It was nearly midday on my day off and I had yet to do even one constructive thing. I tried to write but nothing would come. I read new age magazines for inspiration, and still nothing came. I even bought Coldplay's new single Viva la Vida from ITunes, and listened to it over and over, letting the images flow in my head so that I could form a story or my next chapter from that. And I have come to the conclusion that I
love
their new song, without reserve. It carries me away and fills me with a sense of nostalgia and longing, makes me want to run through grassy meadows and laugh and play and rough house.
But nothing came of it.
Ye gads.
The roses need pruning though. I love roses, even though for me, like most other people, roses inspire visions of old ladies who wear flowery nylon house dresses and large cane hats, and drink Earl Grey from rose covered tea cups on their patio in the afternoon, while they sat at their quaint little round wrought-iron chairs and tables that are only big enough for two - usually just them and their husbands, to whom they have been married to for forty years. Sometimes they sit alone, but, I'm sure that if I asked them, they'd say they had been married for decades before their partner - well - you know.
I'm probably getting a bit morbid here.
I try to distract my thoughts by letting my eyes settle on a rather mangy cosmetics catalogue that has been sitting out in the rain ever since it was left it on my outdoor table. I told the lady who delivers them that I don't want them, but she doesn't pay any attention. It's not that I don't like what she sells, I love it and I love the little catalogue too. I love the little samples and the book always smells so nice! It's just that if I smell it, I will end up with a migraine that usually takes days to get rid of and if I use the samples, my skin breaks out in a rash that looks more like a burn. Sometimes, when I feel like living on the edge, I rub my wrist on those little round fragrance things they have on the pages and I use the samples. It never ends well, so I won't go into it any further, other than to say that I'm allergic to just about everything, and not just the cosmetics catalogue.
I'm allergic to food colouring, preservatives, fragrances, aerosols; even the chemicals that natural foods produce, like salicylates in bananas and amines in chocolate for example, and I have to say - or ask - how ridiculous is that? Honestly, the only compensation for suffering PMS every month was being able to drown my sorrows in chocolate! And you know what they say about eating chocolate; one kilogram produces enough of the exact same endorphins in the brain that having an orgasm does.
That's it. Now I'm on a downer and it's not Coldplay's fault this time. It's the unwitting revelation that I am not privy to enjoy anything that will produce the spine tingling sensation in my spine that only chocolate or a man can give. Well, I can do it myself; I suppose, with necessity being the mother of invention and all that. I didn't invent the dildo sadly. It would be good if I did though. I would be so rich that there would definitely be a cure for food and chemical intolerance by now.
Oh great, now I feel selfish. I'm obviously not one of those magnanimous people who shave their heads to find a cure for cancer or something as equally devastating to people's lives as that. I kind of like my waist length light brown curls too. At least, I do once I wring the spirals out of them with the straightening tongs. Instead of wanting to alleviate the suffering of my fellow man, I'm fantasising about spending billions of dollars on research so that I won't be allergic to chocolate and men any more.
Woah! Le gasp!
Did I say that? I'm allergic to men?
Was that a Freudian slip? Or was that my subconscious latching on to what really ails me? Stranger things have happened, I suppose.
No, surely not.
A woman cannot be allergic to men! It's impossible. I mean, lots of people are allergic to preservatives and additives, but it's only now, forty years after they were introduced in the 1960s that the powers that be are starting to recognise it. Men, on the other hand, have been around since, well, since the ancestors of human kind first developed the ability to pinch their index fingers and their thumbs together.
Apparently, that's all that separated human kind from our ape-ish kin. That solitary, small motor movement that enabled us to develop and use tools, which in turn, allowed us to eat things that expanded our brains and gave the process of our evolution a stiff dose of speed, equivalent to that of a can of Red Bull with a Borroca vitamin dissolved in it. Which, by the way, I am allergic to as well.
So, human kind's ability to develop tools that expanded their brains resulted in the invention of the mighty dildo!
I hope I didn't say that out loud. Still, that thought tickles me. The difference between apes and men comes down to the fact that mankind worship dicks so much that some bright spark thought to make an effigy of them! Like some ancient civilisation, we make idols venerating our gods.
All hail the mighty phallus, hear hear!
Unless of course, we are allergic to them, that is.
No, that's ridiculous. There is no such thing as a cock allergy.
- Just allergies to the beings they are attached to -
NO! Shut up, inner dialogue! You've already taken all the fun out of my life. I'm firm on this one, there is no such thing as a cock allergy!
Firm on the topic of cock allergies? Excuse the pun.
Oh just shut up, seriously, you mad twat!
"I beg your pardon?"
Oh shit! I said that out loud!
I forgot that there was a crew of tradesmen working for my elderly neighbour, Marge. They've been next door for the past week, repairing her fence after some stupid seventeen year old got drunk and decided to take his father's car for a joy ride while his parents were in Sydney on a business trip. At one in the morning, I heard a screech that sounded like a jet flying over head at telegraph pole height, and then a huge rumbling crash shook my house. I thought my roof was being torn off in a Tornado; the sound was so long and thundering and well, violent really.
I took a calmative for my nerves and ever the civic minded individual, I ran out the front door to check for damage. My small courtyard was covered in a billowing cloud of dust and debris. Bricks were strewn everywhere, and the roots of Marge's rose bushes trembled feebly in the aftershock of being ripped so suddenly from the ground. The driver had completely taken out Marge's brick fence! A forlorn wheel rolled along the footpath and spun to a stop in my driveway. It looked as though I'd won a holiday in Iraq - after the invasion - and I stood amid the carnage in a petrified state of shock and awe.
Marge was already outside, the picture of calm. Once she had established that the driver wasn't on death's bed, she proceeded to heap a mouthful of abuse on him with her thick, cutting Irish tongue. It was the goriest thing I have ever seen in my life. When I was an undergraduate, I studied the works of a feminist historian who claimed that the reason Australian men in the early 1900s had little or no respect for Australian women (and some would argue that nothing has changed much - not me of course, just some), was because the generation of colonial born in our sunburnt country from their convict parents, lacked the extended family network of their ancestors back in the old country. Namely, we didn't have the strong Irish grandmother to keep our wild colonial boys in check. To be truthful, even though I respected the Professors work incredibly, I thought that conclusion was a little simplistic.
I take that thought back now, though, after watching our wild, drunken offender scramble into the safety of the Police's caged paddy wagon, just to escape from Marge's tirade of scolding. It was so brutal that those of us present without the stomach to cope had to turn away.
Old Albert, the widower who lives on the opposite side of the street, ran to Marge's front yard as did most of us who live on King's Court Road. There, he kept us entertained in the wee hours with the entire history of the neighbourhood for the past forty years while Elsie, who lives two doors up, supplied the tea. Albert knows everything that has ever happened to anyone on this street, names, dates-the lot. He'd probably even know when preservatives were first introduced to the residents of our royally named road.
At the ripe old age of seventy-two, he has a mind like a whip and the memory of an elephant. He can actually stick to a topic without running off on bizarre tangents that basically, really don't have much to do with anything at all - unlike me. He told those of us who were gathered around the toe-truck driver, who was removing the remains of what was once a beautiful black XR-8, that another drunk driver had done exactly the same thing that the modern version of the wild colonial boy had, only eight years earlier. Albert had looked pointedly at the thankfully uninjured youth in question as the police closed the back of their paddy wagon behind him, mainly to protect him from Marge.
