The Rowdy Boys Incident

Photo of a complimentary drinks voucher from Arq nightclub’Pong and I are standing on the balcony at Sydney nightclub Arq, looking down at the continuing awards ceremony. Nearby someone asks whether the women currently on stage are “the lesbian singers” he’s seen before.

“What’s a lesbian singer?” I ponder aloud in a stage whisper. “Is that like a horse whisperer?”

’Pong glares, unimpressed. His energy levels are low, he’s not in the mood. My friend Nate, not exactly what you’d call the shy retiring type, has encouraged my heckling of the drag queens hosting the event, and ’Pong and Nate’s boyfriend Chris have both been uncomfortable.

Then another loud stage whisper emerges from a leather-clad bear standing on the other side. “No,” he says, “That would be a fish whisperer.”

The bear’s boyfriend’s eyes catch ’Pong and Chris, “Oh no, here we go again,” they seem to say. Strangers bond, wishing they could disown their partners.

Later, ’Pong takes me aside to explain that he’s exhausted, that he’s having trouble focussing on what he needs to do tonight. He’s trying to make a good impression on important people, and my rowdy mood isn’t appreciated.

And just as he finishes that speech, Nate bounces up my side, eyes wide with child-like excitement, proudly brandishing a bunch of green tickets. “Look! More free drink vouchers!”

Burnt out sofa, burnt out life

Photograph of burnt-out sofa on Stanmore Road, Enmore

“Want to buy a sofa, going cheap?” Mike, the bloke sitting on the veranda, laughs — amused that the discarded furniture was torched. He’s annoyed they started the fire too close to the fence, though, scorching the paw paw plant that’s just starting to come into fruit.

Somehow the conversation turns to the weather-beaten old homeless guy who was camped out nearby most of this week, but who’s now been moved on. “Keith? Nah, he’s not into money,” Mike tells me. “He’s a millionaire though.” Come again?

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The Ghost of Cho Seung-hui

Photograph of Cho Seung-huiWatch out. That weird foreign student in trenchcoat and shades. Does he ever talk to anyone? That’s suspicious. What’s he writing? A play about murder and rape? Arrest him. Now! Quick! Check everyone else! Get their psychology profiled! Watch them. Watch them closely!

Cho Seung-hui took a beautiful photo of his bullets and posed with his guns before he blew away 32 fellow humans — roughly a quarter of the number killed in Iraq by suicide bombs yesterday — and was presumably one seriously sick individual. But in that obese, self-centred tangle of hypocrisy that is America the reaction is, as usual, wrong…

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