Holiday From Responsibility

This is the tale of an idea. They say an idea can change the world. Apparently ‘they’ didn’t mention that the idea had to be on a Boeing 757 as it smacked into one of a matching pair of sky scrapers (it’s been 10 years, we can joke about this now). This idea hasn’t changed the world yet, but I think it could. This is the story of the greatest holiday known to man.

I awoke one bright summer morning at the crack of 11am. Having once again failed in my goal of “get up in time for Maccas breakfast” I decided to find out where I was. As it turns out I was at a friend’s house and it was the gentle screaming of his clapped out lawnmower that had interrupted my slumber. So I shortly found myself with coffee in hand providing supervision to my friend as he had a fair old crack at shoving a rusted, asthmatic lawnmower through grass so feral it probably received Centrelink payments.

After a few minutes of “you missed a spot” and getting branches thrown at me I came to realise I was missing something. There was something unmistakably wrong with my day. It was like dancing with Heather Mills, something wasn’t quite right.

I wanted a drink.

There was a need deep in my soul that could be quenched with bugger all but a nice, cold, rum and coke. I knew I wanted it, but I also knew I had to be a productive human being at some point during the day. I had only just gotten out of bed and a whole day full of crap I didn’t want to do ahead of me. That and being a uni student, I was pretty damn broke. I had enough money left in my bank to put a little fuel in my car or buy some food for the week ahead (not both). I had study I should be doing, money I should be saving, and no doubt a whole bunch of other things I really should have given a crap about.

But no. Something inside me climbed a metaphorical mountain and declared to the world “No! I will not!” in what was no doubt a heroic pose and a bold statement of defiance. The fact this statement was immediately follow by “Fuck it, I’m getting drunk!” probably tarnishes that a little, but I stand by my alcoholic convictions, and that’s exactly what I did. I marched right inside, found myself a bottle of rum, some ice, the biggest glass I could find (note: may have been a vase, this may also explain why I keep finding floral arrangements in my drinking cup...) and mixed myself one hell of a drink.

A few minutes later I was sitting in the back yard basking in the radiance of my excellent decision. Also the sun, but mostly my decision. I was suddenly feeling better, it was like my life had found something it was missing, and then poured it over ice and added a slice of lime. It is truly a wonderful feeling to know what you want in life, to go after it and achieve it. Especially before midday and with a minimum of effort.

My compadre gave up on the lawn and joined my in a glass of righteousness, soon realising the wisdom of my ways. A newfound look of respect appeared in his eyes when he realised what I had discovered. The Idea had come to me, I was merely a conduit for a greater power that had seen that tasks of men; the toil and labours, the drudgery and hard work. This power looked at the great tasks of men and spoke thusly:

“Eh, Fuck it.”

It was on this momentous day that I declared the first Holiday From Responsibility. I faced the world and decided that nothing I did today was going to be my fault. I was on holiday from having to take responsibility for my own actions, from study, from work, from commitments, hell, even from pants.

15 minutes later my car returned to my friend’s front lawn. Sideways. At speed. With me hanging out the window waving my beer.

That small amount of money in my bank account? Turns out it was just about enough for a carton. Fuel? not my problem. Food? not my problem. I was on holiday from having to be responsible for any of that junk. So my friend and pulled up a couch on the front porch and proceeded to ensure we were well and truly drunk by 2pm. We accomplished precisely stuff all that day, it felt pretty damn good. We called friends to see how there day at work was going and tell them about our idea, several bailed early to honour this new holiday (with a fresh carton). We invented new drinking games, we cheered on joggers and school kids passing the house, and we made the best possible use of a warm summer’s day in Australia; we got f**k-eyed.

A little later another friend of mine, let’s call her Chesty, came by to see what all the fuss was about. This quickly turned into her driving me on a snack run to the local shops. Chesty later described, with some horror, chasing me down the dairy aisle of a supermarket while I cackled madly and skulled a litre of chocolate milk shouting “If I yak this up later, it’s not my responsibility! And it’s going to be chunky as hell! AHAHAHAH”.

This was the first of many Holidays From Responsibility. Since that fateful day the call has gone forth many times. Call in sick to work, ditch the missus, stop what you’re doing and head to the liquor store because no-one wants anything to do with responsibility today. It’s time to feel good about doing nothing again.

That’s right, NOTHING is your responsibility, it’s your day off.

It’s your Holiday From Responsibility.

-Worst Guy Ever

An Idiot's Rug

I have a problem. It may sound like a common ailment. You may indeed have suffered from this at some point. The Australian Bureau of Statistics hasn’t put an exact figure on it but my sciencing suggests that 1 in 3 people will, at some point in their lives be the victim of an idiot (if you haven't and you can see two people nearby looking annoyed... bad news).

This may not come as a surprise to many of you. You’ve read those “Letters to the Editor” sections of the newspaper, you’ve listened to talk back radio, you’ve seen that some undeniably cruel bastard digging up the scarecrow-like corpse of Gretel Killeen and using it to summon the eldritch spirit of Big Brother for another horrifying season (where’s that bloody 2012 apocalypse when you need it). Idiots are all around us, they make life that little bit harder for us every day. The people who stop in the middle of a shopping centre and block the entire walkway to have a conversation. The taxi driver who has decided that “hazard lights” translates to “I’m about to do a something stupid, inconsiderate, annoying or all three at once lights". The bouncer who thinks you look like someone who got kicked out of the club a couple of weeks ago, by someone else, while he wasn’t working, but he heard the guy was wearing a white shirt, like the one you’re wearing now. Yeah, the peoplle you meet when you don't have a gun...

Sometimes this stupidity pays off and you get given back the change for a $50 when you gave the guy a $20 or bartender forgets to ring up a round of drinks. This doesn’t happen as often as I feel it should. Maybe we should start a national campaign to support idiots getting into jobs that benefit the people and keep them out of government jobs...

Then there’s the judgement calls; those times where you’re not sure if you’re winning or not. I’ve had one of those recently. Like a prematurely ejaculating birthday present, it came as a surprise. I have a fully carpeted kitchen now.

Yeah, that’s right. Plush red carpet from wall to wall all through my apartment, including the kitchen (luckily the bathroom was spared). I’m now stuck without a real idea of whether i should enjoy this or flat out hate it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad having a nice thick rug under foot when I’m cooking (ok microwaving, it still counts as food though) and while it’s new it remains nice. I’m looking at this like the US economy, or Julia Gillard though, I don’t see it lasting.

There’s a reason most kitchen aren’t carpeted. Kitchens are messy. That’s why you don’t see serial killers chopping up corpses in a bedroom or a lounge, too hard to get stains out. Serial killers know what they’re doing, that’s why they’re SERIAL killers, if they got caught after the first one they’d just be normal killers. A serial killer will go for a bathtub or a nice kitchen bench (proper granite, none of that Ikea crap) because it’s easier to clean up afterwards. I’m now denied this since I have a carpeted kitchen, on the bright side a whole bunch of people get to live a little bit longer... no connection... honest...

I didn’t ask for the carpet, it was just there one day (perils of living in a hotel, sometimes you come home and someone decorated). But honestly, I’m not too worried about cleaning it, that’s what housekeeping is for (perks of living in a hotel, I come home to a clean apartment every day).

So I’m not going to care too much about being a neat and tidy cook, and everything else can get sorted out between the rug and the maid.

Now to try some recipes that call for a lot of red wine and fire.

-Worst Guy Ever

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A Good Topic is Hard to Find

It’s not always easy to come up with something on the spot. It’s like when someone says “Hey, tell a joke” and you mind goes completely blank. You knew hundreds of jokes a moment ago, but now they’re all gone. The same thing probably happens to actors, musicians and anyone else who has found an outlet to express themselves. Sometimes there just isn’t a way to get everything out.

That’s where I am today. I’ve started three different posts in the last few days and just kind of trailed off. They were good ideas for posts too! I’m sure I’ll eventually get back to them and finish them off, but today it just isn’t happening.

I’m not sure if this is the cumulative result of a four-day weekend followed by some serious dental surgery (I was the patient, not the guy with the drill, luckily) and a couple of days of top quality pain meds or just good old fashioned writers block. The creative juices just aren’t flowing and the only way I’m going to fix that is by finding the literary (not literal) clitoris. It’s like I’m 13 years old again and just can’t find the bloody thing (I’m kidding, at 13 I was only just figuring out that an orgasm wasn’t a microscopic life form, though I’m sure my biology teacher had a good laugh at that essay...). The point is sometimes things don’t come out in a rush, you have to work at it for a while, let it settle, before coming back and going at it a bit harder... dammit I’m still thinking about clitoris’s. Is that the plural? Clitoriseses?  Clitorii? Clitorati? That just sounds like a very invasive paparazzi. Or a celebrity gynaecologist with a camera. Either way... ugh.

I had a point... Sometimes it’s hard to articulate a thought, this is made harder when the thought isn’t coherent to begin with. I had a friend writing a stand-up comedy sketch a while ago who was a bit short of material. I offered to help him out with some ideas and evaluate what he had so far. So, once we’d been at the pub for a few hours we were starting to get some pretty good stuff down on paper. Napkins and coasters really, but they’re still mostly paper.

I had the great suggestion to get on stage and talk about how hard it is to write a stand up comedy script. My reasoning was something like “You’re supposed to write what you know, yeah? So write that this is harder than we thought! Whose round is it?” Which seems reasonable, a lot of comedians talk about stuff they know. Women complain about their boyfriends, men complain about their wives, gay comedians complain about their handbags, Jerry Seinfield complains about being rich and still not funny. Why not complain about trying to write something funny?

You have to write a stand-up act tailored to an audience you don’t even know yet, this can go badly if you go too high-brow to a crowd full of gorillas that some cheerful bloody zookeeper thought it would be funny to put mullet-wigs on and then drop off at a local pub’s comedy night. This went badly in the case of this friend who once did a gig in front of a crowd of miners (people who mine, not under-agers) and didn’t get a single laugh from a few jokes about party drugs. He later found out that this was due to the fact the people who hand out random drug tests were sitting in the same room. You’ve never met a group of people who suddenly found they (quite deliberately) knew so little about illicit substances. It could have been snowing cocaine in that room and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in there that would admit to thinking it was anything but a very unusual bit of weather.

So you get on stage and talk about how hard it is to come up with material, and how times have been tough for comedians all over since Michael Jackson died and George W. Bush left politics. Talk about some of the stuff you wanted to say, talk about the stupid conversations you had coming up with new material, talk about the fight you got into at the bar when you tried out a new joke on the barmaid. How were you supposed to know she was Jewish?

If you can’t come up with something funny to talk about, talk about not being able to come up with anything, then write a blog post about it.

-Worst Guy Ever.