A moon or two ago, I wrote a heartfelt post about my brother, who was tragically lost in a gender-reassignment related incident. In response, one of my favourite readers, Eduardo, posted the following comment:

I think Eduardo’s name is actually Ben, and I am pretty sure I know where he works, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s behind you.

Eduardo really got me thinking about Neekersneakers though and what this site is about. (Nothing, really.)

Like most things in life, I actually got bored with my tagline after the site had been live for 15 minutes, but I couldn’t be bothered changing it.

However, Eduardo has inspired me. I am going to open up the forum and let you guys submit suggestions for the new Neekersneakers tagline.

Be creative. Be krazy. Be offensive. Be flattering. I don’t really give a shit, just send me something cool.

You can leave your submission in the comments section below, or tweet it to @Neekatron, or send an email to ilikeblackmen(at)annikskelton.com

The booty up for grabs is your very own pair of Neekersneakers!!

Not really, but it will be just as good. I will send the winner a prize so awesome, it will hurt.

Me: Oh good, you’re home. The phone rang, but I didn’t answer it.

Mum: How helpful.

Me: You know I get phone-phobia.

Mum: You answer the phone for a living.

Me: If you worked at Subway, I wouldn’t ask you to make me sandwiches at home.

Mum: Sometimes your selfishness astounds me.

Me: Actually, I am a little hungry…

“Oh god, we were so fucked up that night…do you guys remember?”

“Nope.”

“I remember Chris getting laid that night.”

“Oh look, it’s those two fat chicks who sat on my bike! I’m pretty sure Chris went home and had sex that night.”

“And this one was at New Year, right before Chris laid some girl. Fuck, we were drunk.”

“Oh and there’s the time we ordered all the red bull and vodka jugs… Hey Annik, see what Chris is doing to that pool cue?”

“Wait, there’s the chick I used to hook up with who had leukemia… I thought I could make her feel better. Like, fuck the cancer out of her or something.”

“Did it work?”

“I don’t know, I broke up with her.”

“Hey look, it’s the biker viking party!”

“Oh yeah! Chris had sex that night.”

“Anal sex.”

In 2001, my highschool tragically lost two of my classmates on a Duke of Edinburgh hike at Crosslands. The group encountered a violent storm mid-hike and was forced to set up an emergency campsite in a nearby clearing. The wind grew strong and knocked over a tree which fell on top of one of the tents, crushing both girls who were sheltering inside and killing them instantly. I was at an orphanage in Thailand at the time, building dormitories and singing hymns with some Christian missionaries. I checked my email one night when we went into town and saw a note from one of my friends back home:

“Samantha and Tara died on duke of ed. I twisted my ankle. We got to stay home from school and eat tim tams. You’re gonna miss the funerals.”

I dealt with this in my usual way: almost entirely physically. I went to bed for three days and didn’t eat or shower or speak to anybody. After this, I was very sick for a week, and then by the time we got to Chiang Mai, I was somewhat okay.

When I returned to Sydney, most of the formalities were over. However, the faculty wanted to do something special to honour the memory of Samantha and Tara. During class one morning, my English teacher put out the call for ideas.

“What can we do that is special and will carry on here at the school, even after you guys have all graduated?” he asked.

“We could name one of the buildings after the girls,” one student suggested.

“We certainly could,” the teacher agreed, “Any more ideas?”

I raised my hand. “We could plant a tree? Like, in memory. One with strong roots, obviously…”

They went with the building idea.

When I was 19, my friend and I went on a summer roadtrip to Coolangatta to blow off some steam before going back to uni. We did all the usual touristy crap, got sunburnt and bought stuff from a 12 year old street kid in Nimbin, etc, and wound down on our last night by drinking vodka in a seedy bar up the road from our hotel. We got talking to some of the locals, and when we eventually made tracks, one of them followed me outside.

“Hey, do you want to come back to my place?” he asked.

“Oh, no thanks,” I said.

“Well can I come back to your hotel?” he tried.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said, “Not really. No.”

“I’m not going to lie,” he continued, “I don’t want to watch tv or talk or anything. I just want to have sex with you.”

“Yes, I realise that,” I said, “I’m leaving now.”

“Okay…” he said, “But you should know that when I get home, I’m going to think about you while I masturbate.”

The risk of asking someone to eat you out.

One of my favourite things to do is to walk around the house and pick out the pieces of furniture I wish to inherit when my parents die.

“I’ll take the dressers from the lounge room,” I tell my mother, “and all of the art. Except for the Aboriginal paintings, Chris can have those. Obviously I’ll be keeping the piano and all of Dad’s music as well.”

“Do you want the dining set too?” Mum says, “You might as well take it, seeing as you hacked your initials into all the chairs with scissors.”

“I don’t really care for the finish…” I confess, running my hand over the table top, “but I’m sure I can sell it. I imagine all your cash and investments will be split 60:40 between me and Chris respectively, seeing as I’ve proven myself to be the smarter and better looking child?”

“I don’t know about that,” Mum says, “Your brother was a lot easier to handle as a teenager. You were such a whiney bitch.”

“Well maybe if you weren’t such a shitty parent, I wouldn’t have needed so much therapy?” I suggest.

“Therapy?” Mum says, her voice rising, “Don’t talk to ME about therapy. I’ve been having therapy since the day you were born!”

“That’s a coincidence,” I tell her. “Now, what do you want to do about your jewellery? I should probably just take half now, you’ve outgrown most of it.”

And sometimes it’s better to let your co-workers think you are a victim of domestic abuse, because that is less embarrassing than the skanky, horrible truth.

I returned home after a leisurely afternoon at the pub to find my parents midway through a dinner party with some Christian missionaries who were visiting their church. My mother was wrapping up a rather touching story about a woman who went camping alone in the jungle and woke during the night to find her tent surrounded by hungry lions.

“So the woman prayed,” Mum said quietly, “She prayed for hours and hours. And then she felt calm and went back to sleep. When she woke again in the morning, the lions were all gone, and there was an elephant sitting outside her tent, watching over her.”

As my mother’s guests smiled with glistening eyes and shook their heads in wonder at the mysterious ways of the Lord, I leaned over the table and grabbed a baked potato from the serving dish.

“Maybe the elephant was just passing through?” I suggested. “Or maybe this woman is going to murder all her children in five years? Maybe God sent the lions to get rid of her before she smothered her babies, except then the elephant came along and mucked up the plan? I don’t really think you can draw any definitive conclusions here. Correlation does not imply causation. I learned that in statistics. At uni. When I went to uni.”

“You failed uni,” Mum reminded everybody.

“No, sweetheart, uni failed you,” Dad reassured me.

“I’m drunk,” I announced and went back out.

Wanker at party: Hey She-Skelton, you look different tonight.

Me: I’m not wearing make up. I just came from the gym.

WAP: Oh.

Me: Yeah.

WAP: Oh no, it’s not bad. I mean, you don’t look totally ugly.

Me: Just get me a beer.

WAP: Oh, okay.