No alarms

• Either my local church is having AA meetings or they hold a special scumbag service on weekdays.
• During the week, you notice a lot of middle-class junkies around Surry Hills/Darlinghurst. These are the junkies who have graduated to an all-tracksuit wardrobe, but they are not yet living on the street or robbing 7-Eleven’s. They usually go to score with their bf or gf and they’re quite thin and always have a dog.
• There is an entire house full of trannies on the street behind mine.
• My gay next-door neighbour also appears to be unemployed but neither of us is willing to admit it.
• West Wing goes foooorrevvaa.
• Despite having 11 extra hours at my disposal every day, I eat a lot more when I’m not working and I go to the gym less.
• I really like candles and slurpees?
• The scummy workmen around the corner fill our recycling bin with empty chinese food containers every week after garbage night.
• If there’s no real need to shower before 5pm, why press the issue.
• The closest I have come to actual insanity was when my neighbour played this song on repeat for an entire day and a night. I cried and started looking at rental properties online.

Ryan: I’m so high.
Me: Me too.
Ryan: Want to go to the Voodoo lady’s house?
Me: Dude, I am ripped. I wouldn’t even go to an ATM right now.
Ryan: Good call. Let’s get burritos instead.

Me: When I’m old and I think back on my twenties, all I’m going to remember is being stoned and walking down Riley Street.
Ryan: Naw, come on… I’m sure you’ve been stoned on lots of other streets too.

Ryan: I don’t know why that girl got so mad at me.
Me: Well, according to my therapist–
Ryan: Please don’t even finish that fucking sentence.

Ryan: Want to come over for pasta tonight?
Me: Sure. Will Rosh be there?
Ryan: He has a dinner date. But if this chick is anything like the last one he dated, she’ll probably want to eat twice, so I’m sure they’ll make an appearance.

Old man at bar: I saw you at the races today!
Me: I don’t think so.
Old man: Yes, I did. You were serving chips.
Me: Actually, that’s impossible, because today I was at home playing Goldeneye.
Friend: I can’t tell which one of you is the bigger loser right now.

Friend: Why do they always put the fat girls behind the bar?
Me: I don’t know, but every bartender in here just heard you say that.

Me: Do you guys take EFTPOS?
Bartender: No.
Me: Do you have an ATM?
Bartender: No.
Me: What kind of a strip club doesn’t have an ATM?
Bartender: There’s one just outside.
Me: Good. I’ll withdraw giant wads of cash on my way to a strip club with better facilities.

Me: Some guy at Bada Bing called me fat.
Ryan: Think about the start of that sentence. Most girls who start a sentence with, “some guy at Bada Bing” end it with “date raped me” so I’d say you got off lightly.

SHAMPOO IS BETTER!

Last week, I went for a run. Because I’m fit. As I was jogging through Hyde Park, I noticed a man sprawled on a bench, seemingly unconscious.

“Junkie,” I thought, and continued running. However, as I got closer, I noticed he was reasonably well-dressed and clean-shaven. His head was thrown back and his mouth hung open. Like a corpse. As I jogged past, he did not move at all. When I got to the end of the park, I turned around to look once more. The man still hadn’t moved. I hovered for a few seconds, then a possum ran in front of me and I chased him because I love the possums in Hyde Park. They make me feel like a bush ranger. I ran home, then ate a can of corn and played Diddy Kong Racing. After all,  I am a grown up.

The next day, the man was gone. I wondered whether he’d simply woken up, or been gently pushed into Sydney harbour by the city council. Had I run past a dead body and not noticed/cared? It was entirely possible. I live in Darlinghurst. I pass smacked-out junkies more often than I buy toilet paper. I have frequently seen homeless people brawling, interrupted doorway poops, witnessed various acts of vandalism, and been a spectator to more than a few domestic disputes. On top of this, I get asked for money every time I leave my house. But enough about the Red Cross, because the junkies are pretty annoying too.

Sometimes, I’ll see a couple fighting, and the dude will push or hit his lady around a little. I’ll think, “How could he!” but my default reaction in these situations is to always look the other way. Sure, I’m a post-feminist/alkaline or whatever (I was born under the sign of Taurus), but I’m not prepared to get glassed in the face to save one of my sisters.

Am I a bad person?

Don’t answer that.

I’ve been on the other side of the spectrum too. I was once attacked while waiting for the bus, because I looked at a person. Nobody seemed to mind much. And I once tried to fight someone on York Street, which attracted a few stares, but not so much as a comment from passers-by.

Have we become desensitised? Or are we just tougher?

I don’t know, I’m from the Hills. We used to kill bees when we were bored.

• one dead goldfish
• four towels covered in blood
• fingerless gloves
• a broken stair banister
• a toothpaste penis on the bathroom wall
• vomit splashes on the cupboard doors
• the garage door no longer opens
• someone drank half my vodka
• my birthday book got stolen
• somebody pooped in our bin

The best/only thing to do while growing up in the Hills was to go to house parties. I went to house parties every night of every weekend until I turned 18 and ditched my then-underage friends so I could go out clubbing instead with work people. I have very fond house party memories though.

Opportunities
Anytime anybody’s parents went anywhere ever, we had a house party. However, the best kids to host house parties were those with single mothers who were in the middle of messy divorces and/or distracted by alcoholism. They were too depressed to give a shit about what we did in their backyards, as long as nobody died or got pregnant.

Preparations
We spent every lunch break during grades 9-12 figuring out how we were going to get blasted on the weekend. We’d pool our money and then fight over what we wanted and who could buy it for us.

“Can we get a bottle of Midori?”
“No. Fuck the Midori.”
“We need cigarettes too.”
“Do we have enough for Cruisers?”
“Just steal a bottle of wine from your nanna. She won’t notice. She’s like a hundred and fifty.”

Then we’d organise for somebody’s older brother/sister/cousin/boyfriend or someone with a fake ID to do a bottle shop run for us. If that didn’t work, we simply hung out around the front of Liquor Land and smiled at every guy who walked past until one of them agreed to buy us booze. Sometimes they’d give us a lift to the party too. We were street-smart.

Deceptions
Usually you would tell your mum and dad that you were staying at a girlfriend’s house for a “movie night” or similar. They’d drop you off and you’d walk gingerly up the driveway, trying not to let your Country Road overnight bag full of Stoli’s and Woodstocks rattle. Then they’d collect you the following morning and you would lie on the backseat of the car in the fetal position, reeking of cigarettes and alcohol, complaining that you ate some bad party pies and might have gotten food poisoning and could you please wind down the windows, it’s like a goddamn oven in here and where the hell are my sunglasses?

If the house party occurred at your place while your parents were away, you had to get up early, ignore your raging hangover and attempt to restore everything to its former condition as much as possible. You febreezed the shit out of the couch, stashed garbage bags full of empty liquor bottles under your bed and hoped your dad wouldn’t notice the garden hose had gotten shorter when you tried to make a bong.

Consequences
My highschool friends are now teachers, psychologists, lawyers, nurses, and some do jobs I don’t even really understand. All are functional, well-balanced, tax-paying members of society, and one has even reproduced and is now responsible for the wellbeing of another human being who is still successfully alive at the time of writing. I guess the point is that even if your kid seems like a complete fuck-up, it will probably turn out fine. So just chill out and do your own thing while they binge-drink their way through their interminable adolescence. It’s the Australian way.

Me: Sometimes you just find yourself in the men’s room at Q Bar at 6am on a Sunday morning and you think, “What am I doing with my life?”… Know what I mean?

Dr Riley: Not really.

“Hey are you going to Big Day Out next year? I wouldn’t miss it for anything. I wouldn’t miss it if my own mother died. You should come, we’re all going. You probably don’t want to hang around me too much though because I’m kind of embarrassing. You know how at every festival, there’s that one dude who’s taken acid and dingoes and smoked a spliff, and he’s lurching around the dance floor, leaning on strangers, and everyone’s all DUDE, ARE YOU OKAY? because he’s turned completely grey and can’t speak and looks like he died three days ago? That’s me. I’m that guy. Pass me the ashtray?”

You can read more about Andre at ilivewithcrazypeople

I once lived with a guy who grew up in Kuwait and would talk about his childhood late at night when he was drunk.

One evening, a few of us gathered as he described a horrifying incident in which his father had beaten him severely for leaving a smudge on his black Mercedes.

“I don’t understand, why did he hit you?” I asked, shocked by the scale of such a beating.

“Well I had to clean his cars every week, and if they weren’t spotless by dinner, I got into big trouble,” he replied.

“That’s awful,” I commented.

“It’s okay, I got him back,” he said with a smile.

“What did you do?” my friend asked, “Did you scratch his car or something?”

“No,” he said, glancing around the room mischievously. “I killed his dog.”

Roughly eight seconds of complete silence passed, before I cleared my throat and asked, “How?”

“Well,” my housemate continued, “I waited until he went to work, and then I locked his dog inside the Merc. By the time my dad finished his shift, that dog was swollen up like a motherfucking beach ball!!”

Then he roared with laughter. My friend, an avid lover of animals, picked up her bag and left immediately, while I busied myself clearing away our empty glasses.

When I was younger I used to go to church with a family who had a son with autism. My memories of him are vague at best. He was obsessed with space ships, trains and video games, and would often sit alone repeating the same phrases over and over.

As he got older, he began exhibiting more unruly types of behaviour. They started out small enough – a tendency to break things or overeat. His parents locked all their cupboards and kept him away from the kitchen. Things obviously worsened, however, as he entered early adulthood, because the last thing I heard was that his family had put him into full-time professional care.

“Why did they do that?” I asked my physio, who was a reliable source of church gossip.

“Well, he was becoming a little difficult to handle,” she replied, digging her knuckles into my abdomen.

“But what did he do?” I pressed.

“Oh he would just get upset easily and then do inappropriate things,” she said.

“Can you give me an example?” I asked. I was dying from curiosity. What did this boy do when he got mad? I was imagining physical violence, tantrums, or perhaps even some public masturbation for shock value. The truth, however, was even more spectacular.

“Okay, here’s one,” the physio said. “Last month their whole family went to Perth for somebody’s birthday. When they were due to come home, their flight was delayed for four hours. The boy got upset, and when they tried to calm him down, he became angry. So he bit his own arm until it started bleeding, then he went around wiping the blood on other people and screaming into their faces.”

“That’s fucked up,” I marvelled.

“Please don’t swear in my house,” she replied. “Now, roll over.”