Some people have seriously fucked up their lives by not choosing to do stuff that other people have done and those people will die.
And I am one of them.
Oh, poo.
Anyway, here’s a few of the things I forgot to do, and, in the forgetting of them did I unwittingly seal my fate forevermore as nothing other than an insubstantial fart of failed fat cells flapping impotently over the face of the planet …
A HOUSE
I forgot to buy a house.
Oh, poo.
I live in a rented flat. I’ve been living in rented flats and houses for the better part of 27 years, ever since I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 22. And half of that time has been spent living in rented flats with other people.
That was called “sharing”. I don’t think “sharing” happens much nowadays as lots of people seem to think they’re far better off living at home with their mums and dads until they’re about 45 years old at which time they just might be able to afford to buy a bedsit up a back alley in King’s Cross just down from where that whacked out crackhead smashed her baby’s brains out on a park bench the week before last until some cops shot her in the kneecaps. It’s only about one and a half million bucks, but it’s close to shops and transport and it’s certainly got character alright, that’s for fucking sure. Where else can you entertain yourself at night when there’s bugger all on the box by peering out the window at the winos underneath beating the crap out of one another and then hoiking up their stomach lining on your front stoop.
But hell, it’s a home, goddammit, and it’s yours and you’re entitled. It’s an Australian right. It oughta be in a constitution somewhere.
Whydonchawritealettertoyalocalmemberofgummentandseeifyacangetitputin? Huh? HUH?
I’ve been perfectly comfortable up to now renting flats and houses and sharing some of them with other people. It meant we had more money for other things. Like going out and seeing bands and movies and shows and buying compact discs and having parties and eating out and drinking and taking drugs and all that stuff I thought people were supposed to do when they were young enough to do it.
But I was wrong. I should have left high school and started to think about planning for my retirement when I turned 18. Apparently, that’s the way to go. Leave school and start preparing for when you’re dead.
I thought renting a place to live in was perfectly acceptable in today’s modern society but according to some people, it’s the utter fucking pits of deprivation and despair and it’s a wonder it hasn’t yet driven me and others like me to fling ourselves off our balconies in foaming fits of self-loathing.
Oh, well.
Some friends of mine just bought themselves a very nice house on the NSW Central Coast.
It cost them about $325,000.
I don’t have $325,000. I pay $1300 a month in rent. If I borrowed $325,000, I’d probably be paying double that in mortgage installments and I’d have to eat wild thistles and lick the cheese off discarded burger wrappers in order to live. I don’t think that would be much fun, but apparently it’s a far better thing to do than living in a rented flat according to all the people who are supposed to know what the better things to do are.
My friends had to borrow some of the deposit for their house from their parents. That’s fair enough, I guess, especially if the parents had it to lend.
My parents can’t afford to lend me money to put a deposit on a house for me to own, though.
They’re on a pension. It’s all they can do from day to day to scrape up enough pennies to buy themselves some new bits of cardboard so they’ve got a clean surface to eat their own poo off of. Or some old bottles that they can keep their urine in for when they need to freshen up with a splash under the armpits before venturing out in public to forage in skip bins for rotting root vegetables and bruised fruits.
Fucking losers.
Which brings me to the next thing …
MARRIAGE
I forgot to get married.
Oh, double poo.
I don’t know why this is, but the concept of marriage never seemed to take a hold on my mind as a thing that desperately needed to, or even should, be done. I could’ve taken the option a few times, really I could have. I just didn’t. If I had taken the option, I’d be part of a “working family” right now and my life would have some sort of validity. According to some it would, anyway.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I grew up with married people. My parents.
As a child, I remember watching as my parents argued, or had a fight about some trifle or other and wondering to myself, “Why do you bother with this? You all seem so fucking miserable”. Sometimes my parents would go visiting other married grown-ups, friends or relatives, and, as is the way of these things, poor fucking Ross would get bundled into the backseat of the car to go visiting too when all poor fucking Ross wanted to do was stay home and get down and dirty with some Lego or paint camouflage stripes on a Tamiya model kit tank.
So I’d wind up sitting in the houses of these married people who mostly seemed to communicate with each other through a series of guttural, monosyllabic grunts and grimaces and, if some sort of conversation ever actually happened to evolve from these primitive beginnings, it was usually about how this or that relative of theirs was fucking hopeless or in trouble with the law or was getting divorced or was having kids or had the shits with them or it was about the dickhead neighbours next door or it was a bit of shocked oohing and aahing over the fact that a Chinese couple had just moved in down the other end of the street which was unusual in those days and did you know the Chinese buried their food in the backyard for 12 days before they ate it and when they did eat it it was made of cat and Mabel three doors down lost her cat last week and it wouldn’t surprise us in the least what happened to it if you know what I mean, you know? Bloody foreigners.
Jesus Christ, the things you have to put up with when you’re a kid.
And through all this, all I could think of was how miserable and “small” everybody seemed to be. It was as if, having exhausted whatever few joys they thought marriage had to offer them, they then settled for a life devoted to giving each other the shits on a regular basis instead.
No thank you.
But, turns out I was wrong again. Finding that someone special to spend the rest of your life with and yell at and be yelled at and get the shits with is supposed to be good for one’s longevity.
Fancy that.
Which brings me to the other thing …
CHILDREN
I forgot to have children.
Oh, poo all over.
I once had some friends who had children and one day, the mother cooed to me, “Oh, Ross, you don’t know what you’re missing”, to which I could only reply, “Yes, I do. I’ve met your kids. They’re fucking horrid.”
Needless to say, that was not a friendship that endured much longer after that. But it was true. Her kids were insufferable little shits. When the family popped over to visit, the kids would run rampant through the house, into any room they wanted, into the fridge, constantly yelling at the top of their fucking lungs about this, that or the other thing until, after an hour or two of this, all I wanted to do was grab them by the scruff of the neck and shove their heads into the toilet bowl and piss on them.
And I was once in a relationship with a woman who had a two year old son. My God, this kid, when he decided to void his bowels, you’d swear the spirit of Jackson Pollock had taken nest in his colon. There wasn’t a Huggie on the planet that could withstand the power of his explosive expulsions of luminescent poo. They could’ve made a Huggie from titanium and vacuum sealed it to his butt and still that stuff would find its way to splashy, smelly freedom. The odds of getting the bond back on that rented flat at the time was a long-shot bet, that’s for damn sure.
But I’m realistic enough to know that not all kids are like this. Many children are utterly delightful, given to refreshingly innocent but honest appraisals of life and the world around them, such as “Look at that old bald man, mummy.”
I’d be a crappy father. I would, I really would. Not deliberately, on-purpose crappy, but crappy nonetheless. I’m bad-tempered, impatient and I need lots of time to myself or else I get really ratty in the head. Having a kid crawling all over me demanding attention to its every action or utterance on a daily, nay, hourly basis would melt my brain.
But I’m wrong. I shoulda had one for the country, one for mum, and one for dad (which would be myself, I guess). We’d send the one for the country off to fight a war somewhere and take a bullet through the head so we could have a parade and some things for the display cabinet at home; the one for mum would take her side during the divorce proceedings and hate my guts for the rest of my life and say nasty things about me on the internet; and the one for dad (which would be myself, I guess) would dutifully and lovingly nurse me in my shriveled dotage, feeding me mushed pears and peas with a spoon, wiping the drool off my chin and making sure I didn’t choke to death on my own dentures if I decided to get adventurous one day and eat some solids.
Talk about fucking everything up in life. Boy, did I take a wrong turn.
I’m sorry.
I shoulda bought a house and I shoulda got married and I shoulda had kids and then I coulda been somebody. Instead of what I am. Which is a bum. I coulda been a contender, Charlie. You was my brother, you was supposed to …
Hang on.
I don’t have a brother called Charlie …
…
Never mind.
Anyway, I see it all now. My whole life before me. Or at least what’s left of it.
Spending the rest of my days living in a rented flat without a wife and a bunch of kidlets to keep me warm and comfy. There to expire one distant day in isolated anonymity with only the stench of my rapidly decomposing corpse to alert the neighbours to my passing. The door smashed down by ambulance officers who, upon entering, will upchuck their lunches and then settle down to the business of scraping my innards off the walls after the build-up of gases in my internal organs made my stomach explode like a red roman candle.
Shit, eh?
I’ll make sure there’s some BAM in the laundry.
At this late stage in the game, it’s the least I can do.
Sorry about that.
And I am one of them.
Oh, poo.
Anyway, here’s a few of the things I forgot to do, and, in the forgetting of them did I unwittingly seal my fate forevermore as nothing other than an insubstantial fart of failed fat cells flapping impotently over the face of the planet …
A HOUSE
I forgot to buy a house.
Oh, poo.
I live in a rented flat. I’ve been living in rented flats and houses for the better part of 27 years, ever since I moved out of my parents’ house when I was 22. And half of that time has been spent living in rented flats with other people.
That was called “sharing”. I don’t think “sharing” happens much nowadays as lots of people seem to think they’re far better off living at home with their mums and dads until they’re about 45 years old at which time they just might be able to afford to buy a bedsit up a back alley in King’s Cross just down from where that whacked out crackhead smashed her baby’s brains out on a park bench the week before last until some cops shot her in the kneecaps. It’s only about one and a half million bucks, but it’s close to shops and transport and it’s certainly got character alright, that’s for fucking sure. Where else can you entertain yourself at night when there’s bugger all on the box by peering out the window at the winos underneath beating the crap out of one another and then hoiking up their stomach lining on your front stoop.
But hell, it’s a home, goddammit, and it’s yours and you’re entitled. It’s an Australian right. It oughta be in a constitution somewhere.
Whydonchawritealettertoyalocalmemberofgummentandseeifyacangetitputin? Huh? HUH?
I’ve been perfectly comfortable up to now renting flats and houses and sharing some of them with other people. It meant we had more money for other things. Like going out and seeing bands and movies and shows and buying compact discs and having parties and eating out and drinking and taking drugs and all that stuff I thought people were supposed to do when they were young enough to do it.
But I was wrong. I should have left high school and started to think about planning for my retirement when I turned 18. Apparently, that’s the way to go. Leave school and start preparing for when you’re dead.
I thought renting a place to live in was perfectly acceptable in today’s modern society but according to some people, it’s the utter fucking pits of deprivation and despair and it’s a wonder it hasn’t yet driven me and others like me to fling ourselves off our balconies in foaming fits of self-loathing.
Oh, well.
Some friends of mine just bought themselves a very nice house on the NSW Central Coast.
It cost them about $325,000.
I don’t have $325,000. I pay $1300 a month in rent. If I borrowed $325,000, I’d probably be paying double that in mortgage installments and I’d have to eat wild thistles and lick the cheese off discarded burger wrappers in order to live. I don’t think that would be much fun, but apparently it’s a far better thing to do than living in a rented flat according to all the people who are supposed to know what the better things to do are.
My friends had to borrow some of the deposit for their house from their parents. That’s fair enough, I guess, especially if the parents had it to lend.
My parents can’t afford to lend me money to put a deposit on a house for me to own, though.
They’re on a pension. It’s all they can do from day to day to scrape up enough pennies to buy themselves some new bits of cardboard so they’ve got a clean surface to eat their own poo off of. Or some old bottles that they can keep their urine in for when they need to freshen up with a splash under the armpits before venturing out in public to forage in skip bins for rotting root vegetables and bruised fruits.
Fucking losers.
Which brings me to the next thing …
MARRIAGE
I forgot to get married.
Oh, double poo.
I don’t know why this is, but the concept of marriage never seemed to take a hold on my mind as a thing that desperately needed to, or even should, be done. I could’ve taken the option a few times, really I could have. I just didn’t. If I had taken the option, I’d be part of a “working family” right now and my life would have some sort of validity. According to some it would, anyway.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I grew up with married people. My parents.
As a child, I remember watching as my parents argued, or had a fight about some trifle or other and wondering to myself, “Why do you bother with this? You all seem so fucking miserable”. Sometimes my parents would go visiting other married grown-ups, friends or relatives, and, as is the way of these things, poor fucking Ross would get bundled into the backseat of the car to go visiting too when all poor fucking Ross wanted to do was stay home and get down and dirty with some Lego or paint camouflage stripes on a Tamiya model kit tank.
So I’d wind up sitting in the houses of these married people who mostly seemed to communicate with each other through a series of guttural, monosyllabic grunts and grimaces and, if some sort of conversation ever actually happened to evolve from these primitive beginnings, it was usually about how this or that relative of theirs was fucking hopeless or in trouble with the law or was getting divorced or was having kids or had the shits with them or it was about the dickhead neighbours next door or it was a bit of shocked oohing and aahing over the fact that a Chinese couple had just moved in down the other end of the street which was unusual in those days and did you know the Chinese buried their food in the backyard for 12 days before they ate it and when they did eat it it was made of cat and Mabel three doors down lost her cat last week and it wouldn’t surprise us in the least what happened to it if you know what I mean, you know? Bloody foreigners.
Jesus Christ, the things you have to put up with when you’re a kid.
And through all this, all I could think of was how miserable and “small” everybody seemed to be. It was as if, having exhausted whatever few joys they thought marriage had to offer them, they then settled for a life devoted to giving each other the shits on a regular basis instead.
No thank you.
But, turns out I was wrong again. Finding that someone special to spend the rest of your life with and yell at and be yelled at and get the shits with is supposed to be good for one’s longevity.
Fancy that.
Which brings me to the other thing …
CHILDREN
I forgot to have children.
Oh, poo all over.
I once had some friends who had children and one day, the mother cooed to me, “Oh, Ross, you don’t know what you’re missing”, to which I could only reply, “Yes, I do. I’ve met your kids. They’re fucking horrid.”
Needless to say, that was not a friendship that endured much longer after that. But it was true. Her kids were insufferable little shits. When the family popped over to visit, the kids would run rampant through the house, into any room they wanted, into the fridge, constantly yelling at the top of their fucking lungs about this, that or the other thing until, after an hour or two of this, all I wanted to do was grab them by the scruff of the neck and shove their heads into the toilet bowl and piss on them.
And I was once in a relationship with a woman who had a two year old son. My God, this kid, when he decided to void his bowels, you’d swear the spirit of Jackson Pollock had taken nest in his colon. There wasn’t a Huggie on the planet that could withstand the power of his explosive expulsions of luminescent poo. They could’ve made a Huggie from titanium and vacuum sealed it to his butt and still that stuff would find its way to splashy, smelly freedom. The odds of getting the bond back on that rented flat at the time was a long-shot bet, that’s for damn sure.
But I’m realistic enough to know that not all kids are like this. Many children are utterly delightful, given to refreshingly innocent but honest appraisals of life and the world around them, such as “Look at that old bald man, mummy.”
I’d be a crappy father. I would, I really would. Not deliberately, on-purpose crappy, but crappy nonetheless. I’m bad-tempered, impatient and I need lots of time to myself or else I get really ratty in the head. Having a kid crawling all over me demanding attention to its every action or utterance on a daily, nay, hourly basis would melt my brain.
But I’m wrong. I shoulda had one for the country, one for mum, and one for dad (which would be myself, I guess). We’d send the one for the country off to fight a war somewhere and take a bullet through the head so we could have a parade and some things for the display cabinet at home; the one for mum would take her side during the divorce proceedings and hate my guts for the rest of my life and say nasty things about me on the internet; and the one for dad (which would be myself, I guess) would dutifully and lovingly nurse me in my shriveled dotage, feeding me mushed pears and peas with a spoon, wiping the drool off my chin and making sure I didn’t choke to death on my own dentures if I decided to get adventurous one day and eat some solids.
Talk about fucking everything up in life. Boy, did I take a wrong turn.
I’m sorry.
I shoulda bought a house and I shoulda got married and I shoulda had kids and then I coulda been somebody. Instead of what I am. Which is a bum. I coulda been a contender, Charlie. You was my brother, you was supposed to …
Hang on.
I don’t have a brother called Charlie …
…
Never mind.
Anyway, I see it all now. My whole life before me. Or at least what’s left of it.
Spending the rest of my days living in a rented flat without a wife and a bunch of kidlets to keep me warm and comfy. There to expire one distant day in isolated anonymity with only the stench of my rapidly decomposing corpse to alert the neighbours to my passing. The door smashed down by ambulance officers who, upon entering, will upchuck their lunches and then settle down to the business of scraping my innards off the walls after the build-up of gases in my internal organs made my stomach explode like a red roman candle.
Shit, eh?
I’ll make sure there’s some BAM in the laundry.
At this late stage in the game, it’s the least I can do.
Sorry about that.
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