Fergisms

 

I was having an online chat to my horror writer buddy Daniel I Russell about an interesting concept he came up with in his work. What if, in addition to the traditional old school demons of biblical lore, the modern world spawned an entire new set of demons to provide modern day temptations?

Dan has created a couple. There the porn demon, of course, who lives inside a Japanese schoolgirl (of course). He got his first outing in Dan’s story, ‘The Love Revolution’, which you can find in his collection, Tricks, Mischief and Mayhem. https://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mischief-Mayhem-Daniel-Russell/dp/099217077X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1519653047&sr=1-1&keywords=tricks+mischief+and+mayhem

Then there’s the aptly named Television, who lives inside the trash tv mogul Simon Coop (ahem). On the exterior, Coop is tanned, groomed, all trendy clothes and shiny teeth. But on the inside he is the epitome of trash/reality tv and mayhap its viewers – corpulent, lazy and bloated. Sprawled on their couches, televisions rusted onto brain dead reality shit, stuffing their fat faces with junk. And this was written before Goggle Box was a thing, Dan is keen to point out.

You can read all about the demon Television in Dan’s cracking novel, Entertaining Demons. I highly recommend it. A damn fine read. https://www.amazon.com/Entertaining-Demons-Daniel-I-Russell/dp/1937009564

This got me thinking about what other new demons the modern world could spawn.

For a start there has to be an Internet demon, trolling the social networks, looking for weaknesses he can exploit. Telling kids to take a gun to their school… telling kids they are worthless and they should kill themselves.

Also, Dan’s Television demon has been surpassed by an even more insidious creature – the iPhone demon. He’s with us all day, every day. He sees, knows and records everything. Holds every piece of human knowledge in his palm. He liberates us…but he’s addictive. He insinuates himself in all of our personal relationships, he makes us angry and jealous, envious. He distracts us, stops us thinking for ourselves. He kills our imagination. He feeds especially on the young. He shows them things they shouldn’t be seeing – sex, death, murder and live executions. He makes them turn on their friends. The weaker ones lives are ruined. Some of them suicide.

The iPhone demon is ubiquitous. It’s a narcotic. Walk the streets and you see them all, interrupting face to face conversations to get a fix. We’re all addicted. Kids staying up all night in their bedrooms, scrolling through the screens, afraid they’ll miss something important.

Yeah I like this one. Dan rates it. He’s got one more too. The industrial demon. He was once so powerful, when the industrial revolution was at its height. He brought suffering to millions with his dark Satanic mills, but now he’s been sidelined by technology. So he stalks the empty factories, longing, hoping for resurrection.

Hmmm I’ve got this idea for a novel set in a factory about an abused teenager and a bullying Vietnam vet with a dark secret. Adding Dan’s industrial demon to the mix would be ace.

I wonder if Dan will swap me his industrial demon if I let him have iPhone. Maybe I’ll just text him now and ask…

 

I lost my dad not so very long ago. It’s okay, he was very old, and physically ailing for a long time, so his passing was gentle. The funeral was heart-warming and uplifting. My eulogy full of laughter and happy memories, raised a good few chuckles among the crowd of saddened mourners.

There are many ways of remembering the departed. Most of my memories of dad are happy ones. This is just one of them.

It concerns my dad and his collection of pornographic magazines. I had a symbiotic relationship with my father’s porn mags from about the age of twelve onwards. As soon as I could sustain an erection, I was keen on sniffing out porn.

Now, when I say porn, let me make it clear. This is going back to the 1970s, before the age of the Internet and the porn auteur, before the most degrading hard core porn became easily accessible to children. This was paper based porn, and soft core at that. There were no videos, nor DVDs. The only porn on film around then was restricted to 8mm film, something out of reach for me in suburban Perth.

No, this was a simpler time, when girlie mags were restricted, and most of us pathetic schoolboys could only hope for an older male sibling to hand down a dog-eared copy of a nudie mag, or gaze longingly at them through plastic covers on the upper shelves of the newsagent.

I don’t remember how I first realised that dad had porn mags. It was just something mysterious and innate. As the hormones started to kick in, you sort of develop a sixth sense for all things sexual. Being a loser and a loner, I didn’t have any curious girls around to experiment with, so paper copies were my only hope and the next best thing.

So about this time, when the folks are out of the house, you start to lurk around their bedroom, cos you know there are secret adult sexy things in there. I’m dredging my memory banks here, but I think I first found them in the bottom of their bedroom cupboard, under a pile of shoes. Or maybe they were in dad’s unlocked briefcase with his mysterious Buffaloes lodge paraphernalia.

There they were anyway, a hidden treasure, all shiny and glossy and colourful, a collection of very soft core girlie magazines. No sexual penetration, in fact, no male bodies at all. That would have been gross. Just ladies, without any clothes. On a rare occasion they might have their legs spread to show you their most intimate parts, but that was rare. Mostly it was boobs and bums and hairy bushes. No shaved quims in those days, and no tattoos either. Tattoos, as dad used to say, were restricted to sailors and prostitutes. Dad had an anchor inked on his arm… he was a sailor.

I can still recall some of the titles – Penthouse, Playboy, Swank (which had the titillating and apt word ‘wank’ in the title) Hustler – with I recall a rather tasteless and offensive cartoon called ‘Chester the Molester’ within. The ongoing saga of a middle aged father and his unnatural relationship with his pre-pubescent daughter. It was funny in the 1970s I guess. What else? Parade, Mayfair, Escort. So many titles. Too many to remember.

The pile expanded as my teenage years progressed, only diminished on the odd occasion when mum and dad arrived home unexpectedly and I didn’t have enough time to pull up my pants and sprint to their bedroom to replace the object. Oh and that one time I didn’t realise that…. No it’s too disgusting, but let’s just say several of the pages got stuck together and ruined the magazine.

The really memorable part of this for me was that I never really knew if dad knew I was accessing his material. I was mostly meticulous in putting everything back in the pile in the exact order I had found it. Over the years for some reason dad would move the pile of porn from place to place, but like a rampant bloodhound, I would always sniff it out, no matter where he hid it. Perhaps he was moving it to try and keep it away from the prying eyes of my mother. She never mentioned the collection regardless.

One time it was slipped between a tear in the base of our lounge room sofa. God knows how I knew, but I found it. I like to think dad knew all along, and he was just messing with me, playing a game of smutty hide and seek between father and son.

This went on for a few years until I turned sixteen and one day, probing the cracks and recesses of the parental bedroom, I found the soft core mags gone and replaced with hard core porno mags, showing actual sexual penetration. I was both shocked and excited of course, but somehow, the innocence of it evaporated. In retrospect, the loss of innocence was just another step on my path to manhood. I would soon discover real flesh and blood girls, and while my interest and love of porn would never really go away, I always missed those days of smiling naked two-dimensional paper women, showing me only just enough forbidden flesh to peak my interest.

That was just one small snippet of the relationship I had with my father. We shared an interest in pornography, sex, and mild sexual deviance. He had a quick wit and a knowing smile, and a twinkle in his deep brown eyes.

 

 

Interesting with the passing of time to see things that were once popular and universal fall out of public favour. With particular reference to the concept of physical and mental health.

Take smoking for example. Once ubiquitous across the globe and practiced almost everywhere, in cinemas, shopping malls, offices, restaurants and bars, until the forces of health consciousness mobbed up and mobilised, and drove the tobacco industry away, out of sporting venues, cars and our lounge rooms, away to the Third World, where it appears they are still free to peddle cigarettes to small children.

This happened in my lifetime. I recall the days of my youth, when almost every girl between the age of 15 and 30 used cigarettes as a dietary measure, feeling like they had to smoke because all their friends did. I remember the bad girls at high school sneaking back to class from behind the bike sheds, desperately chewing gum and utterly failing to disguise the smell of cigarettes on their breath, hair and clothes. They got hooked early.

I recall my early days in the public service, when a party in the common room would inevitably witness a fog of smoke crawling along the ceiling, as every girl in the office, and most of the blokes, lit up.

Fast forward to today where smoking in this country is almost a rarity. The education process worked really well, not to mention the taxes and the astronomical cost of smokes. Gone are the days when doctors could be used in television advertisements to encourage the mentally beneficial stress relieving qualities of a particular brand of cigarettes. Now our smokers are the social lepers, banished to a windy corner on the street for their shameful fix. Banned and discouraged almost everywhere in polite society.

Alcohol too is coming under increasing pressure. While we will never see the days of prohibition again, and boutique bars and beers increase in popularity, there is at least some official acknowledgement of the medical and social problems its excessive use can cause, particularly to the young.

Makes me think what other niche unhealthy products will be targeted next. Two immediately come to mind – fast food and gambling.

At the moment, fast food companies are still allowed to reel our kids in early to try and get them hooked on sugar and fat. I’d wager it won’t be long until more pressure is placed on these purveyors of junk to remove themselves from such broad public view.

Lately I notice one company in particular running an ad which seems to imply they are somehow a part of us, a part of our lives and our upbringing. They have always been there for us, in the background, an intricate part of Aussie summers, passed down through the generations. No you fucking haven’t, McDonald’s! You are not part of our history. You are an American company that only appeared on our shores in the 1980s. Away with you, you bastards.

Then there’s KFC. Suddenly an intricate part of the Aussie summer and cricket no less. A part of our cricketing history eh? Their colours miraculously segueing from red white and blue to Aussie green and gold, all so dumb bogans can run around at the cricket with empty chicken buckets on their heads.

Fuck off, Kentucky Fried Chicken. You’re about as Australian as my left nut (I was born overseas). I guarantee the good ol’ boys back home in Kentucky have never even heard of fucking cricket.

The growing epidemic of obesity across the Western World will see to you lot.

The next ubiquitous product I reckon will come in for some harsh treatment in the not too distant future is gambling. Especially now that we don’t have to go into seedy betting shops and it can dig its mucky claws into us 24/7 by our own hand held devices.

I notice the ads for gambling in Australia are usually posited in a blokey, matey, ocker voice. The whole tone of the ads seems to be – ‘Go on, don’t be a fucken poofdah! Have a fucken bet yakunt! Don’t tell the missus, put the whole fucken house on it. Go on, bet bet bet bet bet bet bet… but gamble responsibly.’

Then there’s the ad where we see the inner workings of the betting agency, where the staff engaged in various tasks are cheering the punter on. My fucking arse they are. They don’t want you to win. They want you to fucking lose everything you mug. Gambling of course shares a vital quality with our other bette noirs, smoking, booze and fast food – in that they are all massively addictive.

So come on, what are ya waiting for? Have a smoke, have a burger, have a beer and have a bet, ya bastard! At least before they are rightfully banned or at least supressed.

 

 

It occurred to me out of the blue today that tomorrow is the birthday of my first real girlfriend, the first person I ever fell in love with. For some reason the date has stuck in my memory for all these years. Even though I haven’t seen her in more than three decades. Tomorrow she will turn 50 years old.

That’s pretty incredible. I have thought of her occasionally over the years, and wondered what ever became of her. The last time I saw her, she was living in a different country to me. I can only assume she stayed there and grew up.

I know in this day and age you can trace people through social media. It’s easier to find people than it was in times gone by. Sure I have looked up her name online occasionally. Though as it is a fairly common first name and surname, there are quite a few of them. So you end up peering at avatar pictures and looking at the rough age and wondering, is that her? It’s like looking for a ghost. A ghost from the past.

I never managed to find someone with the same name in the same country I assume she still lives in, so my interest ended there. I doubt I would ever try and contact her anyway. Maybe she moved overseas again.

I wonder did she get married, have children, get divorced? Are her mum and dad still alive? I got on so well with them. What did she end up doing with her life when she left school? Did she fulfil her dreams and ambitions… what were her dreams and ambitions? Did I ever bother to ask her?

Would she be interested in what became of me? Does she ever sit and think of me in the same way I think of her. Perhaps we all do of our first love.

If she had children, they would be young adults now, possibly with children of their own.

Would it be interesting to sit down with that person and talk about how your lives panned out? Would you even want to? What would you talk about? How much of a shock would it be for both of you to see that person you only remember in their youthful prime now grown old and grey? Would you still have anything in common, anything to talk about at all?

Those two young souls are like different people now. I barely remember being that boy.

What would I tell her? About my travels, the places I’ve seen, my studies, my degrees, books and stories I wrote, the women I loved along the way, my marriage, my family. Friends I made and lost. My father dying.

Is she actually still alive?

Would you want to know?

Well I have a wife and children, and grandchildren of my own now, so my curiosity goes no further. But happy birthday to you, girl that broke my heart all those years ago. I hope you are alive, and that you’re very happy. I hope your life was whatever you wanted it to be.

Happy fiftieth JB.

 

I’ve been starting to feel my age recently. Little nagging aches and pains everywhere, even gardening is exhausting and a real chore. I can see why people don’t want big gardens any more. I’m also finding myself short tempered and grumpy about… well everything really… and why not? I’ve bloody earned the right to be pissed off.

I think part of it is that when you hit your fifties, you’ve been around and seen a lot, and frankly, you’ve heard and seen the same bullshit over and over again, so you can see right through it and you just don’t have the patience to deal with other people’s crap any longer.

I think part of it too is that you not only lose the physical joy, but the emotional and spiritual joy of life as well. Cos you’ve seen it and done it all before. You get jaded, life loses its magic and its ability to surprise. Kind of like how Xmas is no longer so exciting after you reach puberty. Instead of leaping out of bed at 6am to see if Santa’s been, you want to lie in til 10, cos you spent half the previous night masturbating furiously into a sock.

I read something, somewhere… I can’t be bothered finding it again, anyway it listed a number of reasons why middle aged gits like me are angry all the time. One of them is if you are in your fifties and you find yourself looking after an elderly parent or parents. That’s me. They’re really demanding on your time, and they’ve regressed to an infant stage, and quite frankly, you yourself are too old and sore to deal with that shit every damn day.

Part of my general malaise is also due to a lack of fitness too. Having a sedentary office job for years on end doesn’t help. It’s like everything on your body that used to be firm starts to slide south, nipples, belly, penis. Then one day you look in the mirror and think, fuck, who’s that old prick? Or as I best heard it expressed by a forgotten Oz comedian, you’re getting intimate with your girlfriend and you look up and catch the action in the mirror, and you think, ‘Why is my dad shagging my girlfriend?’

Another aspect of the malaise of ageing is that you become set in your ways. You’ve pretty much settled your opinion on politics, music, film, ideology, beliefs, etc. So when you’re confronted by someone with a contradictory opinion, you just want to strangle the fucker for being so stupid, ignorant and blind to the truth.

Oh and you also discover that what you always suspected was true – they are out to screw you over, from the cradle to the grave, and there’s fuck all you can do about it, because you can never be sure who they are. They’re clever like that, the bastards!

So I am confronted by my own mortality at last. It occurs to me, shit, this is the downward spiral. I’ve only got another twenty to thirty years, if I’m lucky. Got a letter in the mail form the government the other day. They want me to do another screening test. Bowel Cancer Screening, the sequel. I know it’s a good thing, and of course I’ll do it again. But it’s just another official timely reminder, hey buddy, you’re old.

Another reason of the grumpiness for the fifty plus set is the sudden realisation that you’ve wasted your life and the best years are behind you. Could you have achieved more? Actually, I’m ambivalent about this one. Don’t beat yourself up, we can’t all be famous, and a lot of famous people are shallow arseholes. I’ve written a book, edited another book, hopefully got another one coming soon, and a couple more after that, and I’m heading up to my fiftieth publication. So it’s not all doom and gloom.

I recall the first time I was made aware of my own mortality. I was 35 years old, young, fit and sexy. Flying from Vietnam to Japan on Vietnam Airlines. The only white guy on the plane. All the announcements were in Vietnamese. So I’m happily sitting there reading, when suddenly, BANG! Big explosion. The plane… well let me take a step back here and say that as a young man, fantasising about heroic romantic death (cos you do that sort of shit when you’re young), I always imagined a plane going down would do so gracefully, the nose gently arcing downward toward the earth. But no, turns out a plane drops out of the air like a fucking stone!

This one sure did. All the overhead lockers slammed open and shit flew everywhere. All the passengers started screaming, and even worse, screaming in a foreign tongue and the guy screamed over the tannoy and I didn’t know what the fuck was happening and it suddenly occurred to me – oh fuck! I am not immortal after all. I am going to die!

Then the plane levelled out and carried on.

Turned out it was just a bit of turbulence.

It actually lasted about ten seconds, but it felt like ten years.

It was a white knuckle ride for me from that moment on I tell you. Every bit of plane rattling turbulence had me gripping the seat, and it has done ever since. From that day on, I knew the clock was ticking. Carpe diem, seize the day and all that.

So yeah, mortality. I need to do something to stave death off a bit. Yoga maybe. Go back to the gym. Get a bike again. Start fasting again. One positive step I have taken is to use my second work long service leave to work a 4 day week on full pay. I take every Wednesday off for the next several months. Really breaks up the week and actually allows me to get stuff done, like the bloody garden. I’m really starting to enjoy the freedom, fresh air and exercise, the mental break from the bullshit of everyday life. Best of all, spending some quality time with my favourite person in the world, me, without other people giving me the absolute shits, is just invaluable. If I didn’t have a mortgage, I’d segue this day off into two, then three, and so on until I never went to work at all. I’d spend every day gardening, exercising, exploring, travelling to interesting and different places… and wanking into a sock like a horny teenager.

 

 

 

It might be hard to believe for you young uns out there, but back in the seventies, there was a whole cultural phenomenon built around the art of streaking. Taking your clothes off in public and just generally running around and hollering, often waving an item of clothing around your head as you did so. Usually your pants.

This didn’t just happen at major sporting events, it could happen anywhere. For whatever reason it briefly caught on in popular culture, like marbles or hula hoops. It inevitably led to the formation of a Benny Hill chase scene, as a bunch of either outraged or laughing authority figures ran in pursuit of the errant streaker.

Oddly enough as it may seem now, it was incredibly popular at my primary school, or at least it was with big boofy Bradley Read. Ready, god bless him. I can still see his big grinning oafish face. He started out as a major school bully, but by grade 7 had developed a wicked sense of humour, and if you could make him laugh, as I frequently did, then he was your best mate. I loved the guy.

Anyway, I think Ready had witnessed a few streakers at the cricket on telly, that’s where he no doubt got the idea of popularising the streak around the school playground. Well when I say popularising, it was only really popular with him. I’m pretty sure nobody else ever took it up. The first time he did it, we were all completely stunned and in shock, but naturally we wept with laughter and egged him on.

We were all milling around, probably waiting to start a sports lesson. There was a sudden wild yell, and Ready appeared from around a corner or behind a bush, stark bollock naked and running at full pelt. Racing around the quadrangle and down the ramp across the oval, waving his trackie daks around his big grinning head. I don’t remember his dick at all, but we all must have seen it.

To this day I can still picture Ready chucking laps around the school, twirling his brown Adidas stretch tracky dak pants in his arm as he ran, hollering. Pursued by a bunch of moustached and mulleted teachers, the ones who weren’t doubled over laughing. Come to think of it, most young men aged between 25 and 35 in the seventies looked like porn stars, or rather, the stereotype of porn stars as we remember them from old 8mm loop films… as I remember them from old 8mm loop films. The cool thing was they were all in on the joke. They didn’t really mind Ready livening up our summer afternoons with a streak. I hope the girls didn’t mind either. Today, it would have resulted in a series of psychological assessments and a lengthy suspension, some police charges for indecent exposure, a possible lawsuit and some traumatised school girls.

I’d like to think he’s still doing it today, as a middle aged man, to entertain the kids at family barbecues. And I hope he’ll still be doing it as an old man in a nursing home, leading the nurses a merry dance, twirling his incontinence pad around his head as he yelps and hollers around the corridors. Mmm nurses. Now THAT really will be like the Benny hill chase scene.

Anyway, that was life in the 1970s. They were simpler times. There was no Internet, no Playstations, no 24 hour hour pay tv networks. We had to make our own fun. I’m not making this stuff up. There was a song about it too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtzoUu7w-YM

 

The Other night I went to a show at the local arena. It was packed, sold out. I took my time coming out afterwards, and as I walked through the upper level foyer, I was pleased to find that the escalator and the lower foyer were reasonably free of people. So I eased my way down and pushed my way gently out the doors thinking I had got out easy…

…only to find myself stuck in a vast swirling ocean of humanity outside. Why were all these people loitering outside the venue? I got totally disoriented. I didn’t know where the hell I was, which way was up, which way was down. I couldn’t move, except to be borne along on the swell of this moving, chattering, boisterous crowd.

Eventually, the crowd momentarily parted and I saw an opportunity to step out and try and get my bearings, until, I found myself walled in and trapped behind this one really slow moving old man. You know how it is when someone is blocking your path and they’re not moving at the same pace as you and you can’t get by them and it’s so infuriating? Well that was this guy. ‘Hurry up, old man! I got places to go.’ Well at least I gotta get home.

Then, just as suddenly, I was swept up again by the maelstrom of the swarming crowd. Borne along by the power of its combined motion, I lost the use of my free will, and my legs. This vast collective pushed and dragged me along with it onto a busy road. The traffic honked and swore, but what could they do against such vast numbers. An army of legs crawled across the tarmac like a centipede, bearing me in its midst.

Eventually, I was deposited in a small bit of personal space on the opposite footpath. I looked up, saw an opening, and went for it… only to find my path blocked by THE SAME SLOW MOVING OLD MAN!

You gotta be kidding me! In a cruel random universe, how does this happen? Get outta the way old man, get outta the way.

Anyway, that was my evening, how was yours?

Dreams are funny too. Quite disturbing sometimes as well. I think David Lynch has taken to directing my dreams. That would account for all the oddly behaving faceless strangers who somehow know me and I know them, and the grey other world he constructed in my brain, with its vast amphitheatres and road networks and cathedrals and black heaving oceans, and all those people, both familiar and strange simultaneously, going everywhere and yet nowhere.

I also like the childish illogicality of dreams. How you can be driving down the street one minute, and the next minute you’re riding a bicycle instead, but you don’t bat an eyelid. This is perfectly normal. I’m still waiting to find that huge pile of cash I found in my dream the other night.

Do you think we’ll ever get enough of celebrity chefs? Are there any chefs left in the world who aren’t celebrities? Can we cram any more cooking shows onto the networks? One I thought of recently is called ‘Good Chef, Bad Chef.’ It’s a simple premise, most of them are. Two chefs, one nice, and the other a complete bastard.

‘Right Lindsay, just step into the scullery for a minute, would you? Gordon and I would like to have a word. Take a seat, son…. Now Lindsay, it’s about the dinner service last night.’

‘YOU OVERCOOKED THAT SOUFFLE, LINDSAY. YOU DID IT ON PURPOSE, YOU BASTARD!’

‘Well, as you can see, Lindsay, Gordon tends to get disappointed when the staff let him down.’

‘YOU MURDERED THAT BOLOGNESE! YOU ‘ORRIBLE LITTLE TOSSER, DIDN’T YOU! ANSWER THE QUESTIONS!’

‘Now Gordon, calm down. Lindsay, is there anything happening at home that’s troubling you? You can tell us, we’re your friends.’

‘YOU’RE NO FRIEND OF MINE, YOU OVER-SEASONING SNOT-BUCKET!’

And so on.

    

Here’s a tale from my 1970s childhood that always stuck in my mind. I knew these three brothers, Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee Mitchell. Yeah okay I changed the names. Yeah I also turned them into the Ramones. I liked the Ramones. They lived around the block from me in a ramshackle house. I also lived in a ramshackle house. We all lived in ramshackle houses in Kwinana back then. There was no shame in that.

Kwinana in the seventies was a rough place. It still is. It was a migrant town built around the steelworks that employed loads of Italians, Slavs and ten pound poms, like my parents. When they were looking to locate the steelworks, they must have asked the Poms where to put it, cos only the English would build a polluting monstrosity on the beach, thus ruining it forever. Hence the advertising slogan – Come float with the fish at Kwinana Beach. Okay, I made that up, but it’s a good one. ‘Dad, can we go to Kwinana Beach for our holidays – said no kid EVER!’

So the Mitchell brothers had a dad, who oddly enough was called Mr Mitchell. There was a Mrs Mitchell, but she was always in the kitchen in the background. She’s only a vague memory to me. But not Mr Mitchell. He was larger than life, a real character. Always had a sarcastic grin on his face, and a real sharp tongue. Took the piss out of me something chronic.

Nobody knew exactly what Mr Mitchell did for a crust. He always seemed to be at home when we were at the house. He was short and scrawny, but also managed to sport a big gut. So maybe he drank. Always in shorts, with these skinny little legs. Had an interesting head. Receding black hair in the form of an isolated tuft on the top of his head. It sat there like an island just off shore of the mainland strip around the back and sides.

There was a rumour around the town that Mr Mitchell had been in prison. Actually, it wasn’t a rumour, it was true. We asked him about it. Apparently he stole some food out of a warehouse or something. Must have been a lot of food. He reasoned that nobody was really using the food so he was within his rights to take it and feed his family. We were never big on detail as kids so we left it at that.

So, the Mitchell brothers and I were all into soccer, played for the local club. Unfortunately, like most of Straya in the seventies, this was the era of soccer players being considered sheilas, wogs and poofters. Nowhere was this more strongly enforced than in the personage of my primary school nemesis, Brett Borass. Yeah I’ve changed this name as well, but he’s still a c*nt. He’s probably in prison now, or maybe he found himself and came out of the closet.

So, it was the summer holiday between us finishing primary school and starting our high school career at… shudder, Kwinana High School. Twelve going on thirteen. All those hormones and all that uncertainty; pimples and erections. Kwinana High has been knocked down now and a new one built on its grave called Gilmore College, but the aura of darkness still lingers. Kwinana High, where if the kids didn’t get you, the teachers would. It was not unlike Roger Waters’ recollections of his own miserable schooldays in ‘The Wall’ – Yew! Stand still, laddie!

So trio Mitchell and I were playing soccer on a local footy oval. We’re using jumpers for goalposts. There’s an irony here in that I often drove past that oval visiting my parents in recent years, and the footy goals are gone and it’s a soccer ground now. So, we’re deeply involved in our game, and we don’t see Borass and a gang of his mates approaching until they are upon us. Borass is bouncing a footy.

‘Carn boys,’ he growls. ‘We’re gonna play a game of sockah!!’

So the footy bogans proceed to play kick to kick with their footy in the middle of our space. Despite the fact the oval is huge and there’s plenty of room for everyone. But of course, we all knew their objective was to get in our faces.

Borass hated me. All through primary school he had been after me. I think he knew that I knew he was a total moron and I was a mouthy prick and probably let slip that I knew it. Plus I might have told him and everyone else that footy was a shit game once or twice. I remember one day, a couple of mates and I were walking through the bush near the primary school, and they let slip they were going to meet someone. Imagine my horror when we moved into a clearing and there was Borass sitting on a fallen log. He glared at me with pure malice and the following exchange took place.

B: What’s HE doin’ ‘ere’

He’s okay. He’s with us.

B: (Shaking his big stupid shaggy head angrily) Well he’s not getting’ any of me smokes.

Me: (Bravely) Don’t want none.

So anyway, needless to say, on the footy oval, the tension is mounting. I can see Borass closing in on me, looking to take a swing. I duck away from him but one of his mates, a big bastard, takes me down with a solid tackle.

Then it’s on. The guy starts laying into me and the others run in to stick the boot in. The Mitchells, seeing us outnumbered seven to four, bravely run away.

So I’m alone, getting the shit beaten out of me, cursing the Mitchells, when not five minutes later, there’s a screech of brakes, and a battered old sedan roars onto the oval.

It’s the cavalry!

It’s Superman!

It’s the Mitchells… and they’ve brought their dad!

Mr Mitchell (I never did learn his first name) storms out of the car. He’s still wearing his shorts and his button up shirt with the gut sticking out. He looks angry. The bogans pause.

God love him, Mr Mitchell marches straight up to the biggest, oldest bogan there, who was probably about fifteen, and gets in his face.

‘So you like picking on smaller kids, do ya mate?’

This elicits the expected response from the stunned bogans.

‘Fuck off mate!’

‘What’s your beef, mate?’

But the bogans are uncertain. Their body language shows a hint of fear. They’re not used to being stood up to, especially in a pack.

‘Why don’t you try me on for size?’ Mr Mitchell shouts, and he’s not backing down. He’s coming on with a head of steam.

And then, dammit in retrospect this is one of the greatest memories of my childhood, Mr Mitchell runs at the big bogan and launches himself, kung fu style, into the most ridiculous looking martial arts assault I’ve ever seen. Like Eric Cantona going that Crystal Palace fan in 1995.

He somehow executes the kick and still lands on his feet. The bogan, more stunned than hurt, takes the kick fair in the guts and recoils.

‘Fuck off, mate!’ He yells.

‘Come on, big man, take me on!’ Mr Mitchell is in the zone now. He’s not yelling, he’s not screaming. He’s calm and he’s still got that sly grin on his face. He’s bouncing around on his haunches, he’s shaping up like a short, balding, beer-bellied boxer. He’s Homer Simpson before Homer Simpson was invented. This man does not give a fuck, and it shows. That makes it even more unnerving.

And it works! The bogans don’t know how to respond to this bizarre assailant. They start to back away. They’re still pointing and threatening though, trying to save face.

‘You’re fucken dead, mate!’

‘We’ll fucken get you, mate!’

They bravely yell as they scurry away.

The Mitchell brothers look on. I look on and all I can think is, ‘I am fucking dead when I get to high school.’

Mr Mitchell puts his arm around me and leads me back to the car. I am shaken but not stirred. I came out of it with swollen cheeks and bruised ribs, but I healed up quick.

Borass never bothered me after that. I only had to endure nine months of high school in Kwinana, which was horrible and violent. Then we moved to the Belmont area and I never saw the prick again. Belmont was still working class but upper working class. People had a bit more money. I still remember my first day at the old Kewdale High when three weedy kids tried to bully me with sarcasm. Yes, sarcasm, words. I literally laughed at them and said, ‘That’s it? That’s all ya got? Cos I’ll take all the sarcasm in the world. Beats a punch in the face or a dead leg any day.’ Those kids were alright after that.

I wonder what happened to Mr Mitchell. I never really got to say thanks, buddy. He taught us a valuable lesson in standing up to bullies. Always go for the biggest one first.

 

 

 

When I was a small boy, an English migrant living in a West Australian town full of ten pound Poms, my father and I had an annual ritual where I was allowed to stay up late on a Saturday night each May to watch the FA Cup Final. It was a kind of bonding for us, and it inculcated in me a love of the Cup as a kind of magical festival, an event where strange things could happen and the odds could be upset, for one night only on the hallowed turf of Wembley Stadium.

Dad supplemented the magic by buying me a book for my birthday one day in the early seventies called, ‘100 Years of the FA Cup’. I remember the title because I still have the book, autographed by dad. I never read it when I was a kid, I just marvelled at the action pictures. I did read the whole book much later as an adult, but the pages that really caught my eye was the two page spread toward the back listing all of those first 100 finals, the winners, losers and the scores.

It was this, in conjunction with the annual ritual of final watching, unbroken since 1972, which led to me developing my only idiot savant skill. I can recall who played in nearly every FA Cup Final and the result. I have used this talent to mesmerise various workmates over the years. They sit, there, finger on the Internet to check if I’m making it up, only to be amazed.

When I told dad of my idiot savant ability, he said I was at least half right.

Don’t even bother asking me about any of the finals since 1960. Please you insult my intelligence. I can reel them off easily. Although, I must admit. The finals after 2000 do get a bit hazy, as far too many of them were contested by the new Premier League corporations. Too many dreary Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal victories for my liking.

Similarly, those finals buried in the mists of time before I was even born, do tend to get a bit blurry.

So go ahead, try me. I’ll reel a few off, and assure you I am doing this purely from memory.

1933 Everton beat Man City 3-0. It was the first final where both sides wore numbered shirts as an experiment. One side had 1 to 11, the other 12 to 22. Bo subs in those days.

1934 Man City came back and beat Portsmouth 2-1. Young Frank swift in goal for City was so tense in the last few minutes that he fainted as the final whistle blew. He later died in the Munich air disaster of 1958 as a travelling journalist.

1958 – the shattered Busby babes fought back to reach the Cup Final, but were beaten 2-0 by Bolton. Nat Lofthouse shoulder charged the Utd keeper into the net, back when you were allowed to do that.

1900 and 1903… I think. Nobodies Bury won their only two FA Cups by the incredible scores of 6-0 and 4-0, over Derby County and Southampton respectively. Bury have been a nothing side all my life, but at the turn of the twentieth century, during the industrial revolution, that town was booming with weaving machinery in its dark Satanic mills. Long gone now.

1923 – the first final at the newly built Wembley Empire stadium. 200,000 crashed the gates to see Bolton beat West Ham 2-0. Bolton must have cheated.

1949 – Arsenal beat Liverpool 2-0. Arsenal wore yellow shirts I think, looking at the old black and white photos. (Fact check. I peaked. It was actually 1950 of course. Wolves beat Leicester in 1949).

1872 – the first ever cup final, property of the old boys of the public school where the game was created. Wanderers beat Old Etonians 1-0. (Second fact check, it was actually the Royal Engineers they beat). The first of the Wanderers 5 early cup final wins. The Wanderers never lost a final.

1967 – Spurs 2 Chelsea 1 in the first ever Cockney Cup Final.

1970 Chelsea 2 Leeds 1 in the mud after a 2-2 draw. The flash Cockneys and the despised northerners, dirty Leeds. They hated each other with a passion. Eddie McCreadie tried to decapitate Billy Bremner. Jackie Charlton punched one of the Chelsea players in the face behind the ref’s back.

1947 – Charlton 1 Burnley 0. The ball burst. It burst the year before too when Derby beat Charlton 4-1.

1975 – West Ham 2 Fulham 0

1964 – the Hammers beat 2^nd div Preston 3-2 in a thriller with a last minute winner.

1973 – one of the greatest games of my childhood, 2^nd div nobodies Sunderland upset the mighty Leeds 1-0. Jim Montgomery’s incredible double save.

1972 – Where it all began for dad and me. Leeds 1 Arsenal 0. Alan Clarke’s diving header.

And who could forget 1953, the Matthews final. Stanley Matthews finally won an FA Cup winners medal. Sir Stanley, already pushing 40, inspired his team, Blackpool, to come back from 3-1 down with about 15 minutes left to beat Bolton 4-3. That was what the cup was all about. Apparently it was magic. I wasn’t born to see it.

So there it is, my particular idiot savant skill. Completely useless and unprofitable of course. I couldn’t count cards or pick Lotto numbers or something useful. No, I do FA Cup Final scores. I can also do random Seinfeld quotes, which are about as useful.

 

 

Rinsing

 

Now to be fair this is more of a hobby than a full time job, although for some women it has become a career. It has nothing to do with washing clothes or dishes. I’m also not referring to a type of dance style currently popular in the youth culture, which apparently originated right here in Western Australia:

http://pilerats.com/written/light-easy/reserving-your-right-to-rinse/

That’s pretty cool, kids. It looks like a good aerobic workout. Hey, that kid did the worm. Scotty Too Hotty eat your heart out.

No, the rinsing I’m talking about refers to a more highbrow form of gold digging practiced by savvy women to solicit money and gifts out of sad, lonely, presumably middle aged and older wealthy men. It’s kind of like prostitution but without any tangible physical contact and no exchange of fluids.

It’s another type of commercial exchange made possible by the rise of social networking.

The only criteria for becoming a rinser is that you need to be:

A woman (though I’m hearing men do it too)

Young; and preferably

Hot.

So, like an athletic career, it only lasts as long as your youth and beauty.

The premise is that women post online clips of themselves and turn on their ‘charm’ to encourage men to buy them gifts or send them money. It’s like having an online sugar daddy (or daddies) that you don’t ever have to meet. It doesn’t even involve anything pornographic. In fact in most cases, the men don’t get anything in return, not even a thank you. Makes you wonder what’s in it for them, what sort of gratification do they receive?

The best rinsers will pose alongside a luxury item they desire or simply post a wish list of things they want – shoes, designer clothes, cars, purses, handbags, jewellery, perfume, it’s all up for grabs.

http://rinsing.org.uk/

Be sure to follow all the drop down menus. It’s pretty amazing, the gall of some people. But that’s how the world works. If people are prepared to be exploited, someone will come along and exploit them.

This obviously raises a host of moral issues. Are the rinsers justified in taking advantage of an opening in the market? Should we applaud them for their entrepreneurial enterprise? Should we applaud people for such morally ambiguous and shallow behaviour? Should we be happy to see people exploiting their looks for profit? Is this another example of the general sense of entitlement of the reality TV generation? Is this yet another symptom of the inevitable decline of Western civilisation? Should Rupert Murdoch be charged with crimes against humanity… oops, that one just slipped out. It’s part of my personal subliminal advertising. Impeach Donald trump… dang, slipped out again.

As for the men, wow. I understand it from the financial humiliation and dominatrix perspective. I get the humiliation fetish. But Jesus Christ blokes. What happened to the good old days of kerb crawling and copping a cheap blowy in the back of your car off a street hooker? Ah but therein lies the rub (or the absence of a rub in the case of rinsing), perhaps this is empowering for women. This is a safe environment for women to enrich themselves and humiliate consensual men, so maybe, in some bizarre way, this is a giant leap forward for feminism.

Rinsers, I salute you.