Shows

I was watching a show in which two guys were trying to determine whether or not fake tan produced realistic results, so they strapped a blonde woman to a chair in the sun for three days straight, until her face blistered its way off her skull, and I felt a huge sense of relief when they proved that the sun didn’t cause women to turn orange, it just caused skin cancer.

I was watching a show in which contestants have to drug a total stranger and rape him in a car park, when the door burst open and my husband told me that I had to start looking for work because he had quit his job at the television station and demanded to be a kept man, “silk sheets, a terraced house, friends with the Beckhams”, etc.

I was watching a show in which contestants can only eat food that they have killed by their own hands, and during the climax of a particularly moving scene depicting a 23 year old aged care worker who had been left for ten days in a room with only a live cow and a large kitchen knife finally slitting the cow’s throat, but having to cut its eyes out first so it couldn’t stare at her while she was eating, and weeping as she tore strips of flesh off its hide while it was still alive and braying and mewling because she hadn’t killed it right, I started wishing I had some foie gras on white toast.

I was being bothered by a show in which an offbeat detective, who has precisely one (1) character quirk, but is funny and charming, and has colleagues who are one-dimensional caricatures so as not to detract from our hero’s thrilling charisma, and together they solve crimes by thinking outside the box, and I had just finished discussing it over various social networking websites when I received an email from a major network television producer who said that he loved my idea and would like to commission a series and, instead of reminding him that I was talking about a show that he, himself, had already produced, I decided to just go along with him and take the cash and then, after making my first million, I was truly contented.

I was watching a show that I was in, when the manager of the bank told me that they were closing and that I’d have to go home now.

I was watching a socially conscious show in which contestants compete for the right to marry a farmer who has been having a terrible time trying to find a compatible mate in his isolated country town full of women who say the word “cunt”, but now finds himself surrounded by classy city women who wouldn’t even mention that part of their bodies in conversation, but I missed the final scene, in which the winner is forced to fist fight the farmer’s mother, because the dog started humping my leg.

I was devouring a show in which obese contestants had to dance in order to win cash prizes, but were unaware that the show’s malevolent producers had created weak spots in the stage floor in order to make the show more hilariously enjoyable, and just before the winner was told that, in fact, she was not going to be getting any money and that she should just get a life and stop eating so damn much, my laughter reached the exact pitch of whale song and my lungs haemorrhaged, killing me instantly.

I was dissecting a show in which women undergo radical plastic surgery in order to make them more attractive to men (typically accomplished by adding a third breast), when I coincidentally resolved to start a fitness regime, for the good of my health.

I was watching a show in which a bunch of wannabe models train daily and nightly to become professional supermodels, but are constantly belittled and degraded by Tyra Banks, who is unaware of the fact that each contestant has been fitted with a set of acrylic nails that have been sharpened to such an extreme point that Jamie Oliver could confidently slice tomatoes with them, and they were starved of food, and starved of sleep, and fed cocaine to the point of psychosis and in the series finale, when they riot and slaughter Tyra, and the one who has collected the highest amount of Tyra’s skin and worn it on the catwalk wins, I suddenly became bored and changed the station.

I was watching a show in which two people with absolutely nothing in common are comically forced to live within each other’s immediate vicinity and roll their eyes until they bleed and retain permanent damage, when the universe collapsed in on itself, the rate of entropy spontaneously rising exponentially until all life, and everything else for that matter (puns, even in the face of doom), was reduced to an outright nothingness.

I was engrossed in a show in which fourteen year old girls, young girls, hot girls, girls well below the age of consent, are strapped to lie detectors and then quizzed about their sexual experiences, while a group of thirty-somethings sit around them, bent forward, intent, listening so hard, sweat pimpling on their foreheads, waiting for the words to fall out of the girls’ disgusting little mouths; “…and then he touched me”, and when the entire thing had finished and I got my breath back, I called the station to complain.

In My Defense, I Was Already Fired: A Poem

Another drink and I’m drunk
and not allowed to drive.
Another day and I’m doomed
a dead duck.
Another watershed moment
wielding a maraca like a mace.
I’m fine with your findings
allow me to defenestrate.
Paranoia, you say?
Pish-posh.
Emasculation the cause
of my career ending crash?
Perhaps it’s just what happens
when you’re a pushover and a half.
Bed is where I belong
before I do something bad,
Like lipstick your louvers
with a letter of discontent.
You see me as slovenly
but I assure you I am
As regally rude
as Alan Rickman.

Hate Crimes of the Future

Later, at the police station, I was able to open my right eye a little, but the outside world was still blurred and a rivet of pain shot through my face. I was trying to explain to the officer what had happened.
“I was walking home and I heard someone yell out ‘Hey, Fag!’, and then I was just getting hit. I can’t remember much else.”
“They said ‘Hey, Fag!’?” asked Officer Maltrone, hovering over a notepad.
“Yeah.” I said.
“You ever seen these guys before?”
“No.”
“So it was a hate… crime.” he spoke as he took notes.
“Uh, I guess. I’m not gay, though. I don’t know if that has any bearing.”
He stopped and looked at me.
“They probably thought you were. Were you wearing that scarf?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, George.”
George was leaning against a door frame over the other side of the office, bulging out of his Sergeant’s uniform just above the pant-line. On hearing his name, he stopped taking bites out of a very large ham and salad sandwich and strolled towards us.
“What’s up?” he said.
“Is fag-bashing still a hate crime if the victim ain’t actually gay?” asked Maltrone.
“Well,” he began, “what you gotta look at is intent. Even if you ain’t gay, the guys were out to bash a fag and if they thought you were one, then it’s intent to bash a fag. Were you wearing that scarf?”
“Well, yeah…” I said.
“Well, then, there’s also the element of intolerance. Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that these guys take exception to the way you dress, in this case, a terribly disgusting scarf. An eyesore, even. To an extent, they’re not just being intolerant of you, they’re being intolerant of the scarf, the style you appropriate, the store you bought it in, even the designer him-or-her-self. Either way you look at it: hate crime. Big time. There’s no room for intolerance in this world. Fags of all shapes and sizes should be allowed to walk the streets unmolested. Why in a perfect world…”
I lost focus at this point. My head was swirling and swimming butterfly, the strangest of all strokes. I was the victim of a hate crime. My world was now irrevocably changed. I pulled my scarf up over my head and tied it under my chin. I started to cry.
“There’s a survivors of hate crime support group I can recommend…” said Maltrone.
“No,” I said, weeping, “I just want to be left alone. To get on with my life.” and with that, I fled from the building. My career in prostitution began that night.

Eulogy for Truett (may he live a long, happy life)

I was present on the day Truett was born, operating the video camera for his parents, who I’d met earlier that day during a tennis match I was umpiring. He entered the world in the style of a wild west gunslinger, his two little hands appearing first, pushing back saloon-door labia, then his head emerged and, though the doctors later put this down to the apportion of anesthetic among all gathered, I swear he looked up at us, scowled and said, “What you boys gawpin’ at?”

And he maintained this sassy pretense throughout his life (I always postulated upon a softer side to his character, though I have never seen evidence of its existence), which did not falter on the day he died. Lying upon his death bed, proclaimed too old to possibly still be alive, by every medical specialist in Texas, he reached for the phone and dialed Kneebone Robinson, largely considered to be the most dangerous man this side of Botembé, and brazenly confessed to seducing Kneebone’s partner, Dennis (a crime for which he was totally innocent, you know). Truett calmly reached for his sawn-off Uzi (he was the only man I ever knew who used to saw-off guns, no matter how small they originally were), emptied it of its ammunition, and held it pointed at the door, in anticipation of Kneebone’s arrival. Of course, even in lieu of bullets and quite ready to be euthanized, Truett still had the upper hand and, to this day, Kneebone still can’t talk without stuttering.

Anyway, ashes to ashes, Par tem ar peraminus, goodbye old friend.

Leucochloridium Paradoxum: A Profile

Gareth slumped low in the couch, legs spread in front of him. He felt neither one way nor the other about what the results might be. He was comfortable for now and that was the only thing that really mattered. The huge window in the front of the lounge room was tinted dark and spattered with bubbles, the odd pockets of air separating the plastic tint from the glass. The sunlight that shone through the tint was eerie, like in movies where they played with the film to make a scene shot during the day look like night. Gareth enjoyed the feeling of this faux-moonlight, making his pale skin glow a dull purple.

Gareth had been thirteen years old the last time he’d seen his father, Bob. He’d turned up at his Aunt Gladys’s house, where Gareth had lived most of his life. He hadn’t stuck around. He asked Gareth how he’d been keeping, dropped an envelope full of money on the kitchen bench and said goodbye. The whole visit lasted roughly eight minutes, with Gladys staring at Bob, tight-lipped for every one of them. When he left she swept up the money, left the room and never mentioned the incident again.

Gareth ran a hand through his hair which, over time, had begun to resemble that of a clown’s, disappearing in all the right places, but neglected, growing in thick clumps, one on either side of his head and another one climbing out of the top of his skull like a windmill in a meadow. As he brought his hand down again he realized that it was still covered in motor oil. Motor oil which was now also slicked across his head. He had spent the past couple of hours working on the rusty HX that was sitting in the back yard like the ruins of a lost civilization of rev-heads. It even had weeds growing in the foot well of the passenger seat when he had gone out to it this morning. He had torn them out and then gone to work on removing the carburetor, though he’d only really been out there to avoid Bertie.

Gareth had never felt too strongly for Bertie. Since the day he met her at his mate Travis’s house she had merely been someone who was willing to hang around with him. He had paid Travis for the buds and then sat outside with her, smoking and not saying much. Life had stayed fairly consistent since. In a way, Bertie was settling as well. At the age of thirty (nine years Gareth’s senior), Bertie felt as though she should swoop at whatever opportunity presented itself. She let him move in, and even paid for the broken old HQ to be towed there from Aunt Gladys’s place.

Standing, Gareth went to the fridge and took out a half finished carton of iced coffee. He leant on the door of the fridge and took a swig. Bertie finally emerged from the bathroom, her face angled down, eyes wide, staring up at Gareth. In the distance, the local primary school’s bell rang. He had nine months to get that HX running.

Observations Of A Friday Morning

* It’s a beautiful morning, contrasting viciously with my exhausted mental state.
* The shadows are very high on the walls – a cantilever to the sun’s position in the sky.
* There was no coffee in the house this morning.
* People are bustling energetically.
* Birds are chattering.
* A bottle of Coke is no substitute.
* Blades of grass are glistening, shining.
* The air is still, the temperature perfectly mild.
* Is that fucking dew I smell?
* A bird flew down and sat next to me as though we were friends.
* I’m going home to bed. It’s far too fucking pleasant out here.

I Kick Arse On A Saturday Night

Three green, one white, two green, one white, three green again, one white, one green, one white, three green. This is the seemingly random sequence of colours in the tiles, on the floor, in the toilet, in the bathroom, in the pub that I drank too much in. It took only a couple of minutes to empty my stomach of sushi and beer, but it seems to be taking much longer to gather the strength to get up off the floor. Concentrating on small details seems to help me not dry-reach.
“Luke”, whispers a voice from outside of the stall.
I recognize it as belonging to Dave, this guy I vaguely know, who I’ve been half-heartedly avoiding all night. He’s a nice guy, but he’s one of those dudes that likes to get all deep and meaningful about his band, which often ends with him raging about how shitty “The Industry” is and how hard working bands never get a fucking break, etc.
“Dave?” I mumble, “How did you know I was in here?”
“Your legs are coming out under the door.”
He is right. Fucker.
“It’s ok,” I say, getting up and trying to sound sober all at once. “I just had to be sick a little bit.”
I open the door and roll out, trying to politely walk past him.
“Hey, I’m heading home in a minute, if you want a lift.”
It sounded fine to me. After all, getting a taxi when you’re a drunk male who’s by himself is a bit like getting the DJ to go out with you. Not impossible, but you’d better be pretty well dressed. Getting into his car turned out to be the biggest mistake of my life. When we were halfway home, he told me he wanted to take me past his house first, to listen to his band’s newest demo.
“I don’t know, man, I think I’m about to pass out. Probably won’t be much of a good critic.”
“Nah, bullshit,” he said, “When you’ve had a few is the only time to listen to music.”
My mind had begun to threaten me with automatic shutdown, if I didn’t get immediately to a bed. I closed my eyes, hoping to ease the pressure building on my eyes, but trying so hard to stay awake, lest this man drive me into a dark alley and sodomize me relentlessly. Yes, I knew him, but not all that well. He already seemed a little unstable. Rest the eyes, but stay awake. That’s all I have to do. Have strength.
I woke up just as we pulled into Dave’s driveway. Fuck, I thought. My resolve really is quite piss-poor. We went inside and before I had even wiped my feet, his band’s demo was in the CD player and blaring loud enough to cause tinnitus. I slowly shambled in and fell into the vinyl couch, which complained at me with a loud squeaking moan. The next twenty minutes are a blur of “Check out this bit”’s and “Here comes the bass part”’s.
It sounded as though Dave and his band were still a little too emotionally connected to Metallica, a problem that a lot of guitar players in their late twenties seemed to have. Then he hit me with the extreme nature of his lyrics.
He said, “Have you ever read H.P. Lovecraft?”
I felt sure I must be imagining things. He didn’t really just say that, did he? I erupted into a coughing fit, just to mask the riotous laughter that had nearly rampaged from my mouth.
“Heh, cigarettes will kill you.” I joked.
“Lovecraft’s wrote about parallel dimensions.” he said, not even noticing me. Then he pulled out a crack pipe. “Lovecraft believed that other dimensions existed side by side with our own and that there were weak spots in the fabric of space and time that could let demons into our dimension from some other, hellish existence.” He begun torching the pipe with a lighter, drawing in his own hellfire.
It had become way too surreal in here for me. In Dave’s CD I noticed the lyric “Demon of time, why do you haunt me?” I was going to throw up. I excused myself and made for the toilet. Once in there, I sat on the bowl and tried to sober myself, so I could make a convincing argument about how I can just walk home from here. The fact that I had no idea where we were didn’t matter. I couldn’t handle this any more. I got up, flushed the clean water, so as to make him think I had actually used it, then went about the task of finding the bathroom so I could splash some water on my face.
I opened the door to the left of the toilet and found myself staring into a bedroom. A bedroom plastered with posters of Pearl Jam and Nirvana. A bedroom which was beginning to fill with morning light. A bedroom in which a young blonde boy, no more than twelve years old was lying on the bed, bound with dull silver electrical tape, completely naked and smudged with dirt. Judging by the smell, it was feces.
“Holy shit.” I squeaked, suddenly far too sober to be able to handle this, yet too shocked to be able to process it. I heard Dave move in his squeaky vinyl couch.
“Oh, hey,” he said, rising very quickly. “Don’t go in there yet!”
“What the fuck is this?” I stammered.
“Okay,” he said, “You know I was telling you about dimensions?”
“What the fuck is this?” I repeated, my voice rising in pitch.
“I found that. It was trying to kill me.” Dave’s voice was far too calm, too rational. Almost jokey.
“It’s a kid!” I half screamed.
“No, man. That’s what it wants you to see. It blinds you, you know? Blinds you to the truth. That thing’s a fuckin’ demon.”
“Dave,” I said. “You gotta let him loose. What if someone finds him? You’ll go to gaol.”
Dave’s legal status was not truthfully what I was concerned about, but I thought if I reasoned with him, maybe I could get him to let the kid and, more importantly me, go without gutting us and trying to turn us into clothing.
“We can’t let it go,” he said. “It’ll kill us. Man, I thought you’d get it. I thought you’d be able to see that little fucker for what it is.”
Panicking, I struck out. My fists missed their targets (Dave’s head), but I had put so much weight behind them that I fell forward onto him, knocking both of us to the ground like drunken lovers.
When I looked up I saw that Dave’s head had landed dead on the edge of the skirting board at the point where it folded rather sharply around a corner. Blood pooled out from behind his head and I jumped up faster then I knew I could move.
I went into the bedroom and looked around for something to cut the tape with. The boy looked at me blankly. There was nothing sharp around, so I leaned over and bit at the tape, the stench of shit flaming up my nostrils and making me heave.
The tape gave way easily and his hands fell free, dropping to the bed, before stretching out, impossibly long and rising, grabbing me by the shoulders, pulling me down into the kid’s expanding mouth, which had already grown large enough to engulf my entire head. I noticed its teeth were a dull silver, just like electrical tape that bound him and before I knew it, they were closing down over my neck.

Male Feminism

There was a reason that he didn’t hold the door open for me. He assured me that his not pulling my chair out for me was for a good reason. He told me of the old days in which women were repressed, mentally and physically. Husbands would play psychological games with their wives, hiding some of their possessions, pretending they had said things that they hadn’t, in an attempt to fool these women into thinking they were losing their minds. “It happens to all women after a certain age”, they would say. This form of abuse served to keep women weak, because men were afraid of them. Men were afraid that women could overpower them and take control of their patriarchal society.

The men thought it also important to keep women physically weak. This was achieved in a number of ways. Corsets were drawn tight, so as to disable the women’s ability to draw a full breath. Women were warned not to eat too much, lest they get fat and become unappealing to their husbands. But above all, women were never to exercise. They weren’t to take manual jobs. Lifting heavy objects was entirely unacceptable. Out of this need to keep women physically weak, was born chivalry. Men would open doors and pull back chairs out of a fear that their wives would grow muscles and rise up against them, usurping their thrones of dominance and forcing them to bondage.

For a first date, I felt as though he had confided more than necessary about his desires.

Real Consequences Of Alcohol Abuse As Noted By A Young Person

Three green, one white, two green, one white, three green again, on white, one green, one white, three green. This is the seemingly random sequence of colours in the tiles, on the floor, in the toilet, in the bathroom, in the pub that I drank too much in. It took only a couple of minutes to empty my stomach of sushi and beer, but it seems to be taking much longer to gather the strength to get up off the floor. Concentrating on small details seems to help me not dry-reach. I count one year, three months and 4 days since the last time I drink-vomited, knowing that it was only four days after my last birthday. I remember that I was already on my way home and, whilst walking through a public park I stepped in something. When I lifted my foot up to look at it, the smell of fresh dog turd hit me square in the face and I threw up directly onto the shit and the shoe. Then I put my foot back on the ground and continued walking, unabated. When I got home, I laid on the bed, entirely clothed and with the shoe still on my foot. I took great care in resting my leg with my foot dangling over the side of the bed. Good times.

Homeless Stand Up Comedian

Uh well, hello there and thank you all for coming. Uh, yes I am a homeless man. I actually haven’t eaten in three days and the fact that you all turned up means I’m gonna get paid, which means I’m gonna eat, long story short, I wont be dead by tomorrow morning. So other comedians say “Thank you for coming”, they don’t mean it anywhere near as much as I do. I fuckin’ mean that shit. But I’ve been homeless now for about 3 years and it’s tough, uh I don’t quite fit in with all the other homeless guys, I’m kind of an outsider, reason being I don’t speak the official language of the homeless. That’s right, we actually have our own language. Well, you all know it as tourette’s. Yeah. Uh, but see you all think it’s some kind of disease or syndrome or whatever, but I’m here tonight to let you all know the truth. Fact is, those guys that you see walking the street muttering to themselves, they’re actually speaking in code. That’s right they’re relaying important information back to the government via tiny little microphones that you can’t see because they work for the government… as spies. Yeah. So you hear “Fuckin’ shit son of a cocksucker”, but what they’re actually saying is “Echo Charlie Delta. The woodpecker has left the menagerie.” Which actually makes less sense, but anyway. “Daddy, why is that man saying swears at himself?”, “That’s code Honey, pay him no mind”. Pay him no mind. Pay him no spare change either. “Hey mate, can I borrow a dollar for the train?”, “Well, for a start, no you can’t borrow a dollar, that would imply that you’re gonna pay me back. I think we both know that ain’t gonna happen. Secondly, I’ll bet that you actually want that dollar to buy cigarettes so hell no, I’m not gonna lend you a dollar.” You don’t understand though. The cigarettes allow the government to trace their positions. It’s a special chemical only found in “White Ox”. Or cask wine as a substitute.