Rhetoric Kills

Speed doesn’t kill, that’s just another convenient excuse that’s been jammed down drivers throats for so long that it is now being trumpeted to the exclusion of all else. I’m sure it’s easier to fit on a billboard/coffee mug/key-ring/commemorative butt plug/whatever than “driving like a dick, not paying attention, not understanding the road rules and then passing all these habits on to your children which for some reason you are allowed to teach to drive... kills”. The unbelievable single-target focus of so many road safety campaigns has resulted in the greater public only being aware of one single variable in traffic accidents. Speed.

On a recent trip back home from overseas I realised exactly how bad things are. People have absorbed the message “drop 5, save lives” like it had been chemically introduced into the water supply. I feel like this might be a once off type thing and this is the only message the government has ever been able to pound into people brains. What a waste! If I was going to get the population of a city to absorb only one message I could think of hundreds that would have been more useful. Think about it, you could have had the whole population thinking;

n   Stop being self-centred for the next 5 minutes.

n   Watching The Biggest Loser does not count as exercise, put down the chips and step away from the couch.

n   Buy beers for everyone in the bar.

n   Stop playing the pokies, you’re not going to get rich, spend that money on soap instead. Please.

n   Tits out for the boys.

n   Does anyone REALLY give a crap about this facebook status?

But no, instead people now think “drive slower than speed limit, be superhero”. It was great to see people driving along in a 100kph zone doing 80kph chatting away to the person next to them. That’s great, well done, please stop drifting into my lane... screw this, have some HOOOOOORRN (I wish i had a bigger horn, the kind that destroys eardrums). And then they look surprised!

“How dare you blow your horn at me sir! I’m a safe driver! I drive well below the speed limit, usually in the right-hand lane because it’s my right as a road user!”. This right here is how people end up in shallow graves. They harp on about their Rights and ignore their Responsibilities, like paying attention while driving (to the road, not the phone/kids/GPS in the middle of their windscreen).

Who the hell decided that driving 5kph slower was a good idea anyway? Aren’t speed limits designed to be the safe speed at which to travel on any given road? If that speed limit was 5kph too fast, wouldn’t that be changed? Aside from the blanket 10kph speed reduction on all roads across the state a few years ago, which has been largely regarded as an easy way to increase the number of people getting caught for minor speeding offences, what has improved?

Certainly not the quality of driver training. The current requirement to take an L-plater for an educational spin is having a full drivers licence for 4 years. That’s it. 4 years of not indicating, failing to give way, talking on your phone and having no concept of how a round-a-bout works. That gives you the experience necessary to pass on all these horrible traits to a new driver. You can’t avoid it, even if you have lessons with a professional driving instructor you still have to complete your P-plate log book by spending hours listening to Johnny-No-Brakes telling you that you don’t _really_ need to indicate there, or you can just get away with mounting the curb there. Nothing like having to spend hour after hour in a confined space with someone supervising you to help reinforce their bad habits. Good work to whichever bloody genius had that stroke of logic:

(Read in a posh British accent, just because) “We have a bunch of crap drivers on the road, we should make new drivers practice for longer under the supervision of experienced drivers. That will solve this problem!”

It was a good idea right up until it turned out the people who are currently crap drivers are the ones training the future of crap driving.

So next time you’re driving home plastered at 3am with your headlights off and trying to text a booty call, remember that to be a safe driver all you have to do is slow down from 50kph to 45kph on those suburban roads... verge, footpath... whatever. Mind that letterbox.

-Worst Guy Ever

If I Keep Drinking They Might Shut Up

I should be dead right now. It’s true, various cancer council groups, family-friendly researchers and a whole gaggle of finger-pointing fun-haters are all baffled by my seemingly unbelievable ability to form words at all. I should have developed a dozen kinds of cancer, heart disease, kidney failure, liver cirrhosis, brain damage and jaundice. By no small miracle I appear to be fine. Yup, still got a pulse, just checked it then. Liver? Currently straining a pint quite nicely.

Now you might be a little confused as to what kind of affliction could possibly mean I should be suffering from such a selection of near/rapidly nearing death experiences. Have I been snorkelling in the lovely glowing reefs downstream from Japan’s happy-go-lucky Fukushima nuclear power plant? Did I suddenly develop a terminal case of being 65 or older? Perhaps I’ve taken up a job testing suspicious substances found by the post office by snorting the lot of it with the force of a jet engine. No sadly, it’s nothing so glamorous or welfare-friendly.

I’ve been drinking. Alcohol in fact, all kinds of it; Beers, spirits, wine, and a wide variety of cider too. I’ve mixed energy drinks with alcohol, I’ve knocked back shooters, bombs, test-tubes, jelly shots, chazwuzzers and quite a few drinks that require you douse their flames before you drink them. I have engaged in “high risk” drinking activities (as described by someone’s mum as having more than 6 standard drinks in one night). I called that pre-drinks before heading out. Hell, some days that was just how I got ready to go to work! Various health groups would see these activities outlawed, some of them already are.

There’s a bit of truth behind the argument that “there wouldn’t be a law to stop people doing this if they didn’t want to do it”.

I’ll admit it, I have considered it a “good idea at the time” to start an evening/afternoon/morning off with a few pints of champagne, vodka and cider (um, yeah, all in the one glass). It went down a fizzy little treat and I have to say made an excellent basis for the black-out party that occurred for the rest of the night inside my head. By all accounts I was charming, well-mannered and a great dancer. I felt like death the next day but I’m fairly certain I hadn’t been murdered or died of alcohol poisoning, much to the shock and disbelief of certain parts of the media.

I have injuries from drinking, many through stupidity, and some from a big Maori who didn’t like me judging by the scars. That’s right, I’m part of the statistics, I wouldn’t say I got into a fight out drinking. That would be inaccurate. I’d say I got the crap kicked out of me while I was drunk. I’m not upset, I got into more fights in school than in bars yet I don’t see a government push to ban fifteen year-olds. Drinking injuries are the same as bike riding/skateboarding/chair-racing or sexing injuries. You learn from them and improve over time. Failure leads to learning, you can’t have one without the other.

So why are we stopping them? Why is it becoming illegal for bars to sell people shots, or bombs, or giant cocktails served in a fishbowl? I’ll answer this in two parts:

Part one: Because people want to drink. They want to drink shots, or large crazy cocktails. Why? because it might be fun, it might be new and it might get them drunk. And, like peeing on powerlines, this might come as a bit of a shock, but young people like to get drunk.

Part two: Because there are a bunch of people from generation who popularised LSD, Weed, Acid, magic mushrooms, drink driving, and conscription that feel the need to tell us that we drink too much alcohol. You think? Well everything else is illegal now so that’s all we have left! Excessive drinking and partying might not be the best option, but it’s all that we’ve got these days.

The point is that despite all the government warnings in the world people are still going to drink and still going to survive. I spent a few years where I was more often drunk than not, I called it university, it was awesome and somehow despite all this recent tests showed that my liver, kidneys, and heart are all in perfect health. That’s right, it turns out your body can take a fair bit of punishment if you work hard and train it to handle a bath-tub of vodka per night despite what a bunch of whinging health groups would have you believe.

So I’ll keep drinking as much as I like and knocking back cocktails, shooters and buckets of gin at any hour of the day or night like I’m the Queen Mother. If we’re lucky the nanny-state health groups might become so enraged they fatally choke on their cous cous and bile while we enjoy the spectacle from the beer garden of our warm, fuzzy contentedness.

Because we live in a liberal society, not a kindergarten, and we should be able to do what we damn well want.

-Worst Guy Ever