Over my thankless, fruitless and largely unnoticed career as a decidedly unprofessional writer, I have come to one salient realisation.
People do not want to read about Middle Eastern politics. People do not want to read about the latest indie/electro/nu-wave pack of pretentious twats crashing instruments together. People certainly do not want to read about how to make a quilt, unless you actually want to make a quilt, and then I say good luck to you.
No, what people absolutely fucking love to read about is you.
And I mean this in the least narcissistic, self obsessed way possible (putting aside that in truth we really all are quite self obsessed, except for those outstanding people who actually do things for the world).
They want to peruse the woes of your life. They want to chuckle over what a fool you made of yourself when you decided that yes, jump suits are back in fashion. In short, the general public wants to know how crap your life really is, so they can feel better about being 52 and still living with their Mum and secretly loving Home and Away re runs from the eighties.
And the shitter the better. Got dumped by your boyfriend of five years after he announced he was gay and was going to live with his new lover Fabio, and could you please be his "best woman" at their civil union? Literary gold. Found out the only cure to your rare and disgusting toe fungus is to slather raw fish guts your feet every morning, making you both socially undesirable and suicidally depressed? You're the next Bryce Courtenay.
Unfortunately I can't share all the sordid details of my life with you. Number one, this could possibly lead to arrest and a long period of incarceration (I would most certainly be made the "bitch" in prison). Number two, some things are just far too embarrassing and graphic to tell another human soul and I would have very few real friends left.
I have had many mundane moments that mark my existence, but last night was not one of them.
With every ounce of my being, I wish it had been.
I journeyed to a popular "nightspot" in the cesspool of depravity and moral decay that is Sydney's Kings Cross. Defying the age old maxim that joy can not be found at the bottom of a shot glass, I became every mother's worst nightmare and more. A period of blackness ensued before I noticed that one of the straps on my beloved "stripper heels" had broken, making me the laughing stock of many a bleached blonde bitch on the dancefloor. I swerved out of the club and onto Bayswater road, which is infested with unsavory human beings at the best of times, but on a Saturday night resembles a lunatic asylum filled with stilettos and cigarette butts.
I found refuge in an alley and warbled my sorrows into the night, before being approached and then chased by a suspicious looking male. Me being me, I soon forgot why I was running away from the stranger and found myself talking amicably with him while I attempted to climb a children's slide. He told me that he was a member of the Bandidos and that tragically his mother had died the week before. I had no appropriate response to this except to vomit a short time after. He somehow placed me in a cab and gave the driver fifty dollars to take me home. Unfortunately I was still conscious enough to write what is now an extremely embarrassing four page treatise on love, money and the finer things in life to my completely gobsmacked sister, and by that time found it was almost eight in the morning.
I then took off my now stained and disgusting dress and found that yes, my "lady time" had decided to pay a visit at some stage during the night.
Thankfully no injuries this time, but as always, a healthy dose of humiliation.
Sometimes all you can do is laugh. And I don't mean in that "ha-ha-such-is-life!" way I mean in that "spine-chilling-cackle-of-insanity-brought-on-by-some-severe-trauma" way.
So I hope this has made you, the reader, feel slightly better about whatever shit time you may be going through at the moment, even if only fleetingly. Alternatively, you could be cursing the unfair degree of wealthiness that allows me to throw money away frequently on wasteful alcoholic binges while billions of babies starve in their mother's arms on the other side of the world.
To you I say, get fucked.
People do not want to read about Middle Eastern politics. People do not want to read about the latest indie/electro/nu-wave pack of pretentious twats crashing instruments together. People certainly do not want to read about how to make a quilt, unless you actually want to make a quilt, and then I say good luck to you.
No, what people absolutely fucking love to read about is you.
And I mean this in the least narcissistic, self obsessed way possible (putting aside that in truth we really all are quite self obsessed, except for those outstanding people who actually do things for the world).
They want to peruse the woes of your life. They want to chuckle over what a fool you made of yourself when you decided that yes, jump suits are back in fashion. In short, the general public wants to know how crap your life really is, so they can feel better about being 52 and still living with their Mum and secretly loving Home and Away re runs from the eighties.
And the shitter the better. Got dumped by your boyfriend of five years after he announced he was gay and was going to live with his new lover Fabio, and could you please be his "best woman" at their civil union? Literary gold. Found out the only cure to your rare and disgusting toe fungus is to slather raw fish guts your feet every morning, making you both socially undesirable and suicidally depressed? You're the next Bryce Courtenay.
Unfortunately I can't share all the sordid details of my life with you. Number one, this could possibly lead to arrest and a long period of incarceration (I would most certainly be made the "bitch" in prison). Number two, some things are just far too embarrassing and graphic to tell another human soul and I would have very few real friends left.
I have had many mundane moments that mark my existence, but last night was not one of them.
With every ounce of my being, I wish it had been.
I journeyed to a popular "nightspot" in the cesspool of depravity and moral decay that is Sydney's Kings Cross. Defying the age old maxim that joy can not be found at the bottom of a shot glass, I became every mother's worst nightmare and more. A period of blackness ensued before I noticed that one of the straps on my beloved "stripper heels" had broken, making me the laughing stock of many a bleached blonde bitch on the dancefloor. I swerved out of the club and onto Bayswater road, which is infested with unsavory human beings at the best of times, but on a Saturday night resembles a lunatic asylum filled with stilettos and cigarette butts.
I found refuge in an alley and warbled my sorrows into the night, before being approached and then chased by a suspicious looking male. Me being me, I soon forgot why I was running away from the stranger and found myself talking amicably with him while I attempted to climb a children's slide. He told me that he was a member of the Bandidos and that tragically his mother had died the week before. I had no appropriate response to this except to vomit a short time after. He somehow placed me in a cab and gave the driver fifty dollars to take me home. Unfortunately I was still conscious enough to write what is now an extremely embarrassing four page treatise on love, money and the finer things in life to my completely gobsmacked sister, and by that time found it was almost eight in the morning.
I then took off my now stained and disgusting dress and found that yes, my "lady time" had decided to pay a visit at some stage during the night.
Thankfully no injuries this time, but as always, a healthy dose of humiliation.
Sometimes all you can do is laugh. And I don't mean in that "ha-ha-such-is-life!" way I mean in that "spine-chilling-cackle-of-insanity-brought-on-by-some-severe-trauma" way.
So I hope this has made you, the reader, feel slightly better about whatever shit time you may be going through at the moment, even if only fleetingly. Alternatively, you could be cursing the unfair degree of wealthiness that allows me to throw money away frequently on wasteful alcoholic binges while billions of babies starve in their mother's arms on the other side of the world.
To you I say, get fucked.
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