My brother and I went out last night.
Today I
feel like a well-trodden area of grimy dirt speckled with dead flies, some bird
shit and a few scraggly weeds. It’s just moist enough to be squelchy and clings
desperately to anyone who passes through it. Nothing will grow there. It is
utterly barren.
We started
with a bottle of wine at home. We then went to Kong (a new, and excellent,
Korean BBQ joint in Richmond). We had to wait for a table, so pottered down to
the Prince Alfred for a couple of ales served by surly bar staff with flaccidic[1]
dispositions. We received a call from Kong informing us of our table’s
availability. We ordered a litre of the house wine. We ate and drank with overly
enthusiastic gusto. We left Kong. We were both a little drunk. We wandered down
Chapel St to the Sweetwater Inn behind the Jam Factory. We drank five dollar
tinnies of Melbourne Bitter. We watched a snowboarding video.
…
I don’t
really recall much more of what happened. I do remember feeling like I stood
out at the Inn due to my lack of hat and beard, along with the aesthetic anomaly
of my boisterous blondeness and neatly cultivated neck/chin fluff. I vaguely
recall talking to various hospitality people my brother knew about waiting
work, slurring credentials that probably went: ‘Mate, I’d love to work there. I
know Russian.’ Or: ‘Buddy, you’ve never seen a man with hips as snake-like as
mine. I weave through tables like a granny knitting a particularly egregious
scarf. I also know Russian.’
I also know
we caught a cab home. But I only ‘know’ in the sense that I woke up this
morning in my bed with my pants only half-way off, a receipt from the trip dangling
out of one of the pockets. For all I remember, without the evidence of the
receipt, we could’ve saddled some salamanders (that’s not innuendo for a
particular type of person by the way, I actually mean overgrown lizards) and
ridden them home, gleefully whooping at the fun of it all.
I took the receipt because when I
reach a certain level of intoxication I completely lose all faith in cabbies as
honest human beings, levelling them with distrustful, hate-filled stares of
blonde malice, accompanied by muttered unpleasantries and curses (as in Gypsy
curses where I don’t just curse the driver, but also his entire familial
lineage). I always demand (not ask, demand) receipts in case they decide
to add a little something more to the fare, examining them through the narrow
slits of my drunk, angry eyes before disembarking.
Anyway, to
speak in general and understated terms, my brother and I were not in
particularly high spirits upon waking. Our rooms had the pungent odour of
alcohol, our eyes were bloodshot and leery, and the best we could say to each
other was, ‘I have a headache,’ dosed with a liberal use of the word, 'fuck.' Reckless pantlessness (my brother was also
vesting hard with no shirt) was the order of a large chunk of the morning as we
took to that hopeless, dazed, zombie-ish wandering around the house that is the
affliction of any hungover person trying to make sense of the cruel world.
We decided
to go and get breakfast. Over the course of the drive we heard Steve Winwood’s ‘Call
On Me’ and Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown.’ Neither of these songs were at all
reflective of our state, it was just a neat run of songs. We tried to crank the
radio in the Party Mirage, cracking the windows so Chapel St could enjoy their
majesty with us, but it pathetically begins to crackle over ’20.’ Still, the Party
Mirage presides.
For maybe an eight minute drive,
the conversation got surprisingly weird really quickly:
·
We discussed hybrid dogs
that have been bred from poodles and other hounds. Our favourite was the
spoodle (part cocker spaniel, part toy poodle). This quickly degenerated into
using the term as pure euphemism. As in: ‘Dude, I’d give her the spoodle.’
·
Spoodling, as we came to affectionately
call it, continued into a conversation about ‘docking’ or, more amusingly, ‘aardvarking.’
From UrbanDictionary: When two men touch their penises together tip to tip
and one man rolls the foreskin of his penis over the penis of the other man. It
is necessary that one man is uncircumcised. We wondered at how this ever
came about and, indeed, how one would proposition another man to a bit of the
old ‘aardvarking.’
·
‘Aardvarking’ reminded us
of the children’s cartoon Arthur. The titular character, an aardvark,
looks nothing like an aardvark (see below) and presumably behaves nothing like
an aardvark. Of course, I am only assuming that aardvarks don’t wear lame
sweaters and learn lessons of basic morality/growing up on a daily basis. ‘Aardvarking’
became ‘Arthuring.’
·
Some flannelette shirts in
a store distracted us from the peculiarities of ‘Arthuring’ and aardvarks with
rabbit best friends (I know, what the fuck?), and we robustly discussed that
weird trend of not actually wearing the shirt, but using it as a belt. Like inverse grunging. Flannelette is a shit belt was the gist of it.
·
We arrived at the café.
So, all this aside, I still feel really quite
terrible. My eyes are trying to gnaw their way through vision, I keep breaking out into awkward sweats, and my stomach has expressed continually to me its displeasure.
Please let know if you’re open to gently swaddling me in a blanket and
holding me. You can whisper sweet soothing words of nothing into my ear and feed me bacon. We can watch episodes of Arthur together.
Think of me as the puppy. Look how much it needs your affection and soft touch. Look at how fun it is. I can be this fun. After the right amount of bacon.
[1] ‘flaccidic’
– a floppy, cranky acceptance of being in a mental state akin to erectile flaccidity
– example: ‘he appears full of hopeless scorn and anger, what a flaccidic
gentleman’
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