This is Heather; she was rejected from Masterchef.

This is Paul; he’s fabulous and he speaks to blind people.

This is Joel; he’s just had his hair cut.

This is Zoe; she works at…wait, where do you work? I just realised I don’t know anything about you.

This is Julia; she’s Greek.

This is Leo; he surfs and he writes a great blog and he loves his wife. What? No, your WIFE.

This is Lynette; her hair smells amazing and she is taking me to lunch next week. Smell her hair. Go on.

This is Mick; he likes metal, as in the music.

This is Ben; he’s a writer, or a journalist, or something.

This is Peter; he’s an arsehole.

This is Scott; he’s from Scotland and he has a silly accent.

This is Cathy; she’s awesome as shit.

This is…hang on, I have no idea who that is, walk away, just go.

This is Jess; HR.

This is Mandi; I just met her and she told me something about drawers. I think I like her. I think I like her a lot. Hey, can you get me a beer? I ran out of money.

Dude in bathroom: Did you know there’s some sort of…Twitter gathering here tonight?

Girl in bathroom: Yeah! I did pick up on that.

DIB: It’s so weird.

GIB: Wait.. what’s Twitter?

DIB: Fucked if I know.

Me: Twitter is a micro-blogging  and social networking service where users can post updates using 140 characters or less.

GIB: Who said that?

I once shared a house with an older guy who had gross friends. At least four nights every week, our backyard was full of drunk tradies telling boring stories. However, the following one did interest me.

Damo’s tale:

For my twenty-first birthday, my old man gave me a small box wrapped in blue paper. I unwrapped it and found an old pair of stubbies inside. I was a bit pissed off at getting such a shit birthday present, but then Dad said “Son, these are the shorts I was wearing when you were conceived. I was pretty drunk at the time, but I’ve remembered ever since, and I want you to have these.”

So now I wear them whenever I’m feeling sad, and the Conception Shorts remind me that I’m loved.

I also write down whatever I’m wearing after I shag a chick, just in case I ever have a son, so I can give him his own pair of Conception Shorts.

My brother recently ripped out his shower while he was drunk and as a result, I now have to share my bathroom with him and everyone he has sex with. I complained about this to my mother and she told me that I needed to learn how to share.

Me: Like the Aborigines?

Mum: What?

Me: Collective ownership of property. Plus hardships. Everybody knows that, read a fucking book.

Mum: Why are you even still living here?

What follows is a list of direct quotes from somebody who will be known as Mark, because that is his name. I have not edited these in any way, I simply sit next to him at the pub and write down everything he says.

• “That hill was so fucking steep. It was like Columbine, but instead of murders, it was geography.”
• “I put it on Facebook, a.k.a. internet.”
• “Damn right, I’m awesome as shit. Do you want to see a stunt?” *inserts whole schooner inside his mouth*
• “Hi, I’m Mark. I’m a mad cunt.”
• “It is completely normal and natural for a woman to secrete approximately one teaspoon of fluid from her vagina per day. What? Yeah, get me a beer.”
• “You know what? If I’ve got shoes on, and I’m inside, I’ll walk outside to piss in the garden. It’s not like I’m saving water or being lazy or some shit, I just like pissing in the garden. It just feels natural.”
• “I don’t do drugs, drugs do me.”
• “You know when you take shit drugs and you’re like, Last night was awesome as shit… but last night is also today?”
• “I took acid once. I got lost in this fucking underground carpark for four hours.”
• “I took acid once at Fred Caterson Reserve. I ate heaps of chili because I thought I was hungry, then my mouth was burning, so I went for a walk. Then I was staring at the moon, yelling COME AND GET ME, FREDDO PEDDO. But nothing happened.“
• “Fuck, we’re awesome. I just ate raw chicken and then I tried to purge behind the Mobil service station. I tried hard, fingers down my windpipe. Here, I’ll show you.”
• “I would give head like a motherfucker, trust me. I’m not gay. I don’t want to suck cock, but fuck I’d be good at it.”
• “When I sue you, I’m gonna make some money. Write that down. Damn right, I’m gonna make some money.”
• “The bartender can suck my dick for all I care. Full gag on it.”
• “Men only want three things from a woman. You want someone who does the sexy times, someone who cooks, and someone who cleans. I don’t want to be rude, but I’m pretty sure all you’re going to do is the sexy times. Now that’s important, but it’s not everything.”
• “I just hate it when people talk about dead people. It makes me feel awkward. Is this going on your blog?”

When I was in highschool, there was a group of boys four years above us who were all blonde and hot. They never showed the slightest interest in us during school, but after graduation, I became visible.

One night I spotted the group’s ringleader, Ryan, at a local nightclub. I caught his eye, then looked away and smiled. He approached me and asked, “Can I buy you a drink?” and thus began a brief sort of relationship.

Ryan was attractive, friendly and smelled nice. However, once we got to know each other a bit better, I realised that he was painfully boring. I didn’t really care about any part of his personality because it was all so mundane and ordinary, I wanted to stab out my eyes with a dirty chopstick. The sex was good, but when it came to conversation, I would have preferred a homeless person. The issue was that Ryan was too normal and well-balanced for me. I need to date men who are tortured and neurotic and irrational, otherwise I lose interest after about eight minutes. So whenever Ryan talked, my eyes would glaze over and I would fantasise about being with somebody less average. Every time he suggested we go out for dinner or a movie, I would panic at the thought of being forced to endure hours of his conversation. “Why don’t we just stay at your place and fool around?” I would suggest, trying to reign the relationship back to its shallow, physical roots.

After a month or so of this, I met somebody more interesting and stopped answering Ryan’s calls. I then successfully avoided him until roughly a year later, when I bumped into him at the same club in which we met.

“Hey!” he cried, scooping me into a hug.

“Hi,” I said, pulling away from him.

“Gosh, I haven’t heard from you in ages!” he said.

“I lost my phone,” I lied.

“Can I take you out for a drink sometime?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t think so. No, thank you.”

“Hey, Neek,” he said, beginning to look downcast, “I don’t know if you heard, but my dad had a heart attack a few months ago and he… he died. My dad died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” I said, scanning the bar for my friends.

“I could sort of use someone to talk to right now,” he said quietly.

“Well you’ve still got your mum, right?” I reminded him. “Listen, my ride’s about to leave. Take care.”

All aboard!

Not only was I unfortunate enough to be born with scoliosis and eyes which look in different directions when I am over-relaxed, but I also belong to a set of parents who insist on living in the Hills.

For those unfamiliar with Sydney, the Hills is an entirely stagnant and insular area north-west of the city where people are born, educated, employed and married all on the same block. People who live in the Hills go to school, church, soccer practice, work, the pub, and the movies all with the same group of friends they have had since pre-school, and they will continue to do so until they all rot beside their colostomy bags at the Anglican Retirement Village on Old Northern Road. If you suggest a visit to a city club or a day trip up the coast, Hills residents will smile and shake their head at you as if you are retarded. “Why would we trek all the way over there when we have everything we need right here?!” In this way, the Hills is exactly like America, but thinner.

The only way to get out of the Hills is to go to uni so you can secure a high-paying job and afford to move somewhere less conservative and tainted by Christians. But if you failed uni, like me, then you have to catch Hillsbus everywhere.

Hillsbus is the only way to get from the Hills to the city without paying $40 in tolls or trawling through three different forms of public transport. It is a privately owned company, which means they have a total monopoly on the norwest city-workers’ commute and can bump up their prices at will. The result is 60,000 passengers who fork over $50 each week for the privilege of spending 2 hours every day standing on a crowded, stuffy, perpetually late piece-of-shit vomit yellow bus. It is inevitable, like the tides – anyone who catches Hillsbus is a cunt.

“Umm Neek,” I can hear you say, “You catch Hillsbus. Does that make you a cunt too?”

Well yes, it does, to be honest. I live my life in a cranky state of constant exhaustion because my commute is so fucking long and tedious, I have considered simply sleeping on a yoga mat under my desk at work and giving myself sponge baths using the office water cooler. I also catch approximately six colds every winter because Hillsbus is so crowded that you will perform fellatio, on average, every three weeks simply by sitting in the aisle seat. I hate everyone on Hillsbus and all the filthy diseases they carry and sneeze on me. I never give up my seat for pregnant people or old women because the ride is so long and expensive that on the rare occasions you can get a seat, you hold onto that fucker like it’s going out of fashion. If someone wants to carry another human inside them for 9 months or commute long distances once they’re past the age of sixty then that’s their business, not mine. You should have thought about how you were going to work that into your life without counting on the generosity and kindness of strangers because really, the average person is fairly shit.

The Evidence

Last week, I was waiting at the Hillsbus bus stop after a few post-work beverages, when I became aware of some crazy bitch screaming up the road. Naturally, I turned to look, but my alcohol-riddled brain was too slow to look away before I had accidentally made eye contact with this raging meth head. I turned away anyway, hoping she would let it go, but ten seconds later I was grabbed around the head and dragged 3 metres by my hair. At this point, my brain cut out and I could not feel any pain or really register what was going on. I assume this is the same protective mental mechanism that shields me during sermons, conferences, and twenty minutes into any family dinner. Also, I was too smashed to know quite what was happening. However, I was aware of being slammed up against a wall and thrown to the ground, while being screamed at and called a cunt, a bitch, a whore, whatever else. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I assumed the fetal position and tried to cover my head. My friend Julia was on the scene fast, and yelled obscene threats until the ice junkie retreated, then she helped me to my feet.

“Are you okay?” Julia said.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to sit down?”

“No.”

“Do you want some water?”

“No.”

“Do you want a cigarette?”

“Give me three.”

As we stood back in the bus line, because there seemed little else to do, I became aware that every other person waiting in the queue – all thirty or so of them – had simply watched me get bashed by an ice addict and decided that being a witness was the best civic duty they could provide in this particular situation. One lady (who was not a cunt) phoned the police to let them know what had happened, but everybody else just stood there guarding their place in line and staring at me. I knew they wanted tears. They wanted hysterics. They wanted blood. Instead, I held my cigarette at a jaunty angle and immediately pulled out my iPhone to tweet about the experience. I tossed my hair and LOLed. “Can you believe that just happened?” I asked Julia, who had not blinked or exhaled since the junkie first approached us. As soon as I know somebody wants something from me, I do everything within my power to prevent them from getting it, simply because I can, and I am selfish at heart. So these Hillsbus cunts could have their bus seat, but they wouldn’t get a show out of me.

When I got home, I took three valium and had a bath. Then I stood in front of the television and told my mother I had been attacked by a meth addict at the bus stop.

“That’s awful!” she said, putting down her crossword puzzle book. “Was anyone there?”

“Yeah, but nobody did anything. They didn’t even ask if I was okay. Those arseholes just stood in line watching. Like it was fucking street theatre.”

“Well I probably would have done the same,” Mum said, picking up her book again. “You don’t want to mess with an ice junkie. Besides, you’d never risk losing your place in the Hillsbus line. Those bastards will sidle up like you were never even there.”

The above image was brought to you by the genius man that is @bobearth and my power to persuade people to photoshop genitals into ordinary pictures.

Most of my relatives live interstate or in France and the Sydney ones don’t like us, so my family usually spends Christmas day getting drunk in our living room and letting out all the pent-up rage that has accumulated over the year.

“Why should you get to park in the driveway while my car sits out on the street like a whore?” I snap at my brother, tearing open a carefully wrapped gift from my mother. “Oh look, more Bryce Fucking Courtenay. You know he hasn’t written anything good since Four Fires. Buy me some Tim Winton or something. Goddamn it.”

“I’m the oldest,” my brother says, slurring slightly, “I get to park where ever the hell I want.”

“You’re the ugliest,” I retort. “Besides, you sell cleaning products, you’re going nowhere in life. At least I went to uni. I tried to make something of myself.”

“Yeah, tried being the operative word. Unlucky for you, there isn’t much demand for ice-queen bitch accountants with half a degree under their belt and a drinking problem. Face it, Neek, you’re a fucking failure. You have no career prospects, and no man will ever marry you because you have terrible genes. No offence, Mum.”

“You cunt, I’ll kill you,” I say, smacking his beer off the coffee table and reaching for his eyes, which were recently operated on and cost him $9,000 in medical bills.

At this point, my father rises from his cane chair and sighs. He walks over to his new electric piano and plugs in his headphones. Then he sits and plays Gershwin for three hours, until we have all passed out or gone to our bedrooms. The piano is my father’s happy place. He is an amazing musician, and people often go to my parents’ church just to hear my dad play. But at home, he plays to himself through headphones while the rest of us sit on the couch and watch television. Eventually, my mother falls asleep on the lounge and my brother goes to the garage to work on his motorbike. I walk down the road to the park with play equipment and sit at the top of the slippery-dip. I smoke cigarettes and ash onto the slide, thinking about all the local children who will now go home to their mothers with ashy, smelly pants. I think about how much I hate my family. I think about how much I hate Christmas. I think about the arbitrary cruelty of having a designated day of the year where I am forced to spend 24 hours with my family, regardless of whether I am in a good mood or have a sufficient supply of valium to see me through the holiday.

It wasn’t always like this. We used to have guests over for Christmas. Not traditional guests (ie friends and family) but random people my mother had met throughout the year who didn’t have anything better to do on Christmas day, because they were so scummy that they had failed to achieve basic relationships in life and had nobody to hang out with on the most important holiday of the year.

First there was Warwick, a thirty-something IT professional who lurked around my parents’ church and rode his bicycle everywhere. He came over for Christmas each year, and I hated him passionately.

“I think he’s a pedophile,” I told my mother as we stood at the kitchen window, looking out at  Warwick in the backyard. He was sitting by the pool, supervising the neighbour’s children as they swam.

“Do any of you kids know what skinny dipping means?” he asked them, trailing his big toe through the water. “I like to skinny dip.”

Then there were the pregnant bikie trashbags. They only came once – the last year we had guests. My mum had invited Gail, a crusty woman she met at TAFE, and her daughters. They showed up for lunch at 4pm and were all wearing leather jackets.

“Sorry we’re so late,” Gail said, picking something out of her teeth. “Young Natalie here had to stop every five minutes to take a piss.”

“I’m pregnant,” Natalie explained.

“Cool,” I said, draining my wine glass.

“Not cool!” Gail shouted. “Do you know how many times I’ve driven her to the abortion clinic? She pussies out at the last minute every time and decides to ruin her life instead.”

“How old were you when you had Natalie?” I asked pleasantly.

“She was sixteen,” Natalie replied, “Just a year older than me now.”

“What a charming family tradition,” I smiled, pouring myself a gin and tonic. “I recently turned sixteen myself.”

“If that’s the case,” Gail interrupted, “Should you really be drinking, young lady?”

“Well I’m not pregnant,” I replied.

Just then Warwick entered the house, holding a dripping child under each arm. “Did somebody say something about babies?” he gasped.

“Yeah,” I said, “This is Natalie. She’s pregnant, but she’s still trying to work up the guts to have an abortion.”

“I beg your pardon!” Gail spluttered.

“I like babies,” Warwick said.

“Oh my god, we’re out of wine,” Mum whispered to me.

“I’ll get some more,” I offered. I caught a bus to the local shopping centre and smoked a joint on the loading dock. Then I watched The Ring three times because nothing short of the apocalypse would cause Greater Union to close their doors. By the time I got home, Mum was asleep on the lounge, Dad was playing the piano, and my brother had disappeared to the garage.

“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.”