Someday I'll Own This Bookstore

“Do you have a pen?” I ask.

“Hm?” Jess looks up from her novel and coffee.

“Do you have a pen?” She turns to her handbag and starts fossiking around.

“I have a sugar.” She pulls a long, thin sachet of sugar from her bag and places it neatly on the table.

“Why do you have sugar in your handbag?” I ask, pointlessly. She ignores me and keeps searching.

” I have a gingerbread man cutter.” And she removes a metal gingerbread man cutter and puts it on top of the sachet of sugar. This time I don’t bother asking. “I have a space monkey.” Of course she does. She puts a metal badge  with black relief and the image of a monkey and cyrillian text next to the gingerbread man cutter and the sachet of sugar. She looks up at me and smiles. She looks proud of her pile of treasures. I smile back at her. She pulls a pen out from her bag and hands it to me, and I write:

‘“Do you have a pen?” I ask.’

My new life as an angry driver

I finally got around to getting my driver’ s license this morning. It was all fairly prosaic (crippling nervousness followed by delighted surprise) except for one part of the test- I was doing a totally legal turn completely perfectly and the car behind me beeped and yelled “learn to drive!” as he drove past.

This angered me for two reasons.

1: I was doing the right thing. Learn to criticize, dickhead!

2: I was in a car with Learner plates on it. An RACV Drive School car with bright yellow L plates! If anyone is ever in one of these cars they are most likely:

a) already learning to drive

b) taking a driving test

c) a driving instructor

Gahhh! Idiots! On the roads! Everywhere!

And I’m one of them now.

If you love him say it with chicken

I’m having my yearly session of intense sickness, and it’s not fun. I have a headache. My eyes feel like they’ve been left under heat lamps. I have these weird ulcers in my mouth (stress ulcers, not, like, Feline AIDS ulcers.) Also, I have a bad haircut. It’s not related to the whole illness thing, but I’m still I’m still upset about it. It looks like there’s a quarter of a mountain lion pelt glued to my head. My head that is bald. Under the quarter-mountain lion pelt.

So the band I’m in had our last rehearsal before our first gig next week. We’re a cover band. I might not have mentioned it because we’re so indie (not true) that even I forget the band exists sometimes (not true). Why just last week AC/DC asked- nay, begged! Begged us to let them open for us on Friday the 21st of November at Hardiman’s Hotel, Kensington (Not, not true. Not “Not not true” but the one that isn’t a double negative.) See what I did there? In the music biz, we call that a plug. Not dissimmilar to what my head looks like it has.

Where was I? Stardom, right. Massive super-stardom. We’re so popular that I’ve started setting trends. I go to the shops to buy soap (not entirely true) and there’s teenage girls chasing me for a change! It’s like that episode of the partridge family where the oldest one gets chased down the road by all those girls but escapes to the safety and comfort of his family bus (fiction is wonderful).
Now, all over town, girls are throwing themselves at musicians like it’s not even fair! And I started that! I didn’t start that. That existed before. Every night at the pub pretty girls walk in before the bands start looking confused and scared.

“He hasn’t started yet. He still needs to do a sound check.”

“Oh. How did you-“

“I just know.”

So I finished rehearsal (we totally rocked Blue Suede Shoes). (No, really, we did). And Chris, our singer/harmonica player dropped me off before going home to his daughter, who is also ill. What a nice guy. He deserves a rock star name, like Slash and Axl have. Maybe Snakebite Pinatera! Maybe C-Bomb Supernova! Maybe Norse-God Flaghenbehrger!

I lugged my cumbersome amp inside, held the door open with my foot while bent back and picked up my guitar. When it rains I have to hold the amp above ground and swivel my torso to reach my keys. Incidentally, the doctor said my back pain was due to poor posture and improper lifting techniques. He also said that in a man’s mid-20’s, all the foolish stuff he’s done, the rocks he’s jumped from, the lifting from the waist (it shows off my his svelte legs), the jagerbombs and maybe-trannies (really not really). All of that comes back to visit with dirty laundry and a box of warm white wine.

I got inside and something wasn’t right. It wasn’t a burglary. Most of the time my place looks like I have opponents who work for the Committee to Reelect the President. I turned the lights on and the halogen bulbs hurt my eyes (at this point the light emmitted from a particularly good gnat going to gnat heaven would hurt my eyes).

It was clean. Like, mostly! And the big stock pot was out, and there was a note next to it. Jess had cooked me

chicken soup

Lots and lots of chicken soup!

I’m the luckiest guy alive!

Taking a stand over statuesque feet

In the unusual world of the Melbourne Uni student union, there’s this guy Ramon. Or there was this guy Ramon. I’m not sure if he’s still around. He used to submit a lot of writing to the student literary magazine, Farrago. Jess used to be one of the editors of this prestigious publication, and a fair amount of Ramon’s work got cut. Some got in, too, but a bit was cut. The cut pieces were those that somehow defamed someone.

In an outburst of vitriol he released a ‘zine full of condemnation of the Farrago editorial team. Jess gets mentioned a bunch of times, but the most unusual mention by far was the one where Ramon talks about how he pictures her marmorial feet while recieving anal sex from another dude in order to orgasm. Marmorial means marble-like.

Now maybe I’m old fashioned, but I somehow feel that if anyone is picturing the feet of the woman I love while having bum sex it should be me. Or at the very least nobody else. So here, on a blog, I’m reclaiming her marmorial feet.

They’re mine now, Ramon, all mine.

That’s right, I’m being tough over my blog. He’d better watch out, or I’ll post on him. Pioneer style. The way Wild Bill Hickock used to blog about his rivals. This is Man Blogging.

You can’t see it, but I just clapped my palms against my chest twice and took on an expression of masculinity. Like I was about to chest bump. Or call someone “homes.” I’m being all “what up homes?” Yeah. It’s mannish. Mannish like an East German female weightlifter.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have a foot rub to give. Suck it, Ramon.

Showed him.

Because cut and pasting from the paper is easier than actually writing my own stuff

Also from The Age

“MEET one of Australia’s newest shareholders. There’s not much to distinguish him from the 6million Australians who directly own shares on the ASX. He has a security holder reference number (SRN) and an account statement, issued by Computershare. He’s a native Australian, and his first share purchase is in reputable listed company Downer EDI.

This shareholder even has a welcome letter from Downer EDI company secretary Stephen Mockett. But there is one significant feature - he’s a budgerigar.”

Branch Davidians they ain't

There’s a cult somewhere in Victoria called The Kingdom of Yaweh that is making a stand against the machinations of a dispicable world government- by not registering their cars.

This is from The Age

“The group uses its own vehicle registration plates that are booby trapped, according to a report on radio 3AW. A police officer had been injured trying to remove one of the plates.

Members of the group have sent affidavits to authorities, including the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, stating their intentions to not comply with the law.”

I can just imagine the annual general meeting they must have had at thier fortified compound in the middle of nowhere.

“How are we going to strike fear into the hearts of the unbelievers?”

“Nerve gas?”

“… No, that’s a bit messy, don’t you think?”

And then, all of a sudden, the cult leader storms in. He was running late because he needed to buy a copy of New Idea.

“Damn it!” He says, “I just got pulled over by the cops and fined! My car was unregistered!”

And then two of the others look at each other knowingly.

Why I should be in charge of TV

I went to a halloween party last night wearing my only costume (a real costume from the movie Return to Snowy River). I couldn’t decide if I was going as an 1840’s landowner or Doctor Who (I had connies on). It was held in a friend’s opulently appointed sharehouse in Jolimont and full of very hip people talking about hip things, like bands I hadn’t heard of. Also, there was wine. It was fun.

At one point, standing on the fringes of a conversation between a guy dressed as Satan and a girl dressed as a maid (she may have been the help, it was a really nice house) I couldn’t help but notice that they were negotiating about something. And then I had the idea for the best gameshow ever!

Deal Or No Deal… With the Devil!

So there’s a bunch of suitcases with numbers on them all held by these models, right? And then you pick one and elimante the rest and the audince get to guess too and all of that. It’s a lot like the current Deal or No Deal. Come to think of it, joke-wise it’s a lot like the Gold Case bit from 30 Rock. But the twist in my idea is that all the suitcases are filled with scorpions! LIVE SCORPIONS!

And then there’s a fiddling contest and whoever wins that gets a golden fiddle.

I’m going to make millions.

I tried to find a clip of the Gold Case bit but instead YouTube gave me this.