Recent Posts
on the topic of manners again....this is where i have my whinge so allow me to unload....i went to my first {god forbid ill never do it again} EMO gig on sunday night.....a lot of things disturbed me before id even got in the door the first being the size of the line to get in...the doors werent opening for at least another fifteen minutes and rather than seeing this as a great time to break a world record on rapid jug consumption.. the 300 or so people saw this a great chance to see exactly how hard your nipples could actually get in the freezing fucking cold of st kilda....after realising that infact i was possible the oldest chick in this line up i decided that the only way i was going to feel better about myself was to get stark raving slaughtered...i had 3 very able and willing friends beside me that would follow suit...oh by the way apparently wering dresses, mini skirts and the shortest of shorts with heels to emo gigs is the new vogue...ill be fucked if i ever go to gig in anything other than dunnys or battered trainers....the gig was good i stood in a corner and knocked back countless vb cans whilst avoiding the inevitable "pissed chick in fucking stillettos steps on my foot"...infact it was a man that was first to crush my piggies...not long after a delightful young lady tried to bust her way past me and i put out my foot and kindly told her there was no room infront of us and that busting through me was not very nice...{okay maybe there were expletives used}...in her raised voice she stated the following " WELL ME AND MY MATES ARE SICK OF FUCKING LOOKING AT YOUR ASS CRACK SO PULL UP YOUR FUCKING PANTS OR MOVE ON" at which point a piss weak country girl lke myself would apologise and let her through...but i couldnt help but laugh in her face and continue to giggle for a few minutes at the fact that not only did this chick pay sixty bucks to see her favourite band but she also got to see MY FUCKIN ASS CRACK that my work mates get to see for free every week!!!! its just unfortunate that she wasnt aware of the bargain she was getting....if she had fucking manners she would of thanked me..........
Yet another birthday approaches and with each one, I try to fathom what difference the next number will make. The transition from 25-26 feels like a decade. In the eyes of my country I am no longer a "yoof", in the UK my railcard is no longer valid, I'm ticking the box 26-30 and my moisturiser is now a anti-ageing, wrinkle reducing sunscreen instead of Clearasil.
At the same time I am coming to terms with the fact that dating younger men doesn't make you feel younger, it just makes me think, were they still wetting the bed when I was listening to grunge?
Yes, its finally happened, Back Alley Sally or Pete the Peaedophile is growing up, I'm on the prowl for men with chest hair, beards, drivers licenses, medicare, credit cards, men who were children of the 80's not babies of the 80's. But this change has nothing to do with my impending birthday, oh no its another chapter in the Jasper book of revelations.
It's a lonely town ol' Jasper for the handful of us aged between 24 and 30. We have resorted to testing cookie and cake recipes and trying variants on roast dinners as opposed to spewing on sidewalks and shagging strangers. Dare I say that we have become somewhat civilised in Canada and very far from our peers aged below us.
I look forward to returning to Melbourne where 26 isnt seen as being the age to start paying a mortgage and supporting your 7 children but seen as the start of your time to really appreciate booze, fags and gigs. Alas my 26th birthday will kick off next Friday with bacon and eggs for breakfast, followed by a big dose of day and night flu strength tablets to numb the pain of the needle that will be piercing my back while I get my first tattoo. That's right, after years of fear and deliberation I am finally getting ink (thanks to cable tv for running marathons of a reality tv show set in a tattoo parlour). My birthday will indeed bring physical pain to overshadow the age pain and I'm sure the hangover will be full of pain too.
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 guess to be honest I had never been proud to be from Mount Gambier. I appreciated growing up outside of the city, cherished the freedom growing up with so much room to play, but rarely did I boast about the experiences of growing up there. More often than not it was me to complain, about the people, the restriction and the general distaste of the place.
Last year I thought about taking a year out of the city. I packed up moved to Canada lived in a town of 2000 people and hated the sense of not fitting in, something I felt I dealt with for most of teenage years. I left Canada and fulfilled my promised to my mother that I would live in Mount Gambier for the summer. I have rolled into New York on the train by myself in the middle of the night and survived a Muslim country the day the war broke out, but none of this filled my stomach with more fear than returning to Mount Gambier. I was truly terrified. The only way I was going to survive was to be so busy that I would not even realise where I was. I joined the gym, got a job, got another job, then another, then I got a computer, then I started a course, then I planned my summer.
[ Click here to read more ]
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.
The truth is that it makes tighter the ribbon that binds this town. It makes stronger the young hearts that are not ready for pain. The fact is, it’s a lesson that’s taught that’s always too hard to learn.
Yet again, the town wakes to the whisper, the rumour and then the loud screams that follow in the event of a tragedy. There is no need for a front page, a news headline or a breaking news report, we all know each other round here, the victim is your cousins friends brother or your friends mates brother or he’s in your family. Last week he was a student, maybe a hoon, a top bloke, a heartbreaker, a lover, a teenager having fun or just someone that somebody else never wanted to say goodbye to. By lunchtime everyone knows, everyone talks, snippets of the story are exchanged on the street and when you watch the news that night that’s when it hits you, the gossip stops and the grieving starts, even if you had never met them.
Each year there is a least one, each generation has one that changes their life. They can change the roads, put up a stop sign, take away V8’S, put death on the telly and put cops on every corner, but its not going to stop. Today and every other day we will as a community mourn the death of someone from a car accident. Its part and parcel of being from the Mount, and what doesn’t take us, will only ever make us stronger
[ Click here to read more ]
2 months, 3 days, 20 hours and 9 minutes. Thats how longs it has been since I once again touched down in Australia.
This time was different to the rest. I was racing through to customs to get to the pub, to be around my friends, to be in my Melbourne. What a feeling to finally come home to something. To call somewhere home and know that no matter how long you spend away there will always be a face in that city that will sit you down at a bar and ask with no arrogance, “how the fuck are you?” and you know as soon as it is spoken that it is drenched with genuine interest. That’s what I have strived for my whole life and to have it is like finding a million dollars in a fine leather briefcase, with your name pressed on it. Im a millionaire.
I stood in the customs line, looking around for something to feed my emotion, to reassure me of my decision to end my travels. But I was surrounded by tired and angry commuters carrying the affects of long haul flights and jet lag. People pushing prams in front of others and therefore creating an atmosphere more like a soccer match than an airport
[ Click here to read more ]
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.
|
|
Recent Comments
I've not commented on anything yet :(
|
Add Comments
Comments (1)
Read More