Hello my name is Gay. You may have met me, sometimes people call me Lesbian or Homosexual. I don't much like these words but somehow they have come to be stitched in my forehead. Sometimes a badge of pride, sometimes burning like a pink triangle. I have been laughed at, glared at; stared at and snarled at. I've been told to go away and have been the point of countless jokes, to which I laugh along. Bear in mind this is the liberal age, a time of Acceptance of Diversity, a time of Lies. Bear in mind I am much like you. I feel the exhilarating rush of love inside me and swell with hopes and dreams. You could very well have been me, if it wasn't for this or that, or something else. I have stood in a shopping centre, absent-mindedly hugging my girlfriend, pondering what to have for lunch, vaguely aware of the buzz of shoppers around me when a stranger stampedes into my vision. "Thats disgusting," she spits. "you shouldnt do that in front of childrenM You should keep that shit in the confines of your own home." I stuttered, I grumbled, I gaped, I fumed while her venom burnt its way through my world and I tried, oh how I tried to hold onto myself, to formulate that crushing retort. Her disgust ran over me in tidal waves until tears began to bubble down my face. Like a child that had been snapped at, I crumbled. In an instant we were reduced to nothing more than the shit on her shoes. Angered that her words could upset us so easily, we try to stand there defiant. But she had stepped inside our nice day and shattered it with a jack hammer. The urge to leave grew until we shrunk away, just like she wanted, back into those confines. All the while wishing that we had it in us to tell her just where she could shove her words, to say something that would begin to make up for the kids who have killed themselves becaUse the teasing got to much and the people who have been heckled and bashed. But nothing but disbelief showed on my face, which shows just how naive i have become. Bear in mind this is a liberal age of hate and intolerance. Hello my name is Gay. next time you meet me, please think what it might feel like to be abused and humiliated. Oh and also, you see things better when you open your mind.

On these city streets

Today as I stood at work, mind numbingly bored and watching the hour hand crawl past unhurried and completely at ease with itself, a group of 30 loud people dressed in golfing attire and wielding kids golf clubs hurried past, all walking backwards. You know, as you do.


I like working in the city, this small city that dreams of big-city-status. People do crazy things, or perhaps this is just where those crazy people hang. A bright orange monk wanders through my store while a man desperately hugging a well-worn teddy bear the store folds and unfolds his newspaper in his free arm, hmms and harrs nervously and then dashes outside. A domestic disagreement explodes into a hair pulling, scratching tussle on the pavement, the woman dashes into the store, her face dripping from where he had spat on her. She cowers for a time in the back corner until he, substantially calmer, returns, takes her hand and leads her away whispering sweet I’m-so-sorrys. She appears to have whole heartily forgiven him, which is certainly far beyond my understanding.

One spring Saturday morning I sat idly by as the Hare Krishna’s shuffled up the street singing gods praises, the Coffin Cheaters roared back down it, a sudden swarm of skull masks on vicious, ear-splitting engines that were followed closely by their flashy police escort, and a man dressed as Winnie the Pooh wandered obscurely by. A trifector of the not-so-ordinary. Rush forward in time, to any given, otherwise wholly unremarkable day in November. A man runs in, hand to his forehead trying to stem the steady flow of blood. He is followed closely by his assailant, a wild-eyed, screeching woman who comes flinging a hefty chain of swear words and curses and making wild lunges in his direction. They crash together right in front of me and she leaps at him. “OI!” I yell. There is a sudden silence, a moment unfolds as they stop, bewildered, staring at me like naughty schoolchildren. Then the chase goes on, out of the store and howling up the street. Lord knows what that man did, but that woman was going to tear him limb from limb.

Early late autumn, on a billboard at the end of the street a man stands naked as the day he was born and wielding a gun. This I don’t see, but I note the pack of casual afternoon shoppers gathering open-mouthed and excited as the black armoured vehicle and its officers negotiate with the man. (Who it turns out was a refugee with Post Traumatic Stress, though this fact was readily forgotten. Also it wasn’t a real gun, another fact easily forgotten.)

There are the oddballs who return with a regularity to rival clock work. The sweet and gently described as “not-all-there” customers who I find myself tiptoeing around polite conversation with, otherwise I will literally be there all day explaining how much that key rings costs. Which makes me feel some ridiculously bad kind of terrible because they are just being friendly in their delightfully off-colour and time consuming little way. There are others though who I, in my professional opinion, have decided are quite literally insane. For example there is one regular city feature who charges around the city waving the Australian flag, singing Waltzing Matilda and generally being the Patriot. She assumes, since I sell flags, I must innately understand this seething patriotism and dislike of muslims (which I don’t.)

Meanwhile, outside of my store, in the shopping malls and side streets there are kids that sit hunched in doorways behind signs that beg small change for food. There weren’t so many young homeless people that lived so glaringly obvious to the eye on these city streets until recently when they seemed to have materialised out of the pavement. I wonder if they are among the squatters that have taken up residence under the bridge with improvised tables and bits and bobs that seem to proclaim – open your eyes, we are right here. I wonder when the authorities will decide enough is enough and shuffle them onwards, away-wards.

But I’ve been carried away on a tangent here, swept away by the faces in the city, the cities celebrities and passing peculiarities. The humdrum of your average day mixes gleefully with the casual eccentricities and quirks of a few. But for most of the day humanity just repeats itself endlessly before my eyes like a broken record. That sunburnt, balding and unathletic looking English guy looks vaguely familiar but I struggle to place him. Perhaps, I decide, its just that he looks like one hundred other pink, bald and sweaty English tourists. People make the same statements, trip over the same step, buy the same things, crack the same flat jokes. Sometimes the intense repetition amuses me – other times it depresses me unimaginably. My eyes glaze over with boredom, until something extraordinary shocks them open and brings my mind to life again.

Groan.

I awake to the sinking feeling that I have died and gone to hell. The first coherent thought I have sails in on a sudden sea of self-hatred – Why, oh why did I drink so much. Drink till the world disappears in a whirlwind of smiles and terrible jerking dance moves, wake to a glaringly empty wallet and a white shirt oddly stained and reeking of the smoke and ashes of the nights debauchery. A concoction of blank spots and hazy memories move in bright and early with Mr Headache, who doesn’t even deserve the name headache. My Greymatter has been so thoroughly marinated in a liquid errenously labelled drinkable it doesn’t just ache it throbs. All my energies become hastily engaged in not giving in to the impulse to curl up in a ball and die. Any remaining energy is tied up in the back of my neck and the arch of my throat, weary from the hefty reverse flow of the nights deluge. Alcohol seems to drip from my skin, pouring from every single cell. It turns the mouth into a dry, desolate dust pan and leaves my liver quivering as they work overtime to expel the sludge. I stare morosely into the toilet bowl, utterly disturbed by the way its waters swish and swash, further reducing me to a sweaty mass incapacitated on the bathroom floor. I venture outdoors to that place not so fondly known as Work and I beg with the world, won’t someone please turn the lights down? Surely we don’t need all that radiant, retina burning light that surges and dances in my eyes so quick its nauseatingly painful. My body craves proper food, but everything I try to force down makes a speedy reappearance, as if my body is saying “Fuck off, we are too busy dealing with the trash you dumped here last night.” And a single thought plagues me – why, oh why did I drink so goddamn-much. Oh the reckless abandon that alcohol provides was fun, but as logic would have it the higher you soar, the further you fall – and my oh my doesn’t the break of a new day have a sickly scent to it.


I could sum it up in one word – Groan.

(Written from deep within the murky depths of one of the most spectacularly Epic hangovers in my short and unacclaimed drinking career in hope that I may one day learn from my mistakes.)

Annual Stocktake

I spent the end of 2010 cleaning out my cupboard. Mainly because an army of ants has recently taken up residence in there and have been steadily ruining my biscuit supply over the past few weeks. But also in pursuit of the freedom of movement that comes with having fewer possessions, to live according to that maxim that ‘man is rich according to the things that he can do without’, as Henry David Thoreau said. (Though he did also say he’d rather live alone in a swamp than in society.)

It’s amazing what you find in the depths of a closet. Skeletons and festering secrets aside, five years worth of uni course readers took up a large chunk of the space in mine. I held onto them because ‘I might need them one day’. Like one day if I wanted to have a bonfire in the backyard or build a fleet of fighter jet-engine paperplanes. I discovered things that I simply forgot I had, like for example a paper recycling kit given to me by Santa Claus well over a decade ago. I never threw it out because I’ve always intended to use it. I’ve just never actually got around to it because setting aside time to ‘make paper’ is never something that seems very pressing. In another corner I discovered a pile of things my rat has collected and stored in the depths of a pile of bags, such as the missing piece from my 3D naughts and crosses game and the strap off my brand new, expensive backpack that she has destroyed. A ‘Learn French’ kit and a hideous paperweight from the War Memorial in Hertford, England were also making themselves comfy in the back of the cupboard with a whole family of other things which I am not sure I ever knew I owned.

Sorting through my junk was, as always, a good way to take stock on the year just gone by. In short, 2010 has been great. In long, it’s been really fucking great. This year I felt like I existed. This year I feel like I accomplished a few things, like learning to cook a decent meal. (I do still have issues with frying eggs. And boiling them. In fact, eggs in general – what’s with them?!) I planted a tiny garden that has grown into a not so tiny garden. I finished uni (although I’ll find myself back their again this way) and I found someone special, someone almost more precious than air itself. Which is perhaps not an accomplishment but a rare piece of luck, an extraordinary find.

Hence, a million metaphorical miles and 366 days later, sitting cross legged before a pile of junk from years-gone-by I feel like a new person who inhabits an entirely different universe. So in 2011 I would like to commit myself to actually using that paper recycling kit but otherwise I hope things stay much the same as they are. Except my sunflower seedlings, may they grow big and smiley.

All the best to you and yours for the new year.