A bit of culture

It was the F-word's birthday recently so I treated him to a few days in Melbourne as a kept man. It was a bit of a backhanded present though, because fuck me sideways, did I ever need a few days in a city. I needed a few days of Asians and music with basslines and beautiful man-made objects and people who aren't staggering pisspots still out after 6pm and different kinds of food that I'd never tried before.

This past weekend I had my first durian. I should have done that in Singapore but we were with my boss all that week, who considers durian about as appetizing as baby shit, and I was having all sorts of other firsts that week too, most remarkably my first full week eating only fucking marvellous food . . . oh fuck me Singapore . . . I'd take a caning for ya. Anyways. Back to earth. I ate my first durian in Melbourne at a Thai restaurant, or rather I drank it in smoothie form, and it was good. Probably not representative of a nice fresh durian though, because it was also unremarkable, utterly unremarkable - like a creamier sort of honeydew flavour - and from all I've heard elsewhere durian is nothing if not remarkable.

So anyways, in Melbourne we ate beautifully, the best we've eaten since that week in Singapore, and all of it various sorts of Asian of course (a Malay restaurant in St. Kilda's topping the list - ginger fucking salsa, fuck me), except for one pizza with some of the F-word's family on Lygon street after a really, really emotional Aussie Rules football match. Wow, was it emotional. I never think of myself as someone who is into spectator sports, but when I actually make the effort to go to a game I always get sucked into it. When all those people are there in the field performing their little hearts out for crowds more populous than my whole hometown, I get utterly sucked into their human dramas.

Also Aussie Rules is a ridiculous thing for humans to do. In the game we saw, two guys, within five minutes of each other, tore their ACLs, an injury I've experienced myself and which was, you know, really shitty . . . and there those poor boys were being carted off the field. It was gladiatorial. Which of course calls to my disgusting, decadent Roman blood.

So I won't go to another such game for another year or so, not only because the human drama was so intense, but also because I can't fucking stand sports fans. So many fucking retards in such a small space when you're in a stadium. I mean, there are all those poor boys on the field, playing their hearts out and ripping their ACLs and doing really astonishingly physical and co-operative feats of awesomeness, while a bunch of stupid fat drunk assholes who wouldn't be able to jog around a cricket pitch without taking a break to suffer a fucking coronary yell insults at thier own team whenever something they don't like happens. It gives me the fucking shits, I'll tell ya.

In which I rant

Some families are really fucked up, and mine isn't one of them. Never mind all the nude posing and LSD and occasional unwilling involvement with the wrong end of a police cruiser, and me, who is . . . well . . . potentially objectionable in some ways, if one chooses to be an objectionable cunt. We are really, really great as a family. We love each other and we love the old generation and we love the new generation. We are rotten with love, the way it is meant to be, except not everyone is. Oh, what a fucking shitter of a world some of us live in.

Speaking of which, Australia is a fucking dump. The south, anyways. We're back in Shepparton and I've been coughing my guts out for the last week and a half because the cunt farmers are burning off their stubble, like we live in some fucking third world country, and it's making me regret that I ever went to the trouble of giving up smoking if this was the fucking future. Australian farmers are fucking idiots. The entire agricultural culture here is what makes this place so fucking stupid. They farm like absolute fucking fuckwits, degrading the country and getting shitty yields and charging fucking absurd prices and when anybody suggests they adopt 20th century practices or mentions climate change they whine like fucking toddlers about how their way of life is being stamped out by a bunch of know-nothing yuppies. Well, fuck'em. Can't wait to get back up north where the agricultural class has already driven itself out of business.

There is such a heavy irony, a real testament to how fucking naive and ignorant a certain class of Australian is and how absolutely corrupt the media is, that this is one of the first non-Vanuatu type countries that's really going to get hit hard by climate change - already has - and I've never met so many people so willing to utterly disbelieve the science. And the pundits are not even especially clever in their attacks. The latest one I paid attention to had one of the leading denialist moron-wranglers attacking plans to lower carbon emissions on the basis that the target of the programme was to arrest, not to reverse, global temperature increases. Jesus. Not even Americans are this fucking stupid. At least Americans have some airy-fairy God-Rapture imaginary story about how climate change isn't real. Australians have fuckin' nothing but an ignorance so rock-solid you could bounce dimes off it.

Fuck. Uhm, honeymoon's over . . .