him start to relax and soon he was calm. We dressed him and then moved on to the next patient that needed our help. It felt good and it felt right.

Rorriexo

Alright, I want to tell you about something that I’ve just discovered and you’re going to think it strange, not the thing but the fact that I only just discovered this phenomenon. Until very recently when I heard the term ‘camming’ or ‘cam-whore’ I thought it was a reference to either A) girls that got on sites like 4chan and showed their bodies for compliments or B) girls that got on things like MSN chat and showed their tits to strangers or C) a form or pornography where you pay a girl to do a show for you via webcam. Turns out I was right on all counts but what I didn’t realise is that there is a whole industry built around it. You can go right now to a website and watch a beautiful girl from middle America stick a dildo up her arse in real time right now and it’s free! Having no idea that such a thing existed, the first time I went to one of these sites I was totally unprepared for what came next. And let’s get this out of the way, this is not about me in a frenzy of masturbation, this is about me being gobsmacked at life in all its fucked up glory. Saying that, if I’m truthfully honest, this is the only time I have legitimately masturbated in the name of research. It can be done. Anyway, moving on.

So you go to the page right, and then you see all these thumbnails of girls and you pick one. Seems easy enough. They might be sitting there fully clothed, just waiting. So you start scrolling through a few, some semi-naked, some costumed up, some in hoodies and g-strings. Then Bam, there’s a girls squatting on a dildo over a mirror squirting everywhere and you’re like ‘Where the fuck did that come from? It’s the surprise that gets you. But when you get over the whole fact that you’re watching someone masturbate for money on the internet you realise that you’re watching someone masturbate for money on the internet. But not your money. But you can watch anyway. It was about here that I started to feel pretty damn seedy, but undeniably fascinated. I carried on.

So you’ll flick around and if it’s your thing you might go back some other time and notice the same girls working the same shifts and maybe you’ll find a girl that you really like the look of and you’ll watch her for a while and she’ll say some pretty dumb and corny shit but every now and then she’ll do something like be she’ll masturbating with a dildo and as she inserts it she whispers “I hate all of you” and you might be like ‘Well ok, there’s nothing on tv so continue’ and then maybe you’ll start following them on twitter and pretending not to check when their next show is coming up.

The one I chose to follow is an 18yr old Canadian girl who does shows in her parents house after they have gone to bed. She is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, an absolute knock out. . She sits around in her pyjamas and talks. A lot. It has this weirdly intimate feel like pillow talk. Sometime I have her window open but I will be doing other things whilst I listen to her talk. It’s like the perverts version of the radio. Sometimes I play ambient electronic music over her and it turns it into the scene from American Beauty where that kid’s watching the plastic bag blow around like a giant fag. And she bitches about other cam girls. Stuff like, “her name is Leah she has four kids and does her show from her mini van a lot”. Or she’ll say something like ‘Yeah, my moms best friend is in a coma so tomorrow Imma go buy a vibrator’. Oh yeah, and she had a UTI.

 

It’s the bits in between the action that I find so interesting. When the girls are just talking, trying to drum up some money. I’ve seen some pretty smart things, I saw one girl who was having a drinking competition with the guys who were watching her. On Halloween I watched a girl in the most amazing zombie make up masturbate and rub what I desperately hope was fake blood all over her vagina. It was deeply disturbing but borderline genius so, you know, credit to her.

This is what they wanted Big Brother to be. Pretty girls talking in an intimate atmosphere and then getting naked for your viewing pleasure.

Wait, I gotta go. My girl is on and she’s talking about her daddy issues and how if she ever does porn she wants to go on Bang Bus. Some guy asked her what her tattoo says but she didn’t answer. I’ve seen people ask her before but she always avoids the question. She has a tattoo above her vagina that says ‘Respect’. Yup.

I'll buy that for a dollar.

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Do you know what I hate? Advertising. It’s pervasive, invasive, and unless you were lucky enough to be born in Såo Paulo, it’s fucking everywhere. On every wall, on every tram stop, on every television station. Constantly spruiking whatever it is that it spruiks. It’s like a child that never shuts up unless you give it attention but when you give it attention it gets ADD and you have to spend the next 4 hours trying to calm it down. “Look at me” it yells from the television, “Look at me!” it screams from the billboards, from the bus stops. “Look at ME!” it hysterically wails from any social media site you might use. Or online newspaper. Or email account. Or the place you go to check the weather.

And the things that riles me up the most is that advertisers have the guile to say that with social media we are now entering a time of ‘conversation’.  To this I say ‘Bullshit’ and when you start to interrupt I yell “Shut your fucking mouth because I’m talking!” A conversation goes two ways. For the last, what, however long print advertising has been around it’s been a one way ‘conversation’. They talk, or print, we listen, or read. Then television came along creating another wonderful platform for companies to foist their wares upon us. I can’t watch television anymore because of how insulting I find the advertising. It is obvious that in every one of these briefs I am described as a ‘consumer’, like I’m some animal with a voracious appetite going around and shoving whatever I can into my mouth, not caring where it came from, not caring what it is. I find this very insulting for numerous reasons, the main one being that I don’t just blindly consume, I am very aware that the resources on our planet are finite and I worry constantly that the footprint that I’ll leave will be much too large for someone my size. Part of what irks me is also the way we are conditioned to consume, like it’s our only goal. And advertisers, if we’re engaged in this so called conversation, how come you did not hear me when I said ‘Fuck off’, why did you just keep talking like I had not voiced my opinion? What part of “I don’t want you in my life” was so hard to understand?

Another thing that irks me no end is this ‘We’ve listened, we care’ bullshit. I just told you that you don’t listen and this thing you call ‘caring’ is not caring at all, it’s protecting your own interests which are, as always, financially motivated. When a company tells you that they’ve listened and that they care what they’re really saying is ‘We thought we could slip that one by you and you wouldn’t notice, what we’ve done is tweaked it slightly and so hopefully you’ll just buy it and shut up’ or ‘we didn’t think that you’d notice that we were being complete arseholes about that, we’ll pretend we’ve fixed the problem but what we’re going to do is carry on and do the same things with just a little bit more subtly’.

I know that this sounds a lot like hysterical paranoia but think about it like this. A corporation is a whole bunch of people who have got together with one aim in mind, one goal and that goal is to separate you from your money. Sure you might get something in return, but they only have that thing so they can get your money. Think of it in terms of prostitution. They don’t necessarily want you to fuck them, they just want what’s in your wallet and if letting you fuck them is how they get it then so be it. Throw in the fact that advertising plays on fears, (you’re ugly, no one will fuck you so you might as well fuck us) and people are beating a path to their door. They way that advertising plays on peoples fears and insecurities is insidious and possibly evil, if not morally corrupt and morally deficient. And you know the worst thing about advertising?

We let it happen to ourselves. For years magazines aimed at women have done nothing more than make women more self conscious, made women more critical towards each other. And we complain, but we don’t do anything about it. On the other side of the fence, we’ve sexualised our women to the point of over sexualisation, turned them into women with baby lady parts, not a pubic hair to be seen. The modern version of masculinity has way less body hair than it did in the 80’s and is so self obsessed that it “body sculpts”.

The thing is, it’s all about manipulation. Say that to any ad man and he’ll grin and say “Of course!” like it’s something to be proud of, “I lie so well and so often that you don’t even know it!” And yet we continue to buy it, we continue to lap it up. It’s like someone serving us a steaming pile of shit on a plate and instead of throwing it back in their face like we should, we eat it up, we keep steady eye contact and nod our head with every mouthful, smiling the whole time.

Wake up.

MWWS

‎"1st get raped den Get hanged u dog den u will know how it fills"

- Freshta Jan, from the Facebook page, naming and shaming the man accused of the murder of Jill Meagher. 

Australia, we have to talk. There are some things that I feel I need to discuss with you, things concerning the recent case of Jill Meagher. Some of what I’m going to say might be hard to hear but I really think you need to hear it. Everyone seems to have an opinion on this so I’m going to share mine.

First up, the way you originally reacted was wonderful. I woke up on Saturday morning and my social media feed was already clogged with “Help find Jill Meagher” posts. Everybody was on it, and it was an excellent example of the some of the good that social media can do. Everyone uniting for the one cause. Everyone hoping for the best. Clicktivism creating awareness. And the days went by and things started to look worse rather than better, the media had a field day, there was footage of her last moments, people came forward and then someone was arrested. The end.

But oh no, you couldn’t let it go. You had to attach yourself to the case like it meant something to you, worked yourself up into a hysteria, made your grief a public platform on which you could stand and shout “I’m sad about this”. And in doing so, in getting caught up in the mob mentality, you let the monster out, the monster that is stupidity. And I don’t mean one person in particular, I mean all of you as a group. You became a hive mind of activity that only got dumber the larger it became. You showed us the de-evolution is indeed possible, all you need to do is sit behind a computer.

You posted the accuseds name and photo on a public website. Then you posted the phone number and address of someone with a similar name on the same website and then you started calling that number. And then you realised you’d made a mistake and so you took the number down and asked everyone to stop calling it. And then shit just got dumber, and I’m sorry to say that I too got caught up in the moment and I’m afraid that the temptation was too much and I just had to participate.  

SOME IDIOT: Hope you dead in jail fucking cunt

Top of Form

ME:ME: Nice use of language.

SOME IDIOT: Hate that fucking , think say bad word about this guy nice use of language

ME: Have you ever been so far even as decided to use go want to look more like?

SOMEONE ELSE: Well said...

ORIGINAL IDIOT: I hate guyz who rope women that is yurk

ANOTHER DUDE: Like think for should go happen when because potato?

IDIOT AGAIN: I don't care what u think , he will get karam at him for what he has done to the poor girl

ME: Not sure if serious...

And then, internet, you created an account in Jill Meaghers name and insinuated that she was a slut who deserved it. Tsk tsk internet. Posting on her RIP page under her killers name and under an account claiming that he was innocent. Ha ha internet, you are so funny, I have not seen that done a thousand times before. Where do you get such comic brilliance? You trolled, oh how you trolled, from early morning to late at night, I watched the whole thing. It was actually really boring, but the only other thing on was the grand final and there just wasn’t enough real emotion in that for me. But online, oh, the emotions flowed thick and fast.  

It’s like you just let go completely. You lost control of your emotions and let it all out, on the internet and on the street. You held a candlelit vigil at the shop where she was last seen? Does that not strike you as a bit odd? You all gathered and shed tears… for a stranger. I’m not saying your grief is not acceptable, what I am saying though is it is inconsistent. What was the last tear stained vigil you attended? What would motivate you to attend another one? Will you do it for everyone who is murdered or just those you deem the innocent? Thank god you don’t live in Mexico where in 2011 there were, on average, 49 kidnappings a day. You’d shit your pants, you’d be dehydrated from all the tears that would pour out of you.

I have read too many “It could have been me” stories this week that now none of them actually ring true. You know what? It could have been anyone, it was a random attack. A quote from todays peace march goes like this "The nature of your passing is not acceptable, and you have bought a community together to show we will not tolerate it.", which is good because what they’re talking about is murder and it would be a terrible thing if it were tolerable. There are already many many laws against it, and infact it is deemed highly unacceptable to kidnap and rape women in most societies and has been for a long time.

I get what you’re saying. The fact that violence against women is still prevalent in our society is a reprehensible thing, but this is not your standard domestic violence, this is a random opportunistic attack.

What you’re all up in arms about is an aberration, a deviation from the norm. Men don’t usually go out looking for women to rape and kill, it is not the usual motivation for going out on Friday night. The thing that scares you is the fact that she was taken from a place that you know and call safe and that has shaken up your world view and you’re all disoriented and lashing out blindly. “It could happen to anyone”, well, not really, this sort of thing is actually quite rare. “But there’s heaps of people around and someone should have seen something”, yeah, well, King st always has heaps of people around and no one ever calls it the safest street in Melbourne, and maybe someone should have seen something but we’re talking about it being nearly two in the morning and everyone being under the influence of alcohol. How much detail do you notice at two in the morning when you’ve been drinking for a few hours? I’m going to go ahead and say ‘Not much”.

I’m not saying that women can’t walk the streets alone, what I’m saying is that everyone is in some kind of danger when they are by themselves at night in an urban environment, it has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with the fact that we are human and humans are fucked and do fucked shit to each other. It would be nice to say “We should all be free and safe” but we just can’t, there will always be the deviations from the norm, there will always be some spanner in the works, because we’re human, and as I said, humans are fucked.

It really bothers me how you took all that grief and let it out, grief for someone you’d never met no less. You openly said things like “I never knew her but I feel there’s a hole in my heart” and you wept for the cameras. You said such inane things like “God needed another soul so he took yours” like you were desperate to be a sound bite.

And where are you now? Do you think about her every day? Do you help hand out wanted posters of all the other lost and missing people?

Enjoy your life.

I tripped balls at the zoo and all I got was more awesome.

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Jesus, where to start with this. I guess I’ll just begin at the beginning and we’ll see how we go. Alright, so, back story, you who know me may know that I’ve had a checked history with drugs, sometimes I’ve loved them and sometimes I’ve hated them, but they have always, in some way or another, been part of my life. So I’ve always been upset when I take what should be a fun thing and it turns out to be a negative experience, and it’s not like I mean bad times just bad vibes and awful jaw clenching. I’ve always wanted to love acid and the few times that I’ve tried it it’s like there’s been something missing. Something that I have always dreamed of doing but have always been too afraid and never had the opportunity to do was going to the zoo on acid. Today I was lucky enough to live that dream.

So it went like this, a good friend of mine whom I can’t say too much about organised a day at the zoo. They came over, we got stoned, we got a train to the zoo and on that train we ingested half a tab of LSD each, then we loitered in the zoo car park and smoked a joint and then we went in.

There was kids. There was people. It was fine. We saw the big cats, it was cool, they were big, we saw the small cats, it was cool, they were pretty, we saw some pelicans and then we went into the undergroundy type seal chamber and things started to get a bit interesting. Colours were nice, the seals looked amazing as they glided through the water and I was particularly taken with the tank of sea horses. We walked out into the sunlight. Alright, we said, it’s on.

We did some wandering, everything a lovely green, all the plant life looking amazing, the brightly coloured birds like something out of a fairy tale. We saw otters, tigers, we did the butterfly house which was lovely but I took it all with such ease that I was beginning to wonder, should I take more drugs? The answer, as expected, as hoped and as feared, was yes. I mean, I was riding this out pretty well, this would just be a little more spice. And it’s always the same thing with drugs, you have a little, wait a bit, think ‘This is not really doing anything, better have some more’ then two minutes later your original dose hits you and then BAM! you realise you just fucked yo' self. It was when we were in the giant aviary that it really started to hit me, and it was also at this time that I recorded this message. By the time we were at the orang-utans it was difficult to tell who was simian and who was human. I was definitely less than human.  

Then this whole next bit is sort of like a blur, let me try and explain it. Imagine a train going into a tunnel right and you’re on the front of the train. The wind is blowing in your face and you can’t see where you’re going but your course is literally set on rails. Imagine that moment just as you enter the tunnel, half bright half dark and the change in air pressure around you. Imagine that feeling for about an hour while you look at animals in cages and try to contain your ever mounting hysteria, the whole time surrounded by strangers. I climbed in a replica wombat cave that kids are allowed to play in and I swear I got lost in the damn thing. It was about a meter long and dark as hell. We got really bad vibes from the emus that were just walking around. Are you serious? Emus just walking around like it aint no thang? Interacting? Don’t they know there’s people with heads full of acid roaming these parts who are likely to be surprised, to say the least, when they come face to face with one of these beasts? Have some care man and think of the damn children.

Then I think we went looking for the bears and they are, aha, barely worth a mention. Then we headed to the reptile bit which was incredible but they were starting to close so we had to skeddadle. I could have stared at those snakes for hours though. Also, do they have a spider section because I would have loved to have seen it.

The thought of being packed into a tram terrified me so we walked to the city and then got a cab home. I say it casually, ‘We walked to the city’. We were tripping balls. Every step was its own adventure. We walked past the Royal Childrens Hospital. Quite an impressive building, such wonderful colours. And the way it subtly moves a bit also quite impressive. The stream of people coming home from their jobs that we were walking against was also kind of daunting at times. Every now and then I’d think to myself ‘Be careful now, these people aren’t like you’ and I’d have to stifle the giggles. The closer we got to the city the more it enforced my beliefs that hallucinogens are always best in a natural environment, or at least, a concrete one that had been sculpted to look natural with animals from all around the world stuck awkwardly in it.

The other real highlight was being shot in the face with a bubble gun that has the brightest fucking lights on it that you’ve ever seen. I swear, I can’t believe they sell this stuff to kids. It was staring into a multi-coloured sun. My retinas will never be the same. And if I could experience that very first moment that it happened I would bottle it up and sell that shit because it was fucking amazing. My friend was together enough to get some excellent photos and they are at the end of this post. I also watched a cloud turn into a fish and as it caught the last fading light of the sunset just so, looking for all the world like a salmon, flicking its tail and disappearing into the void, its scales rippling. 

It truly was an incredible day and I couldn’t have done it without someone I trusted being there, so I thank you unnamed provider, for all the awesome things that you provided for me today. I’ll probably remember this day for the rest of my life, long after the scraps of my sanity have flown. My dim eyes will stare into nothing and I will smile, happy in my memories. I hope to see you there. 

The ship sank and so then I just rode the debris in with the tide.

It’s been a while and it’s not something I’ve really addressed here so today I want to talk about something that has always been a curiosity to me, as I’m sure it has been to all of you. I have worked in retail for a long time. Over half of that time was spent working with womens clothing and let me tell you, it does something to a guy, especially one who’s naturally predisposed to being a little camp. Retail fashion is the sort of environment where you are expected to judge and critique someone’s appearance and in this environment it often helps to assume a pose that is non-threatening to the person being scrutinised so closely. Considering that I was more often than not dealing with women, it was easy for me to assume the appearance of being gay, and considering that I was a guy working in fashion, it was almost always assumed of me anyway.  

This opened up a world of possibilities and allowed me to be in situations that would only terrify the women if they knew what was actually running through my head as they stood there in bra and undies idly weighing their boobs in their hands as they considered their next garment to try on. I’ve seen things that I hope I never forget and things I really hope I do. I’ve had women tell me the most intimate details about themselves because of my “non-threatening” demeanour. The amount of times I have said “Your ass looks amazing in that” or “I’m sorry, but that makes your tits look fantastic” and had positive results is, well, it’s actually almost retarded. I’ve said things that I’d hesitate saying to my good friends let alone a total stranger. Actually, that’s a lie. I have no problem telling my friends they look good. And I’ve approached randoms on the street just to tell them how amazing they look, so, yeah. Moving on.

And here’s another thing about being surrounded by women, you begin to notice things about them, like nail polish. I now have fully formed opinions on nail polish. And womens shoes. And dresses, god, don’t get me started, I’ll fag out all over the place. For instance, I was on the tram the other day and there was this Asian girl and she was smoking hot like, untouchable hot, hotter than a two dollar pistol hot, and she was wearing these yoga pants and the sneakers with heels, you know, the whole bit, and the whole time I was looking at here, and trust me, it was a creeplily long time, the entire time I was thinking, “Someone did a really great job on dying her hair” because her hair was indeed dyed purple, but it was really well done. I actually thought, if I was ever to be able to fuck a girl like this can you imagine what the pillow talk afterwards would be? I’d be examining her nails and asking her where she got her hair did.

 So I can hear you asking, how has people thinking you’re gay helped at all, and I’ll tell you some of the times it has come in handy. For instance, this one time this cute girl, she would have been about 21, comes into my shop on a Monday morning. she’s walking around in a bit of a daze and I engage her in conversation, you know, doing the shop thing and then we get to talking and I swear I don’t even know how it came up but she starts telling me about this lesbian orgy she had at this party she went to on the weekend and about hot it was and all the drugs and it was amazing, you know, just watching her relive it and her youth was shinning through like sunlight and it was so lovely of her to share this amazing story with me. I was like, ‘Oh wow, that sounds like an amazing time, I remember one time me and this girl” and she says “Oh, I thought you were gay” and then she got really embarrassed and told me that she wouldn’t have told me the story if she knew I was straight, and the way she said it was like she thought that the only thing I could see in the story was sex and the instant she was gone I was going to close the doors and run out the back and jerk off over the thought of it. I wanted to say ‘Hey, its ok, I just appreciate witnessing someones awakening, I think it’s cool that you’re out there doing your thing and to be honest, I’m a little jealous’ but you know, these things never come out right and so we made some slightly awkward conversation and then she left.

And as soon as she did I closed the doors and ran out the back and jerked off over the thought of it. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. It’s the truth when I say I felt like I owed it to her not to sully this beautiful image of youth and ecstasy with my lecherous horny thoughts, I swear on my life. I can’t pretend that there hasn’t been times when after a long day of summer serving some of the nicest skin this town has to offer, well, at the end of the day the relief is palpable. If the toilets at my work could talk they would say ‘Yes, he masturbated in here. And would take half-hour long shits just because he could’.

This is a terrible follow up sentence to the last paragraph, but I miss the women most of all. As a man who truly adores women, especially those that are easy on the eye, working with womens clothing is, of course, the epicentre of all that is cool and young and hip and hot. I just wish that I had caught a few more in my trap, you know, snared a few specimens for my own private perusal. Maybe I could have asked them where they got their hair did, if only I’d ever got around to asking them their name.

I was just thinking then about how in summer I used to have cold bottles of water or coke for my customers and I’d stand in front of the fan and spray myself with a water bottle and sometimes for hours no one would come in and the day would drag in the languid heat and I’d lean in the door way and look out the insanity that was Smith st and nod to people as they walked by, olde’ shopkeep like. If I look at it in the right light, I think sometimes that they were some of the happiest moment of my life. I remember leaving on Friday nights as the sun was setting thinking that it couldn’t get any better than this. And for a while I was right, but god damn I wish I hadn’t been.