Notes to Self

• When you open an axe store, open it in some backwater hole and call it "Better axe your Mother". Feign surprise when people axe you why they need permission from their mother to buy an axe.



• When you get a pet pig, call him "Hamlet".



• When you get a pet polar bear, call him "Penfold", which although traditionally being a name attributed to Danger Mouse sidekicks is still a good name for a Polar Bear I think.



• When you procure an apple cider company, GM the apples to contain tobacco and then call the result "Tobapple". It will be thoroughly addictive, and you'll make millions but then feel bad about it. Eventually Julia Roberts will sue your fucking ass.



• When you get around to starting your Skid Row tribute band, call it "Skid Marx". Naturally you should play lead guitar and get all the babes, who'll eventually leave you for someone younger and hipper and whose band doesn't have a name that honours poo residue and glam rock in equal measures.
  


• When you get a pet dog, call him "Cucumber", or "Cuke" for short; because then nobody would be as cool as Cucumber. He'd be a border collie or a German Shepherd, because those dogs rule.

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Go and tell humor-blogs.com your wildest dreams. Please? I get a vote if you do, and that will make my dreams come true. You'd be like my dream weaver, you ol dream weaver you.

Old Man BMX

The other day when I was walking down Well Street to grab the paper a really old guy whizzed past me on a bike. While this is nothing that usual, what caught my eye was that he was dressed head to toe in a fluoro Kappa tracksuit, wearing a huge gold medallion and backwards cap and that his bike was a hotted up BMX.

"Woaaah," said my very impressed internal monologue. "He'd be amazing for the blog. I could explain that he was a perfect example of what you would look like if you'd just woken up from a 60 year coma caused by a BMX accident. I'd need a picture of him, so I could say that I work for BMXing Australia and that I was doing an article on the implications of wearing incontinence pants while freeriding. Hopefully he won't ask for a card, but if he does I'll just say that I've already given them all out down at the Sunny Vista estate and that he could grab one down there from Beryl if he liked, so long as he didn't ask about her recent divorce. 'Yikes' I would then say, for effect."

It was brilliant.. until I remembered that:

a) I didn't bring my camera
b) it had taken me two hours to make up the joke about the coma
c) the old guy was long gone

I was left feeling vaguely uncertain, as though I'd somehow invented the entire scenario in my head; just like in the Labyrinth where that chick wakes up and can't believe David Bowie could actually be the head of the muppets, while at the exact same time have such enormous hair and bad dress sense.

Paying for my newspaper, I cautiously asked the lady behind the counter whether she had seen any old guys getting around today, you know, like on a BMX or something. She turned her head and looked at me out of the corners of her eyes; the way people do when you walk into a bookstore and ask if they have any other books in a similar vein to 'The Notebook', because you're on a bit of an emotional roller-coaster right now and that book made you feel as though you had something to live for and you have every intention of keeping that buzz going, man.

"Forget it." I said quietly and walked out, not collecting my change. Then it occurred to me that the old guy and the paper lady probably have a racket going and are taking over the world, 20p at a time.

I'll find you, geriatric BMX bandit. And when I do, I'm taking the best damn picture of you the world has ever seen. And then I'm taking my 20p back. I'm taking them all back.



More tales of delusion and grandeur over at humor-blogs.com. Please click that link for me? It helps me out a lot while at the same time helps starving kids in that place.. overseas. The dusty one. It's totally win win.

While They're Young

A friend of mine Ben has a little brother who has just started going to primary school. Alongside learning about the wonders of numbers, letters, and Transformers, he has also been exposed to a variety of new social structures. Specifically, he's started bringing home the sailor talk.

Unfortunately for him the lesson plan for discussing the different applications of the verb 'to ho' falls a bit short around the playground, which leaves our wee protagonist a bit confused most of the time.


"Ben, what does gay mean?"

"What do you think it means?"

"I don't know."

"Why do you ask?"

"Well all the kids at school call me gay. And each other. That call everyone gay."

"What do they think it means?"

"They don't know either. Their brothers call them gay."



Lo, another generation indoctrinated into sexual ambiguity.



I don't wanna start nothin, but Humor Blogs has been asking difficult questions about your sexuality too. Better go there now and set them straight.

I make hamburgers, I get all the girls

Although this probably won't satisfy the requirements of Miss Bloom's meme request, it is none-the-less a story. It is set in the past. It does contain two or more primary actors. The main hitch I can see is that it's not one of my earliest memories -- though considering the amount of self inflicted amnesia I was suffering at the time due to the excesses of high living, I'm pretty certain I can contest that point with some success. Perhaps not in a court of law, as they say on the telly, but in any court that ol' Hell on Wheelsanor would be privy to I dare say.

When I was only a little Davey of 19 years I decided to take a year off from the pressures of first year Uni (retroactive scoff), move out of home, and get myself a job at the high class catering establishment known as 'Pizza Hut'. It was a shitty job. I smelled like pizza most of the time and after paying the rent I only had about 100 bucks left over to live on. Most of that was inevitably spent on weed, with everything left being spent of booze and petrol. I guess we figured that sustenance could be established through the ritualized consumption of pizza. I can't remember being that concerned with the effects that this diet was having on my health, but as you might imagine, being healthy didn't rank too highly on our give-a-shit list.

I was working under a new government initiative at the time that was putting fast food workers through a monthly Tafe training program. A 'catering traineeship' I think it was alluringly called. While this seemed great in theory, the entire process was a complete farce. The lesson plan at Tafe revolved around simple sums and role playing scenarios such as:

A customer approaches the counter and makes a complaint about finding a hair in their food. Do you:

A) Laugh and say 'Plenty more where that came from!'
B) Ignore them and hope that the problem goes away, hiding behind the counter if necessary
C) Apologise and offer an immediate replacement for the food, followed by a refund.
D) Ask for the box. The box!

In exchange for this wealth of information the powers that be had devised an ingenious trainee compensation plan. Firstly our pay was docked to cover the course, then we were given longer hours to make up for those lost studying, and finally we were allocated extra responsibilities so that we could 'practice' what we were learning -- so long as it wasn't during work hours of course. It was a grueling schedule, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I had an illustrious career ahead of me working at like, Hungry Jacks. Tops.

I used to ride my skateboard to work. We were pretty big into skating at the time anyway, and due to never having more than 5 bucks worth of petrol in the car driving was out of the question. It was a boring and routine life, and I did it 5 days a week. Week in and week out. Nothing really changed in my schedule until one morning.

Opening the store, bleary eyed and pot hazed, I yawned my way toward the back of the kitchen. Suddenly, surreality wearing a balaclava and brandishing a shitty looking knife jumped out from behind the cool room door and yelled "Drop the board man!".

Although my stoner reactions were probably still grappling with the nuances of the previous evenings Simpsons episode, some olfactory sense must have kicked in and my hand immediately let go of the board. I was astonished at the speed of my reflexes to be honest. If only I could pull the same moves during Datona I'd be the undisputed rally driving king of Port Jackson Crc.

"I don't want to hurt you man!" my intruder blurted excitedly, ripping me from my dreams of racing accolade and manhandling me into the back room. "Just open the safe and you and the girl will be fine! Ok?"

Girl? Oh shit. Michelle. "What have you done with her?" I demanded with transparently false bravado, thankfully remembering to omit the suffix 'you cad'. "Is she ok?"

"She's fine. She's tied up in the cool room." Oh what a relief, only lifelong counseling to deal with then. "So just shut up and open the safe man!"

Sensing a disruption in the force, I immediately executed a perfectly timed roundhouse kick to the face, immediately knocking myself unconscious. The next thing I remember is that I got two paid days off work. Score!

Ok, ok. That bit is made up, obv. In reality I opened the safe, got tied up on the floor with plastic slip ties and began accusing the guy of picking up his crappy knife at a Woolworths sale on the way to the gig. It was a completely stupid and reckless thing to do in hindsight, but then most of my behavior was in those days. He laughed and said that's exactly what he did, and then took off. I waited for a few minutes, pulled out of the ties and barreled into the cool room. I found a hysterical Michelle gagged and bound. I got rid of the tape around her mouth and her hands. She was a limp kneed mess of tears and anxiety.

"I didn't know what he was going to do to you!" She finally managed through the sobs. I just held her and waited until we could call the cops.

I did get two days off work out of it. Undoubtedly I had to make it up later. Michelle was given much longer, thankfully. I'm not sure whether they helped her get counseling for what happened as she didn't really work there much after that, which is completely understandable. I never thought to get any help myself. It didn't really seem necessary.

Maybe the 19 year old pseudo tough guy in me was still making the decisions. Who knows.



sorry for the long post!

Snooze. Just a little longer.

Recently I've started to think that I might be suffering from sleep apnea. I may have to go to a sleep clinic to get it checked out, which actually sounds quite appealing -- I really like the idea of people working for me while I take a nap.

Hangin' Trough

It's not often that you waltz into the urinal at your local pub and find the resident condom box posing an eternal philosophical question. Now you might say that up until now I've lived a pretty sheltered existence, given that I'm easily impressed by the capacity of the local prophylactic vending machine to prompt introspection. But hey, where I come from, our rubber dispensers are limited to 'do you wanna?' based Q&As. Call us simple. Call us dumb. We can take it.

About five of us crowded around the thing attempting to decipher the cryptic catechism.

Performance?

..or Security?

By God, if I hadn't been asking myself the exact same question. It's like finding out whether someone supports coal or conservation, war or peace. Heck, I'm even going to stop asking people whether their preference is butts or boobs; THIS is my new social tuning fork.

I can imagine the meeting room at Ansell & Co:


"You know Bob, I'm getting the feeling that our product isn't asking the big questions. I propose that we start appealing to people's base human instincts. Start posing philosophical discussion pieces that prompt self awareness coupled with.. oh I don't know.. maybe an impending sense of annihilation?"

"Dude, we sell frangers. Don't you think we should try to steer people's thought away from potential annihilation?"

"You got no vision Bob. No damn vision."


What really gets my goat is that you are forced to choose between the two. Why can't we have both? It's like those new pain relief tablets that are 'fast acting' but apparently not as potent. You know what happens? You end up taking twice as much. Allegedly.

I'm not saying that this corresponds directly to the condom thing.. you know.. I'm just saying.

Freedom: Chaos with better lighting.

Life can be pretty confusing sometimes. Cataclysmic events can be spawned by seemingly innocuous moments in time that have little or nothing to do with the eventual outcome. Explained reasons are often bewildering and abstract. People's motivations are concealed behind a smoke screen of subterfuge, obfuscated even from themselves. Cause and effect, logic and reason, action causing reaction (or over-reaction) are all ill-defined in a world where it is said that the disturbance created by a flutter of a butterfly's wings can eventually lead to atmospheric havoc.

Spooky huh? Think about it too much and your head will explode. I don't want to alarm you, but it can happen.

It's no wonder we're all nervous wrecks. Constantly fearful as we are by the possibility of anti-social exploding head death (Boom. Who brought that guy?), it's a welcome relief when you see something that immediately answers one of life's many questions. Whose logic is irrefutable. Where the validity of the argument is so inescapable that you wonder why you ever questioned it in the first place.

Take the following picture for instance. Now, the question: "Why didn't this guy get invited to the work Christmas party?"...








..can immediately be answered with: "Well simply because his fruitcake basket had reached such critical levels of ding-a-ling that he thought it wise to noose a baby effigy from the roof of his forklift."

You see? I imagine that you're now all slapping your foreheads good-naturedly and muttering "Of course! Now why didn't I see that one coming."








ps: How disturbing is that photo? Yeesh.