There's a great sense of accomplishment after you survive a winter in Canada. For antipodeans frost on the car on a winter's morning is cold but other than painful there are no words to describe walking to work in -35 degrees. I hope I never get to experience the sensation of a numb face, frozen nose hairs and the burning of freezing muscles ever, ever again. But as the snow melted 3 weeks ago and I saw my first grass blade in almost 4 months I wondered how on earth I was going to do an Aussie summer again!!
Spring is more than a season here it's the light at the end of a very dark tunnel; it's the calm after the winter storm. For me it was time to put away my jacket and pull out my hoody, take off my explorer socks that had been glued to my feet and slap on a pair of thongs, it was time to sell the equipment I had bought for a promising snowboarding career and not used, it was time to expose myself to the sun once again. It only needed to be a balmy 14 degrees to get us out of the house on bikes and searching the town for a beer garden. Wow 14 degrees in Melbourne sees crowds piled around open fires and layering clothing to cover every piece of bare skin. In Jasper 14 degrees makes the town feel like they're in an episode of Baywatch without the beach.
Unfortunately for the cancer stick indulgers of the community, no bar in Alberta allows smoking and to our disgust neither do the outdoor and uncovered beer gardens. But alas we found the one and only beer garden in town, even if it is no smoking there's still a view of the Rockies to take our minds away.
Even though spring is apparently in full swing, reminders of winter still hinder the town and me. Snow falling on a 10 degree day, a blast from the east coast returning temperatures to below zero and lakes that should be floating fisherman is still trying to crack the 2 foot of ice coating them. Soon enough though ill be swimming in those lakes and complaining of sunburn. But right now im complaining cos the fake tan Im using is turning me orange. Im no Paris Hilton im just trying to fit in when i go to LA tomorrow..theres no point looking like a washing machine from a white goods catalogue when i can look like a juice carton.
It has always been the dead cert at 2am. If you’ve just finished work, if you are having a rotten time at a pub, if you’re boyfriend is being an ass and you want to get off your rocker, you go to Pony. Yep it’s dark, dingy, smelly, and full of attitude and testosterone with a hint of perfume, the best thing: it’s open til 7am. It’s a sess pit of excess, a place where you drink sparkling from a jug, piss in the men’s room and pash strangers on the couch. On my recent return to Melbourne, I had to re-establish my relationship with this beautiful dive, get back on the horse {or the baby horse as it was}. With the new smoking laws in full affect, there was no longer a smouldering thick cloud of smoke surrounding the lights, the couches did not puff with ash at the moment of impact with your ass, and when I left I actually didn’t feel like I had left a lung on the bar. It wasn’t the only change that smacked you in the face on entry. There was a sudden pungent, intoxicating and horrible smell of class that wiped the smile right off my face. Had Pony become cool? Not just for the middle class booze hounds of students and twenty something’s waiting for life to happen, but it was becoming evident in the first ten minutes that the crowd there weren’t much different from a crowd on Chapel Street. It was like a room full of average. I used to thrive on people watching the punks and wannabes that would grace the mingy floor of the club, the filth and the fury of Melbourne’s scene. Even the bar staff was lacking in attitude, their usual total disgust for patrons was noticeably absent, but their faces still beared graffiti of “whatever”. So many times I have lost my stomach on the curb side of Pony, along with so many. So many times I have bought a round only to return to my table with all my mates passed out in a heap. It became somewhat a Pony tradition to always pass your jug onto another table, as not to waste any beer. But when I attempted to pass the jug on in my current Pony experience, I was denied three times!! Did I not just say FREE BEER!! I am not drugging it you fool; drugs are wasted on the young! It was with pure shock that one man accepted, but his face spoke a thousand words, all I could think was “Fuck I should have spiked it”. Ah Pony. I will attempt only a few times more before I tire of the crowds that are bringing disrepute to the stingy bars of Melbourne. It’s a good thing you have cider on tap otherwise our friendship would be over.
(now thanks to the 2am licensing laws...ponys friendship with the whole of melbourne might be over..thanks brumby)
I was caught off my guard. My head was too far from my heart and suddenly I was under attack. One minute I was happily humming ballads to myself and the next I was the walking wounded in an all too real sequence of a soap opera. He said everything right as he tied a juicy worm to the end of a tight line and cast it off the pier and there I was swimming around waiting for the hook to sink. Of course I couldn’t see this happening at the start, us women don’t go out with a search party full of bloodhounds looking for heartbreakers, we eventually discover them. But regardless you are always given a clue before the inevitable ‘find’. Your stomach will rumble in public as if you just woke and sculled a litre of orange juice, you think a cigarette will calm it but then you realise that’s it, that’s your gut feeling, you know when you saw him with that other girl and it felt odd, that’s your body telling you. It’s not just your stomach, your chest pounds with every movement, your legs appear to have taken ecstasy but are keeping the effects from the rest of you, your hands feel weak and you become horribly aware of every action around you. I thought I had grown too old for these high school shenanigans, I though I had chosen well, well enough to protect myself. That’s when I dwell on the start and try to uncover the obvious signs, I dissect every conversation, every text message and every softly spoken word, try to find the reason. But the only thing I discover is that there is never a reason, there is only a reaction. My reaction was to swallow Vallium until I couldn’t feel the pain he had caused, until I could call my dreams my happy place. For days you dwell but then suddenly you wake up and you realise a week later that you went a whole week without thinking of him, then you go a whole month and then you start to laugh and wonder how anything so petite could penetrate your iron guard wrapped around the only prize that’s priceless, your heart.
It was a hot, blowy, humid, hung-over, whiny sort of Sunday morning. A perfect time to knock back a glass of sauv’, a fag and breeze over the bollocks of election crap that litters the Sunday rag. Before too long I’m in the trashy gossip section, glazing over the photos of the weekends parties in Melbourne. Spring racing frocks and footballing cocks, plus the tarts that crash the celebrity clubs to get laid by a name. I glazed over the MTV party photos from South Bank, a face caught my eye, I paused on the photo before I caught my stomach at my ankles and felt my wine hit my eyebrows. It was who I thought it was, the name was right, the face was familiar, deep down I had hoped that I would be blessed with never having to think of him ever again. There he was, for all of Victoria and surrounding areas to see, the man that popped my cherry, wedged between two platinum blondes and with the unforgettable smirk of arrogance, he haunted me again. So as every good woman does when something big happens, you write a witty or alarming text and send it to every person you know is going to greet you with a reply or better still call you and demand all the details. At that point my patience was enough to send 5 texts. Within a few minutes the first call and suddenly my news was steamrolling into a stage production with me as the star and a league of back up dancers and singers parading behind me all chiming with the phrase ‘ Ohmigod can you believe it’.
Women are not unlike men when they take on invisible challenges to prove their status to themselves. My challenge at this point was to make sure this cherry poppin heart breakers appearance in the paper was a one off and he just happened to be at the party due to winning a ticket on a radio dialling competition and not because he had a career in the industry I have wanted so desperately to be a part of. I did what every good person does this day to boost or deflate their ego, I googled him. I was deflated. When I Google myself it just comes up with one and a half million pages containing insight from some freakshow shrink called Sally Young. Staring at me from the screen was pages of search results, and even an address to his wikipedia site. I read his biography, and considered altering it. ‘He lost his virginity at age 19 to a beautiful Australian girl whilst residing in Darwin’, ‘he has since lost contact with the beauty but hopes to meet her again on a red carpet somewhere, he says that someone like Sally May Young should be enjoyed by the world’. I switch of my dream radar and begin to relish in the fact that after me he went onto pash Pammy Anderson. Now I may not be a platinum blonde with a bust bigger than a book shelf, but im sure he remembers me.
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