THE END OF TONGUES …

… At Google Blogger.

Smelly Tongues will now be over at Wordpress.

There’s nothing wrong with Blogger (not that I’ve experienced, at least), it’s just that it’s more convenient to blog through Wordpress. For various reasons … um, er, yeah.

So, will the three of you who read this blog kindly change your bookmarks and links and stuff. Thanks.

…

Flaps up and away!

(No offense, ladies).

DON’T SHIT IN THE HALLWAY, DARLIN’

What is it with these idiots?

We need to get down to the business of calling a spade a spade for a change and stop farting and fucking about looking for some wider reason or societal cause in order to explain why so many footballers are so very bloody stupid.

I mean, let’s face it.

We’re just not dealing with very bright people here.

And they’re happy with being not very bright people, ‘cause they don’t know any different and they don’t want to know any different ‘cause to know different would mean learnin’ stuff and learnin’ stuff hurts. Help, mummy.

Now, God knows, there’ve certainly been times in my life when I’ve been drunk, staggeringly, stupidly drunk. But at no such time have I ever gone wandering through a hall or a corridor somewhere and thought, “I need to poop. This looks like a good spot.”

As far as my own toilet training goes, I can’t really remember as I was pretty young at the time but it seems to have stuck with me thus far, ‘cause at no time in my life have I needed a refresher course. It’s not like I was 13 or 14 years old and on my way out to a mate’s place my mother had to say, “Remember, Ross, don’t go pooping in other people’s rooms”, “Oh! Okay! Thanks for the tip, mum” …

No, I’ve been drunk, stoned, drunk and stoned, high, low, up, down, left, right, a kaleidoscopic mélange of whacked-out, wobbly-brained, insistently incoherent, wired-up weirdness to the nth degree of odd at times, but at no such time did I ever feel compelled to take a poo in some random hallway.

And certainly not a hotel.

I mean, you’re in a hotel, for Christ’s sake, it has rooms. Find yours, open a fucking door and go to the fucking toilet. They even give you paper for when you’re finished. So you don’t have to drag your arse up and down the carpet runner in the corridor. Some people leave their plates out there when they’re done eating, you know. It’s not sanitary.

So, let’s just call a spade a spade, shall we?

Footballers are just plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face staggeringly fucking stupid.

Most of them, that is.

Because I’d hate to be accused of making any broad generalisations here, y’know?

…

…

Well, I wouldn’t hate it.

…

…

I’d be a bit iffy.

Whatever.

But, look. It’s not as if your average idiot footballer goes on in later life to write critically acclaimed works of literature when their careers are done. Become incisive journalists of great merit and note. Carve out glittering careers for themselves in the arts and sciences. Reap glittering prizes as they go. A certificate or three, some honorary titles.

No.

Mostly, they’ll just open a car dealership somewhere.

A shop for vacuum cleaner accessories, maybe …

But, seeing as how they’re just stupid bloody footballers, their businesses go bust in twelve months and by then they’re too old to get another job so they just sit at home all day and drink beer and get fat and then they get into drugs and prescription painkillers and speed and the like and spend all their spare time in the company of shadowy underworld figures who coerce them into doing shadowy things for wads of shadowy money and then one night they try to hold up a chemist for a carton of Sudafed but they don’t know that the chemist has seen “Taxi Driver” 96 times and forges prescriptions for himself and has gone quite insane as a result and tonight he thinks he’s Travis Bickle and he pulls a shotgun out from under the counter and blows a hole in their heads and their brains go spurting like a half kilo of wet mince all over the Rexona deodorant poster and dribbles onto the shelf below where the eyecare products are kept.

Next to the display dump bin of Listerine, two for six bucks, on special.

That’s what happens to footballers.

Because they’re all so fucking stupidly fucking stupid, the stupid fucking … fucks.

There you go.

If you know any small children, you should tell them that. Teach them.

As a precautionary tale.

Like “Red Riding Hood” …

…

Or “Last House on the Left”.

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…

…

Maybe leave out the curse words.

Being fucking kiddies and all.

NEW STUDIES REVEAL …

A new study has found that the number of Australians currently engaged in conducting new studies and compiling statistics about meaningless aspects of human behaviour, both personally and professionally, has ballooned by approximately 36.79% over the last 15.61 years and may be a leading cause of productivity losses over that time and a contributing factor to the current economic downturn.

Research conducted by The Institute of Studies into Studies Of Irrelevantly Random Crap has revealed that compiling studies about things whose conclusions would be blindingly obvious to the thickest halfwit on the planet consumes almost 17.825 million days per year as a nation and the resources of close to 47.3% of the current population.

Ross Sharp, the Director of the Institute, announced today that "if one were to take all the metal used in these studies from paper clips, staples, foldback clips, ring binders and those sliding metal paper binders that slice half your finger off when you try to remove them from a document, you could probably build a bridge between Sydney and Perth with it."

He added, "We have individuals engaged in compiling studies about the economic cost to the nation of people taking two toilet breaks a day during work hours and statistics about the impact on the national state of mental health caused by recalcitrant shopping trolleys with dodgy wheel bearings, and we feel this type of thing has now reached epidemical proportions and something must be done, and done urgently, to address it.”

Mr. Sharp also stated that, "if we were to take all these people conducting studies into things nobody could give a flying proverbial about and place them into some sort of productive work like the construction of public housing, we could probably solve homelessness in 37 seconds, build a couple of hundred new hospitals, some spaceships, cure cancer, and bring dinosaurs back from the dead."

"Unfortunately," Mr. Sharp added, "a vast number of Australians, rather than engage in some substantial form of work, would rather sit on their ever-expanding backsides, chew the rubbers off their pencils, and make studies about the impact on global warming from farting parrots who've taken one too many nips of over-ripe fruit and have then gone muscling about a public square making a racket at 5.00am in the morning squawking for a kebab shop".

In response, a spokesperson for The Institute of Studies Into the Effects of Fermenting Fruits on Native Wildlife rejected Mr. Sharp's comments as little more than the rantings of an angry and disaffected middle-aged man, and insisted that their research was vital in these times of global crisis.

Mr. Sharp replied that he couldn’t give a stuff about any of these stupid studies anymore and that he was going up the pub for a few beers and a monster-burger with double cheese and a side order of chips with gravy.

ARSEWIPE? ...

Use bumstick …



(Spotted on Slate.)

DEL TORO SAYS NO …

To sappy wuss-bag vampires with big boofy hair ...



From 2009, Guillermo del Toro on Craig Ferguson's "Late Late Show"

It’s about time someone put the teeth back into bloodsuckers, and del Toro, director of “Hellboy” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”, is just the right guy to do it.

Tongue has a happy.

1-2-3 … I, CLAIRVOYANT

Ahem …

What I said over here?

I hadn’t even seen the thing.

And what are others saying now? …


Marc Savlov from Austin Chronicle -

"Loud, abrasive, and featuring performances seemingly calibrated to be heard over the cacophonous roar of Travolta's mad, bad overacting, this unnecessary and ill-advised remake of Joseph Sargent's 1974 crime movie in which a group of ex-cons (led by Robert Shaw, playing off a Transit Authority cop essayed by the shaggily brilliant Walter Matthau) stage an elaborate cash-based caper in the subway tunnels beneath Manhattan."

John Swansburg from Slate –

"Here's my question: Why did Tony Scott make this movie? He isn't a straphanger. He isn't paying Tarantino-like homage to a film he grew up on. And any implication in Scott's film that New York in 2009 might be in danger of slipping into a 1970s-style malaise is purely incidental. So why did he bother?"

Rene Rodriguez from Miami Herald –

"Hiring Tony Scott to direct The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is like hiring Michael Bay to direct My Dinner With Andre: A colossal mismatch of director and material. Scott's (Top Gun, True Romance) directorial style has evolved -- or, depending on your taste, devolved -- into a frantic, hyperkinetic rush of images (Domino, Man on Fire) capable of inducing seizures."

Gary Thompson from Philadelphia Daily News –

"The only surprise in the new "Pelham" is that there's nothing to replace the narrative ingenuity of the original. In fact, there's almost no ending at all.

And not much going on in the beginning and middle, a fact that director Tony Scott disguises with his customary razzle-dazzle - splashy widescreen shots, a lot of movement, a million angles cut together with loud music that signals something significant is happening. (Something significant is happening: you're being relieved of $8 you could have spent on "The Hangover" or "Star Trek")."

Robert Ebert from Chicago Sun-Times -

"There’s not much wrong with Tony Scott’s “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” except that there’s not much really right about it.

Say what you will about the special effects of the 1970s, at least I was convinced I was looking at a real train. Think this through with me: Once you buy into the fact that the train is there, the train becomes a given. You’re thinking, ohmigod, what’s going to happen to the train? With modern CGI, there are scenes where a real train is obviously not on the screen, at least not in real time and space, and you’re thinking, ohmigod, real trains can’t go that fast.

And when cars crash, cars should crash. They shouldn’t behave like pinballs."

Sean Burns from Philadelphia Weekly –

"As expected, Tony Scott’s hyperkinetic, entirely unnecessary revamp attempts to update Pelham by cranking the volume and inflating the Noo Yawk attitude to a cartoonish level of macho posturing. The opening conversation, a slight bit of banter between Denzel Washington’s paunchy subway dispatcher Walter Garber and a co-worker, contains what must be at least 15 utterances of the word “fuck.” See, these guys are from the big, bad city, so they say the f-word a whole fuckin’ lot."


You see?

I told you I was clairvoyant.

WHEN ONLY THE RIGHT WILL DO

This grubby little cunt's desperate effort to turn a racist, anti-semitic madman's violence into something symbolic of "leftist" hate is the latest example of the rising din of stupidity and hysteria from those who call themselves "conservative" and "right-wing" and labour under the delusion that violence is, and can only ever be, endemic to the "left".

There's certainly no hate here, is there? ...



No, no, no, there's no hate on this side of the political spectrum. Never has been. They're sweet and cuddly little sunbeams for Jesus.

These are the type of people who give rational-minded conservatives a bad name. Whether one is of the "right", or of the "left", neither side can claim for themselves a monopoly on sanity and common sense as there are fruitloops batting for both teams and it's the fruitloops who always holler the loudest and for the longest time, attracting attention simply by virtue of their ability to throw fistfuls of shit about on a regular basis like so many monkeys in a cage.

And their existence, their actions and their views soil the minds, the souls and spirits of those of us on each side of the spectrum who are not so arrogantly convinced of our righteous infallibility in all things that we may claim all evil and all that is and has been bad in the world is the fault of one side and one side only.

For to do so would be to reveal oneself as a vacuous, drooling, twitching and ignorant imbecile of the highest order.

As for Bolt, well, fuck him. A gutter-dwelling, dog-whistling grub of the lowest order, a talentless and spectacularly banal hack who is to journalism what Jacqueline Susann once was to literature.

Popular in their time, but barely relevant to anyone and anything after it.

It's not journalism. It's not reportage. It's not even analysis. It's the sound of a man way out of time and way out of place whistling vintage tunes out of his arse, expecting his acolytes to gather round for a sing-along while someone resembling Walter Brennan plays pianola in a bar.

It's crap.

And I can't read any more of it.

Therefore ...

Bookmark deleted.

Life's too short, and there are better things to do with it.

I CAN HAS SPAC ATTACK?

So, I’m on the train to work yesterday morning. I only have two stops to go and I often walk. It was early. Cold, too. I took the train.

As it approaches my stop, a message comes over the intercom …

“Passengers should take care when detraining from the vehicle.”

…

…

…

“Detraining”?

“DETRAINING”?!!!!!

“DE-FUCKING-TRAINING”!!!!!!!!!!!!??????

I would like to find the person who thought of that and smash their fucking stupid head into a toilet bowl until they become de-fucking-brained.

Fucking spacwad.

TONGUES ON FILM – MAY 2009

“LET THE RIGHT ONE IN” (2008)

Everything you may have heard about this film is true.

SEE IT.

It is not a horror film. That is to say, it is not a catalogue of “kills” carried out by some lunatic fucker scuttling about in the dark with a knife or whatever. It is the anti-“Saw”, the anti-“Hostel”. And that is a good thing.

It has traditional horror elements in it, yes, but these are not the story. The story is the telling of the tenuous and tender relationship that begins to develop between bullied 12 year old Oskar and his mysterious neighbour, the “girl”, Eli, who is an “other”.

And that is all I will say, for others have said it far better than I. I blogged about the book a while back, over here. There’s a trailer there that you can watch. Off you go.

An American remake is in the offer. God help us. I think I shall smite them before they fuck it up.


“TWILIGHT” (2008)

Only joking.

I haven’t seen this film.

What, do you think I am insane?

I’d rather stick pins in my fucking eyes.


“MARLEY & ME” (2008)

The last 15 minutes of this movie made me a little puddle of wet.

Look, you make a movie where a central character is a dog (a real dog, that is, not one of those squeaky rat-like things), and you show the dog growing up from a puppy into old age and then dying, I’m gonna have a little eye dribble going on when that happens. Okay?

Deal with it.

And I like Owen Wilson. I like his funny-looking mashed up nose and his stoner drawl and I’ve liked him since I first saw him in “Bottle Rocket” years ago, “Bottle Rocket” being an excellent little movie. He strikes me as the type of guy you could have a quiet beer with and just generally chill out around. Unlike this wanker, for example.

And Jennifer Aniston actually looks like a real woman still, a 40 year old woman whose face can still move when she talks. Unlike, say, Meg Ryan, who looks like she’s taken the labia from a 400 lb female Sumo wrestler and had them stitched to her face where her lips once were.

And Alan Arkin’s in it. Briefly. So.

You’ve got a movie with a boofy dog in it and Alan Arkin.

What’s not to like?


“THE PROMOTION” 2008

John C. Reilly. And some other people. I like Reilly. He acts, he sings, he dances. I wish I had his life, the life of Reilly.

Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-rah, too-rah-loo-ra-laiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii …

… So I come back from the pub after 3 beers on a Sunday afternoon, and start working my way through a bottle of wine and then I decide to watch this.

Ten minutes later, I was fast asleep.

And I had to take the movie back, because it was a one night rental and I should have watched it the night before.

I hate it when that happens.


“THE LOST” (2006)

Portrait of a teenage narcissistic psychopath who kills two people just to see what it feels like. By the end of the film, he’s well over the edge, a full-fledged fruit loop on a rampage who wants to be Charles Manson. Thankfully, the film-makers resisted the urge to show his ultimate act of horror toward the end. That would’ve been well beyond the pale.

This is good. It’s not bad, that is. It’s okay. It has a few major flaws (it is, after all, a very low-budget independent U.S. production), and it’s taken its time getting a release here (straight to DVD), but you could do worse. I mean, you could rent “Twilight”, for example. But then you’d have to stab yourself in the head after.

The only actor I recognized here was Ed Lauter in a minor role as an old guy having a fling with a woman about a third his age. And I have no idea what that storyline was supposed to achieve as every time it popped up, I thought I was watching another movie. The whole silly subplot could easily have been left out and you’d have a much tighter film, as “The Lost” runs a little too long for what it is and what it deals with. Also, I didn’t really buy the idea that the central character would be so popular with girls and others of his own age. He’s quite the preening little fuckwit, a guy who shoves crushed beer cans in his boots to make himself taller. I mean, if you were a woman who knew a guy like this and you were in possession of half a brain, this is the type of guy you’d throw your used sanitary pads at.

What else?

The sound transfer sucks. It’s as if the boom operator thought shoving the microphone up the arse of an elephant might add some depth. It doesn’t. Try it and see.

…

…

…

See? Told you.

You should move away from the elephant now. You’ve aggravated his anal warts.

You bastard.


“STUCK” (2007)

HALLELUJAH!!!

Now this, this is the type of movie that makes it all worthwhile …

Stephen Rea plays a character down, and almost out, out of work and out of welfare, with no hopes on his horizons, and about to find himself spending his first night on a park bench or in a hostel …

Mena Suvari plays a nursing home carer on the brink of a promotion who, after a night of booze and pills chooses to drive home, only to collide head on with Rea’s character who becomes firmly wedged in the windshield of her car.

And then drives all the way home with him still stuck there, doing nothing to help.

Inspired by an actual event, but not a replication of it, this is one right out of left field, but not in a “leftist” sense. (It could be out of the right field, but not in a “rightist” sense, though I guess it depends whereabouts in the paddock you’re standing and who’s throwing the balls. If you’re standing in a paddock and some bastard’s throwing balls at you, just shoot them in the fucking head, okay? You shouldn’t have to put up with that type of malarkey.)

A tight, taut (80 minutes), blackly comic, toe-curling little thriller that perfectly captures the blindly self-absorbed amoral cruelties, the (as Jules Feiffer put it) “little murders” of the soul that we and others casually commit every day in the name of our own self-preservation until all trace of our basic humanity is stripped back to the raw and chalky bone. The one-ply tissue veneer of so-called “civilised” behaviour flushed effortlessly away to sleep the sleep of the dead with the fishes.

You’ll feel every scrape, every cut, every puncture on Rea’s body ache and howl with pain as he desperately tries to extricate himself from his horrific situation, and, as Suvari’s character gradually reveals her true nature to be that of a shallow, unthinkingly vicious cunt of the first order, by the closing moments all you will want to do is grab her head by its expensively braided ‘do and slam it into a fucking anvil.

This is truly marvelous stuff, one of the best low budget indie films (Canadian) I’ve seen in quite some time, simply because it was so unexpected.

Also, there’s an instructive little sequence about the proper use of pens and pencils when you’re in a fix, and a heartwarming scene with an adorably fluffy little canine.*

… From Channel 4’s Anton Bitel, “Stuck is disturbing in all the right ways, turning an incredible real-life story of human callousness and suffering into a tawdry entertainment that makes guffawing, sociopathic rubbernecks of us all.” …



Directed by Stuart Gordon, scripted by John Styrsik, if your local store don’t have it for rent, go out and buy it. It is that good, and hats off to Suvari for choosing to play such an (ultimately) unsympathetic and irredeemable character.

Bloody brilliant.

* Warning – Irony.


“FEAST II: SLOPPY SECONDS” (2008)

Henry Rollins was in the first “Feast”, albeit briefly.

I think Rollins toured Brisbane earlier this year. Or maybe it was earlier last year. I forget. Once you get to a certain age, all the years look the bloody same. I’ll be dead before I know it. “Hey, Ross! You’re almost dead!” “I am? Shit, and I never got around to seeing Henry Rollins. Caaaaaark.”

I only found out he was touring at the last moment and it was a week before payday, so I was flat broke as per usual. Pfhhhhht.

And now I’m expected to work until I’m almost dead thanks to this shithead. Christ, I started working at the age of 17, back in 1976 and now I’m supposed to stick at it until 2026? Get fucked. I’d like a few years of comfy retirement just generally farting about and taking it easy before I’m shuffled off to some cockroach ridden rathole to be given methylated spirit baths by a bunch of Nurse Ratched types. Wipe my arse, will you? I shit in your hand.

This movie has lots of goo in it.

The acting is crap, but, aside from some lousy effects work, the film improves a little the last 15, 20 minutes. It would bloody well want to.

One thing I hope I won’t be doing in comfy retirement while I generally just fart about is wasting what’s left of my life watching shit like this.

Maybe I should’ve rented “Twilight”. I could’ve rented “Twilight”, but then I would’ve had to dip my face into an acid bath and hammer nails into my testicles with a hacksaw blade afterwards.

And I’d rather not, thank you very much.


“ACOLYTES” (2008)

Teenagers discover a body, identify and locate the serial killer responsible, and then attempt to blackmail him into killing a thug who abused them when they were children.

Elements of “Stand By Me” and “River’s Edge” with psychopaths added for that extra zing.

The only recognisably Australian elements are the accents and the suburban topography, those red tile roof, red brick houses. I wish there more Australian films like this and less of the, “This is an AUSTRALIAN film! We gotta have colloquialisms and flannelette and men in big hats and some fucking bush, NO, not that type of bush, you cock, I’m talking shrubbery out to fucking buggery out there!” variety. I know there are some dangerously deranged freaks wandering about the fucking desert, the so-called romantics of the land, salt of the earth blah, they’d hump your leg if it had a hole in it, but you ought to see some of the people up the local mall on a Saturday morning.

This is a very well made, very (unselfconsciously) stylish psychological thriller, eschewing most of the tired and tiring clichés that bore me to tears in so many films of its type, headache inducing rapid cut editing and zoom in, zoom out, bang crash cinematography and sound that makes you know what it might feel like to be in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease and have someone smashing cymbals over your head for ninety minutes.

There’s none of that here, the three teenage actors are excellent and completely believable as characters, and Joel Edgerton avoids stereotypes altogether in his chilly and nicely restrained portrayal of the serial killer as average suburban family man.

“Images are the essence of cinema and Hewitt's cinematographer Mark Pugh, delivers some exceptional material, which is sometimes manipulated for extra effect. The sound scape is well worked into the fibre of the film and the end result is a superior piece of genre filmmaking.” - Andrew Urban from Urbancinefile

There are two alternate endings provided on the DVD. I thought the first one of these was a better choice than the one they finally went with, though that one is perfectly fine, just that the other seemed more plausible given all that had gone before and what we had come to know along the way.

You could rent this and “Stuck”, buy some booze and get some cheap Thai or Indian takeaway, and you’d be sure to have yourself a fine ol’ time in, I reckon. Or you could watch “Twilight”, swallow some Drano and wash it down with paint stripper and watch your own stomach explode.

Spoilt for choice, really.


“THE LODGER” (2009)

Man (Simon Baker) rents a room in boarding house. Quiet type, likes his privacy, charming though.

Meanwhile, someone’s killing prostitutes in the exact same manner as Jack the Ripper.

Will Alfred Molina, our burnt out, troubled cop with the burnt out, troubled marriage stop the bloodthirsty fiend before he commits yet another in his gruesome series of dastardly deeds?

Meh.

Just ordinary and all over the place, it goes over here, then it goes somewhere else and forgets about where it’s been and why it was there in the first place, then it comes back and goes somewhere else and loses its keys and has to walk all the way home.

I’ve no idea what the thing with Molina’s wife was supposed to be there for, to make me understand what a complex set of situations his character has in life? His wife is troubled you see, she is in an institution being cared for because of her troubles. The fuck do I care? What does it add to the telling of the story? Why do I need to know this? What does it have to do with anything?

Anyway, “The Lodger” mostly limps along, finally coming to a “well gee what a big surprise I didn’t see that coming” cod Hitchcock conclusion, nod to “Psycho”, throw in a curly one the last few minutes, roll credits, end. Turn off player. Goodbye.

The soundtrack was good.

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…

Soundtracks have music on them.

“WETBRAIN JIM” Chapter 3

3.

Chunk Smalls, his favourite phrase, “I don’t give a fuck”, was true in all senses.

Chunk wasn’t one to give much thought to the whys and wherefores of a thing, meanings and motivations and the like. If you’d said the word “subtext” to Chunk Smalls, he’d probably think you’d gone and hidden his sandwich under a newspaper. All Chunk needed to know about a thing was “who, where, what, how much?”. He’d get a mite confused if someone started in on the detail of a thing, his brain seemed to swell up and pound at his skull and everyone began to sound like they were talking from under a blanket.

So Chunk never had paid much attention to his mental development, only reason he learnt how to read was so he could follow the assembly instructions to his gym equipment and understand the labels on his “supplements”. At four years old, the other kids, they were watching cartoons and kids stuff, Chunk, he’d be glued to the Shopping Channel and bugging his mother to buy him an Abfabulator, only $69.95 in six easy instalments plus postage and handling and they’ll throw in this thing you use to scrape the dead skin off your elbows and a herb rack.

With herbs in it.

Over the course of his life, Chunk had built himself into such a tight ball of bulging, rock hard muscle that if you’d strapped him into a glider with a wing span the length of two Sydney Harbour Bridges and took it up twenty thousand feet and let it go, it’d simply plummet to the earth like a bloody great big boulder and leave a bloody great big hole when it hit.

But Chunk wasn’t about to go up in any glider any time soon. If man were meant to fly and all that, and man weren’t meant to fly, Chunk thought, a man were meant to be a man and do man stuff, not bird stuff. And Chunk was a man, he had the body of a man, and he’d made it all a man’s body could be so it could do all the things a man’s body should do and flying wasn’t one of those things.

But birds?

It’s different, that’s what they do, what they’re supposed to be doing, and it always scratched Chunk’s mind up something awful he saw a bird in a cage not going about its natural business like Chunk had always had the freedom to do.

So today, Chunk bought himself another canary to set free. Chunk would buy a canary once a month, then take it back to his place and throw it off the balcony. Sometimes, Chunk not being the gentlest of people, he’d reach into the cage, grab the bird and throw it out so hard that the bird went into shock and before it could peep whatever the canary equivalent of “what the fuck?” was, it had dropped to the ground twelve flights down and become a little puddle of feathered mash.

And once, years ago, Chunk’s mother had called him by his actual birth name ‘cause she was the only one who was still allowed to do that, but Chunk forgot himself momentarily and momentarily forgot that she was his mother, and he smashed her across the face so hard, the neck of the whiskey bottle she was sucking broke off and came out the other side of her cheek and her head slammed into an open kitchen cupboard and split open and stuff came out.

She’d needed 87 stitches and was in a coma for four months. When she finally woke up, she spoke with a Spanish accent and had a lisp. And she wasn’t Spanish.

That was a strange day.

Although Chunk didn’t think about it much. Weren’t his way to.

He put his bird on the kitchen table and it peeped at him. It made him feel good, doing this thing with the birds. There weren’t that many options open to you for feeling good if you were Chunk Smalls. He had all the flexibility of a telegraph pole so any form of sport was out, for a start. And sex was definitely out. He literally couldn’t give a fuck. Chunk had taken so many steroids in his life, his dick was now the size of a sucked out cashew nut and his testicles were no bigger than barley grains. Chunk’s thing wouldn’t fill a doll’s thimble, and no woman in her right mind would want to be poked at by something looked like an angry pimple. Chunk didn’t mind. He couldn’t even tell he had a hard-on anymore, couldn’t tell the difference one way or the other and couldn’t feel anything either, so it didn’t bother him.

Chunk just did what Chunk did, work out, eat six times a day, do Mr. Spivot’s weird errands and buy himself a canary once a month.

Next time Mr. Spivot had an errand, Chunk hoped it’d be a bit more than just rooting around some old bum’s bundle of scummy papers. That weren’t proper work for a man, and Chunk were a man and he wanted a real man’s work to do, damn it. Next time Mr. Spivot had an errand, he’d tell him that, Chunk would. He’d tell him straight.

With that, Chunk grabbed the birdcage, walked to the balcony, reached in and took hold of the canary and flung it out and over the balcony rail as if it were a shot-put and he were an Olympian.

The bird never had a chance.




To be continued …

“WETBRAIN JIM” Chapter 2

2.

That night Harry was locking up the shop and getting ready to go home when he began to feel bad about giving Old Wetbrain Jim that broom-thumping earlier.

Harry knew Jim was harmless enough, he’d been a regular around these parts since Harry had first set up shop over a decade back. Mostly, all he’d do is wander up and down the strip all day, occasionally planting himself in a doorway to yabber a whole bunch of nonsense at no one in particular, wave his arms about and cackle a lot. Sometimes, if he was on a roll in the cackling department, he’d get so caught up in his own amusement that he’d forget himself and pee his pants, after which he’d look terribly surprised and then very embarrassed and he’d just slink away somewhere private to dry off.

So what in blazes got him in the mind all of a sudden to just wander in out of the blue for a wank by the deli cooler today? Where’d that urge come from? wondered Harry.

Maybe it was that Old Jim had just touched another milestone in his enthusiastic journey toward vegetablehood. Maybe he’d had a thought about something and seeing as how the blood couldn’t get much done by heading for his brain to help clarify things, it all just shot to his dick instead because it had nowhere else to go and this had become Old Jim’s way of working through his troubles.

Hell, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, thought Harry, but I sure as hell don’t want it going on in my shop, some old biddy waves her bacon at me asks me what this crust on the packet is? I don’t care it’s in a packet, it’s not, you shouldn’t have to buy food people have spoofed over and then just shut up and pretend not to care if you’re a paying customer. It’s a fucking hygiene thing, isn’t it? Fuck, thought Harry, someone did that to me, I’d be on ‘em quick smart, bring the health down on them and sort the dirty fuckers out.

Regardless, Harry wasn’t much inclined right now to hold a grudge against Old Wetbrain Jim over this one little offence this one time. He felt quite sorry for Old Jim. Who knew what he’d been through in his life and what had gone wrong with it. There but for the grace, thought Harry, although he left off the “of God” bit as he didn’t believe in any of that bullshit anymore. He’d stopped believing it the day, back when he was twelve years old, Sister Apophanius got her six clit rings tangled up with the gas tap handles in the science room and he was the one had to untangle her as he was the only one around and he had small fingers. At least, that’s what she’d said. What the Sister was doing up on the desk waving her fanny over the gas taps in the science room in the first damn place was anyone’s wild guess, but for the next couple years Harry packed a pair of rubber gloves and a bottle of Dettol in his schoolbag just in case it ever happened again. Which, thankfully, it didn’t.

Jesus Christ, Harry shuddered, I haven’t thought about that for years, and he shuddered again and involuntarily began wiping his hands up and down his trouser leg. Merciful God, my arse, he thought, if the bugger exists, it’s surely a nasty old buzzard to do such a thing to a sweet and innocent child simply because he was doing a little overtime boning up on his element tables for the mid-year trials.

Harry began to think some gesture on Jim’s behalf might be nice. Something that said “no hard feelings” and sorry about the business with the broom.

Take it down and leave it by Old Jim’s place, the old discarded stormwater pipe under the overpass by the creek.

He could thaw out a number 7 chicken overnight.

Old Jim might enjoy that, his current state of mind considered.

Harry got to the door of his building, turned the key in the lock and hauled his self up the two flights of stairs to his flat, a one-time “bedsit with a two burner cook top in a nook next to the bathroom” which, over the many years Harry had lived there, had magically transformed itself into a “cosy studio apartment with an ensuite kitchenette in a desirable location and handy to everything” despite a thing having never been done to it.

Every time the agents changed or added something to the description, they’d put the rent up.

Harry was waiting for them to add “polished floorboards” to the list, despite the fact the only polish on the floorboards was the wear from where he walked, and six of the boards, you trod on them, you’d fall two storeys and straight into the fucking basement.

He went to the refrigerator, took a chicken out from the freezer, put it in the sink.

“I’m a nice guy”, said Harry to the chicken.

And he was, too.

For now.



To be continued …

“WETBRAIN JIM” Chapter 1

1.

Harry Heiner had his back to the door of his shop, hunched over a bundle of that mornings newspapers when Old Wetbrain Jim staggered inside, opened his pants and began to masturbate over by the cooler where the deli meats were kept, next to the cheeses.

Harry didn’t even realise Old Wetbrain Jim was there until Jim had already worked himself up to a climax, shooting his load over a packet of mortadella and then screaming “EEEEEEEE-POCH!!” at the very top of his voice.

So Harry grabbed a broom from behind the counter and ran over to beat Wetbrain Jim about the head and shoulders with it a few times and shoo him out of the store, not the first time he’d had to do so, but he’d be damned if this old derelict was going to come into his shop now and start emptying his fucking tubes all over the fucking smallgoods.

Wetbrain Jim stumbled out of the shop, stood and swayed back and forth on the footpath for a bit, then opened his mouth in mock indignation, raised his hand in a mock salute, and blew a long, wet raspberry back at Harry. All this time his cock’s hanging out of his pants, lolling back and forth like a long-preserved and now reanimated shrunken lemming looking about blindly for its specimen jar.

“Nooooooooooo-booooooooooooo…..!”, yelled Jim at Harry, “Noooooooooooooo-boooooooooooo……!” just as Harry was about to walk back inside and get down to the business of cleaning Jim’s jism off the stock before a customer came in. That’s when Harry realised that Jim had probably left his notebooks, the bundle of fourteen A4 sized, ring bound notebooks he carried with him everywhere over by the cooler. Sure enough, he had, so Harry picked up the bundle, which was tied together with bits of old plastic bags, and threw them out the door at Jim, half-hoping he might knock the old masturbating bastard off his balance in the process.

But Old Wetbrain Jim artfully (albeit a little unsteadily) dodged Harry’s toss, picked up his bundle, and bowed deeply at Harry in a sarcastic gesture of thanks. Then he tucked his cock back in his pants and began to wobble off in the general direction of nowhere in particular, something he couldn’t quite figure out burning with some intent he didn’t quite recognise about something he couldn’t quite remember picking at what was left of his damp old mind.

Something about the notebooks.

He had started out, he couldn’t remember when, with one, and now he had fourteen. He was sure of that much. Fourteen notebooks. Fourteen.

Yesterday morning, he had twelve.

That was it.

The other two notebooks.

Someone had taken them. He had no idea who this could be, or why they would want them, but they were his, and he was going to get them back, goddammit.

With that sorted out and patted down in some (hopefully) not-so-foggy recess of his addled and oft-drowned brain, Jim walked over to a bench at a bus stop, sat down, pissed himself, and began to think. And think deeply. Or as deeply as someone like Jim could manage given his shaky predicaments.

Now, aside from getting thrown out of shops on the odd occasion for wanting to have his way with chilled packets of cured hams, Old Wetbrain Jim was not the type of man who normally attracted much in the way of trouble. But what Old Wetbrain Jim didn’t realise at that point in time was that a whole shitload of motherfucking trouble was about to find its way to him and find its way to him with a stone cold killer vengeance.




To be continued …

CREEPY CRAWLY

When I first thought of the name for this blog, I realised it might, to some people, imply something weird, as in sexual weird. As in, some strange fetish or whatnot.

But it’s not that at all.

The name is the title of a song from the early 1970’s by San Francisco pop nutjobs The Residents and later covered by their frequent collaborator in crimes against music, Snakefinger (who is now dead, just in case you didn’t know).

It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I love The Residents to bits and have done for over 30 years now. And I realised that the name would allow me to do silly things with puns and plays on words and such, like Tongue-In-Chief and The Tongue Commandments.

Okay?

Fair enough.

But fuck me if some of the things people are looking for, some of the search terms people use that seem to bring them (very briefly) to this place are just plain creepy, in a chilly, shiver up the spine way. Variations on the two words in the title of this blog. That make me wonder, “These people should be in fucking jail”.

I’m not going to list the terms.

Use your imagination. Use your imagination in a way that you normally wouldn’t want to use it.

And then go a bit further.

Sometimes, it makes me want to give up the internet altogether, to shun it, and go back to entertaining myself by reading more books and seeing more movies and eating out more.

To stop writing this blog, and maybe try my hand at writing something real for a change. You know, writing something with an intent.

I thought all the stupid, creepy people were over here.

But no they’re not.

They’re every fucking where.

I suppose I could just not look at my blog statistics any more. I have no idea what half of them mean anyway (Bounce rate? Huh? Bouncing from, or bouncing to? Whyfore you bounce? Boing, boing. Honestly, the internet has some stupid bloody names for things).

Maybe I’ll just do that.

Or maybe I should just get a life.

SENDING A MESSAGE TO THE KIDDIES …

You’re all a pack of raving fucking morons and retards.

Why?

Experts tell us so.

Your brains, resembling nothing so much as a sucked out sultana ricocheting wildly around the dark vacuum of your tiny skulls, are so underdeveloped, so meager, so inadequate, that you are completely incapable of making a rational decision about anything, or holding a point of view and arriving at that point of view through the application of logic or observation, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves to be so arrogant as to think anything you say, think or feel could possibly hold any water at all.

Idiots.

You’re all fat, you’re all stupid, you’re all illiterate, you’re all on drugs and you’re all drunk all of the time and you’re all having sex at the age of 12 and having babies at the age of 13, you read the wrong books, you wear the wrong clothes, you listen to the wrong music, you watch the wrong movies and the wrong television shows, you’re addicted to the internet and violent video games and you’d like to stab us all to death in our beds and run rampant through the streets every night to pee on our rose gardens and hump like rabbits behind the school toilet blocks while smoking ice through a home made bong, only then to stagger home and foolishly allow yourselves to be groomed by pedophiles in chat rooms because you’re so astoundingly dumb, it’s a wonder you can figure out what shoe to put on what foot on any given day.

In fact, you probably can’t even do that and, until you turn about 25, you will remain such a vacuous, drooling imbecile that your mother will have to lay out your clothes for you every morning and feed you baby mash with a plastic spoon from a big double handled Snoopy cup because if you tried to do it yourself you’d probably put your own eye out.

What a load of crap.

I swear, if I’m looking for examples of witless stupidity and crappy decision making in the world, I only have to bone up on the latest antics of the NSW State Labor government, none of whose members could run a lap around a wading pool without drowning a couple dozen people let alone run a fucking government. Or those Masters of the Universe, those infallibly gifted men and women who work the financial markets and have run it so far into the bloody ground that we’re all going to have to work until we drop dead at our desks or fall into the ditches we’re digging for council. And if I’m looking for examples of sexual infantilism and immaturity writ large, any press release or pronouncement from those mad old male virgins in dresses from the Vatican will do just nicely. For examples of the most extreme forms of base cretinism at large, popping over to Andrew Bolt’s blog of idiocracy and the pinheads that lurk there will suffice if one wishes to acquaint oneself with the unhinged, the deranged, and the dangerously underdeveloped mind.

And, I promise, if I keep hearing again and again and again, over and over and over, this bullshit, this utter, utter fucking bullshit about the inability of young adults to make their own decisions and to form their own opinions on things on an independent basis, I am going to seek out the offending party or parties and bash them over their withered, gray, balding fucking heads with a fucking big mallet until they promise to cease and desist, shut the fuck up, and go home and clean up their fucking rooms.

Honestly.

TONGUES ON FILM – APRIL 2009

Depending upon I-don’t-really-know-what, I shall endeavour once a month to provide a brief wrap-up of all of the films I have watched during that time …

Isn’t that sweet of me? …

“DELIVER US FROM EVIL” (2006)

Academy Award nominated documentary concerning the exploits of one Father Oliver O’Grady, a Catholic priest who, over more than two decades during the 70’s and 80’s, abused dozens of the faithful, leaving nothing but shattered childhoods, abandoned trusts, and deep emotional trauma in his wake.

Then, of course, there is the hierarchy to whom O’Grady was, or should have been, accountable, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Despite knowledge of O’Grady’s behaviour, the extent of it, and how long it had been going on, next to nothing was done, next to nothing acknowledged. In more than a few cases, the only action taken was to move O’Grady to another parish and, on these occasions, this rarely amounted to more than a move some scant fifty miles away. They may as well just have spat in the eyes of the parents and raped their kids all over again for all the good that did.

More than once while watching this, I had to punch the pause button to spend some time muttering darkly at the walls, a fairly inefficient way of expending some of the rage I felt over the way these people had been, and were still being, treated by the church, that faith in which they had placed such significance, such meaning.

There is one couple who welcomed O’Grady into their home as a friend, had no doubts or qualms about his behaviour (had no reason for any such doubts), and entrusted their daughter to his care. This is a couple who have been together so long that they have grown into that quaint habit of being able to finish off each other’s sentences. As the father comes to recall the time, the number of times, the moment when O’Grady’s betrayal became fully known to him, his voice, choked with anguish, blurts out that he should have known, that he was the one who trusted this man, and how could “he have let it happen?”

Imagine … To be a father who thinks himself a “failure” at his responsibilities because a pedophile abused his daughter.

Thus does a parent’s prime, primeval, duty of care to their children, that is, to protect, come to be shabbily thrust aside and trampled upon as one selfish other chooses to indulge and inflict it’s penchant for furtive spurts of sexual subterfuge with no regard, no sliver, no glint of understanding as to the consequence to anybody of their actions. And then to scuttle behind a church pew and be assured protection simply because you are clothed in the dark rags of this absurdly popular cult.

O’Grady spent some time in prison for his crimes, but that is due in no part to any action from the church. Today, he is free and living in Ireland, the country of his birth. He willingly takes part in this documentary, where he speaks freely of his actions, his desires, his (so-called) motivations.

Remorse eludes him.

When one considers that many of the most devout proselytisers of this faith consider the “evils of homosexuality” to be the frontier most worth fighting on, and then one considers the subject matter of this superb film and the seeming insignificance of it to the architects and defenders of this belief system, one could be forgiven for thinking the whole Catholic Church is not just out-of-step with reality, but so far out of time they make the Amish look like The Jetsons.


“TOKYO GORE POLICE” (2008)

Utterly incoherent, yet oddly compelling. Makes no sense whatsoever. Blood gushes from severed limbs like water from a fire hydrant. There’s an English dub that sounds like it was performed by graduates of the Ed Wood school of vocal technique back in the ‘50’s. Some of the prosthetics are quite good.

You could try drugs. Some drugs and beer. That might work.


“QUARANTINE” (2008)

Jennifer Carpenter (from “Dexter”) is in it …

The next time I see a movie shot like this, I’m gonna go out and buy a fucking tripod and send it to the fucking director as an act of fucking charity. I’m fed up to the fucking back teeth with this fucking shaky-cam shit.

Just fuck off.


“FINDING AMANDA” (2008)

Dialogue, for example …

- “How you doing?”

- “I’ve got no legs, I’ve got no balls, and I piss through a tube, how the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

And …

- “She’s probably at the Thaiger Club. It’s not spelt “tiger” but. It’s Thai, like the food.”

- “Like the country?”

- “There’s a country too?”

Good, yes?

The eternally youthful Matthew Broderick plays a “reformed” alcoholic and gambling addict who finds out his niece (Bettany Snow) is a hooker in Las Vegas and, to prove to himself, if not least to his long-suffering wife, that he has the stamina to resist the temptation to drink and gamble there, he pops off to Vegas to find her and drag her to rehab.

Very funny, very sharp, no soap or sap. Think “After Hours” and “Something Wild” and ignore the horrid poster art and byline which seems to indicate some sort of sexual thing may arise from Broderick and Snow’s relationship. There’s no such theme, and nothing of the sort happens.

“DANCE OF THE DEAD” (2008)

Another bloody zombie movie. Is there anyone who isn’t making another bloody zombie movie? You probably shit another bloody zombie movie for breakfast. Even I had an idea for another bloody zombie movie. And someone actually expressed an interest in making the bloody thing.

I should probably get around to writing something resembling a bloody script. YA BLOODY RECKON????? Bloody oath.

Anyway, this one is set in a bloody high school.

And there’s a bunch of bloody zombies about.

What a bloody surprise.

Fuck off.


“END OF THE LINE” (2007)

Independent Canadian horror film.

The leader of a religious cult, a Rush Limbaugh lookalike, gives the word and his acolytes scoot about in a righteous frenzy attempting to “save” the souls of non-believers by stabbing the shit out of them. Takes place in a subway.

Very well done, no CGI (hooray!), good story, quite effective jolts. Ends well, too. Original. Good. Yes.

Yes, you may watch this. It has a brain and there was talent involved in its making.


“DYING BREED” (2008)

“Your testicles are tacos!”

That’s not a line from the movie, but I wished it had been.

Inbred cannibals in Tasmania.

Who’d have guessed?

“Deliverance” … meet “The Hills Have Eyes”.

Animal traps. Teeth. Retards.

Full of surprises, this one.


“THE WACKNESS” (2008)

“Quirky”.

In that “I’m so quirky!” way some independent films irritatingly insist on being at times ...

- “Hey, Brent! I took all these QUIRKY people and put them in a movie together!”

- “That’s brilliant, Gavin! We’ll call it “WHEN QUIRKS COLLIDE!”

Ben Kingsley plays a pot-smoking psychiatrist who offers counseling sessions as payment for dope to his emotionally constipated young dealer who then ends up falling in love with Kingsley’s daughter.

Life lessons are learned.

Gee, I didn’t see that coming.

Mary-Kate Olsen’s in it. I thought she was a “tween” phenomenon, not a legit actress.

So. You see? I have learnt something. She turns up here as a zonked out bar and party slut. She’s not too bad at it either.

Fancy that.


“DONKEY PUNCH” (2008)

There’s a cover blurb that quotes a review something like this, “The Most Sexy, Shocking Thriller of the Year!!”

No, it isn’t. There’s some sex scenes in it. Big fucking deal.

A bunch of girls join a bunch of guys on a boat and have a party. A girl dies. Everyone tries to extricate themselves from being implicated in her death and ends up turning on one another.

As you do.

Half way through watching this, I began to think, “I’d really like to see “Shallow Grave” again”.

So I did.

“THE WAVE” (2008)

German film. Based on a true story, or parts of one.

Firstly, you have to accept the premise that a group of well educated senior students would, in the space of only five days and as part of an experiment on autocratic society, enthusiastically transform themselves into a bunch of robo-fascists at the behest of a rather uncharismatic lecturer.

I didn’t.

Ay, there’s the rub.

‘Cause there ain’t no “secondly” if that don’t happen.


“DEATH PROOF” (2007)

Tarantino’s contribution to the “Grindhouse” experiment didn’t work for me the first time around but after reading this re-evaluation on Bright Lights recently I thought I’d take another look.

As the reviewer notes, the half-way point massacre, Stuntman Mike’s “vehicular homicide” takes out those protagonists in whom we’ve just invested time and attention and leaves us with no choice but to callously discard our empathies for these characters and start over again. It’s an alienating experience, or at least it was and may have been one of the reasons I found the film initially resistible. I didn’t want to start over again on account of I’m bone lazy and impatient and get cranky when I’m asked to make an effort. And, at the time I was far more impressed by Robert Rodriguez’s sublimely unhinged “Planet Terror” and it’s “why the fuck not”* attitude to story-telling.

Another thing, Tarantino’s habit of having his characters lapse into fanboy enthusiasms, such as the name-checking of “road” or, to be more precise in this case, “rod” movies which happens here is getting a little too self-consciously twee and I wish he’d knock it off. I get the point, get back to the movie please.

Second time around, however, it did work for me, there being subtleties and spaces throughout that become far more apparent when you pull it away from the immediacy of expectations that typically cluster around Tarantino’s work.

As a matter of fact, I think it’s a work of utter bloody genius.

The difference between the two groups of women became far more apparent to me the second time around. The first group, the victims, give the initial impression of independence, full of smart mouth sass and attitude. But no, they’re not that at all. They’re just in the process of becoming tomorrow’s housewives today, still looking to have their existence validated by some man, whether it’s the boyfriend who hasn’t turned up, or the film director who won’t remember a birthday, or some gormless sleazebags in a bar. Girlie girls all dressed up waiting to go somewhere with someone, to be courted and paid for.

Pfhht.

The second group, on the other hand, they’re the real deal. Beholden to no one, dependent on nothing, they live fast, for and in the moment. These women are cooler than fuck, as tough as nails and goddamn it if they’ll take any shit from anyone. But there’s no attitude here, no style that they’ve adopted to telegraph their individual philosophies, who they are.

Some guy tries some cheesy line on these women in a bar, they’d have his balls for breakfast. For tapas.

Kurt Russell, as Stuntman Mike, with the first group, he’s the bad guy, the mean, nasty murdering motherfucker. But against the second group? Nah, he’s just another lip-licking, toe-sniffing, garden variety crybaby creep. As are they all.

Fucking brilliant.

Where Rodriguez played his exploitation hand as fondly reverential spoof, Tarantino has played his by demanding the audience too fully immerse themselves in an “exploitation” attitude, dispensing with fashionably post-modern concerns about the fate and motivation of characters and asking only that everything put before them is fast, sexy, violent and fun. That there be no point, no lesson, no thing of learned value to be taken away from this experience other than, “Did you see how the car took the top of her head off?! Cool!” is all there should be.

And that was a fucking excellent scene.


* For example:

- Why don’t we throw this in?

- Why the fuck not!


“THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL” (2008)

I made myself a very nice bacon and egg sandwich halfway through this movie. With HP sauce. Four strips of bacon and two eggs.

I left the plate out overnight on the couch? And the next morning, there were ants crawling all over it ‘cause there were a couple of drops of sauce left on the plate.

It’s not the first time, either. They just come from nowhere and crawl over anything that may have a trace of food on it. It’s not like I leave stuff out all the time. There aren’t food scraps lying all over the fucking place. It’s respectably clean, my house.

It’s a weather thing with ants, isn’t it? Maybe they’ll piss off when the weather cools down.

Because it’s beginning to give me the shits.

THE SQUEALING OF THE SWINE

We knew it would happen. Those of us who pay attention to such things. I knew it would happen. The only question was when.

And so we prepared. We were always prepared, and they, people like you perhaps, thought us all fools for our cautious ways. Paranoid, you said we were. Some of you called us psychotic and stupid, hicks, halfwits, and my, how you laughed.

Well, well.

Are you laughing now?

I doubt it.

Most of you are dead.

But I take no pleasure in your misfortunes or the misfortunes that may have befallen your loved ones. It gives me no comfort. Perhaps you will listen to us in future. Should this happen again. And it will happen again. Mark these words. Or something similar, some variation on another strain. The same strain? Yes.

I had spent thousands, tens of thousands over the years reinforcing the house, the stronghold as I began to call it during the onslaught, to ensure it was bugproof. And that it could not be breached by any poor, desperate soul who may have been infected. Or, more importantly and most probably, a mob of souls. Angry souls. I had built, as a necessary backup, a bunker in the yard. Beneath the earth. I had stocked it well. That, and the central stronghold, the house, contained all those things that one could consider essential to one’s survival. In the short term, and the long term. It was the long term that mattered most, though.

There were not many of us who did this. Who went to these lengths. We were not a “group” or a “force” or a “unit” of any kind. We were scattered throughout the country with little, if any, ability to communicate with each other. We were not going to stand as one, for to do so would be a fatal error. If one became infected, there would be nothing to stop the spread among the others.

And so, as individuals, did we take our stand and vow to resist, to fight to the bitter end if need be.

And we had no guns.

Goddammit.

Howard, that bastard. He took our guns away. 1996, 1997, I think it was. Cheap political ploy, a stunt that was. I never liked Howard. Pissweak, he was. To take a man’s gun. What type of “man” would do this to another? A coward, that’s what type. A girl.

And so, we stocked what we could in the way of knives, bats, power tools, whatever we thought may help us through the darkest days we knew were coming, whatever we could lay our hands on. Some improvised.

We didn’t really have much time.

And then, time ran out.

People dropped like flies. A cough, a sneeze, that was all it took. Within minutes, the disease would tear its way through the most able-bodied of men and women and reduce them to shuddering lumps of virus-ridden flesh and, in hours, death would take them. The children went the quickest, a small mercy, to be spared the prolonged agony afforded the strong and the capable.

In two weeks, eight million had died.

In three weeks, forty seven million.

In four weeks, two billion.

The world went to rubble.

Yet, through it all, I, and those like me, prevailed. We stood our ground, defended our territory, made ourselves deaf to the entreaties of those who tried to worm their way through our defences and take advantage of our stocks, our supplies, of food, of drugs, of anything that we had because we had had the intelligence, the foresight, to prepare for this exact moment in advance of the moment coming.

The fools. The poor, poor fools.

By the time it had become clear to those in charge, supposedly in charge I should say, that the human race were facing such an implacable, invisible foe the likes of which had never been encountered before, a confusion of so-called “advice” tumbled from their lips, “do this”, “do that”, “don’t do this”, and so on and so forth. None of it added up. One piece of advice contradicted another, one “expert” clashed with this other “expert”, one minute it was a call for calm, the next, some piece of information caused thousands to panic.

I ignored it all. I knew, people like me knew, what we needed to do to survive. We had our own code to follow and we weren’t going to throw that overboard on the say so of some fucking politician, some bureaucrat, some statistician.

They had never listened to us. Damned if we were going to listen to them now.

Ludicrous, yes? That one third of the world’s population would be decimated because a bunch of goddamned pigs got the fucking sniffles.

Well, no, not ludicrous. Not at all. Probable, that’s what it was. And it was probability that we, people like myself, concerned ourselves with.

Listen …

They told us to stock up on dry goods. Rice, pasta, beans and such. Stupid. You need water to cook these things, precious water, and you’d have to be a fool to waste such a resource on the preparation of a bowl of fucking pasta. I had 100 eight-gallon drums of water stocked. It was for drinking. Not cooking, that’s for sure. What was I, Jamie fucking Oliver? No.

I stocked tin foods, frozen, stuff you could microwave (we all had generators and we all made sure to have enough fuel to run them indefinitely) and if water were needed for its preparation, it would be only a minimal amount, a half cup perhaps.

I had 200 cans of goddamned baked beans. Among other things. Jesus, did I ever get sick of fucking beans.

But those damn things saved my life one night.

Listen …

When it seemed the worst of the plague had played itself out, as we knew it would eventually for that is the manner of such things, I went to the fortified observation deck of my stronghold. I could see, in the distance, smoke, small fires, nothing unusual in that. There were no emergency services anymore and so, when a fire started, it just burnt itself out. God only knows how many poor souls got caught in them. If it wasn’t the sickness that got you, it was a fire, or starvation, or, in the worst cases, some bastard stuck you in the ribs ‘cause you had what they wanted.

Law and order? Not anymore. Not in this gutted new world.

But that night, I heard a rising sound in the near distance. A sound I hadn’t heard before and it seemed, to my ears, like the sound of some strange new mob and not at all human.

I quieted my breathing, deep, slow breaths and focused my hearing, trying to identify this noise.

What fresh new hell was this?

I had a long, large carving knife at hand. I had a heavy, six-pronged fork, its tines fashioned (by myself) to the sharpest tips I could manage. I had a pocket knife.

Downstairs, power tools. If I needed them, I could have them to hand in 26 seconds flat from where I stood. I left nothing to chance.

The sound grew louder. It seemed to be coming straight for me. Still, I couldn’t quite make it out. What the fuck was that?

My stomach growled, my bowels seemed to shift. From fear? No. I’d been eating goddamned beans for the last two weeks now, twice a day. I hadn’t shit in a fortnight. I’d deal with it later. After this thing, whatever it was, was dealt with first.

And just then, I saw them. The things that had been making that sound. And yes, they were coming straight for me, straight for the stronghold. Hundreds of them.

PIGS!

Goddammit.

All of them gone feral and looking for a kill. This was no random mob of brainless animals. They knew what they wanted and they were working as a group, a gang, to get it.

And what they wanted was me.

I felt my stomach groan again, louder this time, longer, a massive shudder went through my bowels and then, that’s when it struck me.

What I had to do.

They got closer. Fast.

Not close enough, though. Not yet.

Hold.

Hold.

Hold.

Hold.

They were one metre from the front wall of the stronghold. And that was when I blew the whole lot of the oinking little fuckers to hell.

I turned my back on them.

Dropped my trousers.

Shifted my arse over the side of the deck.

Grabbed the cigarette lighter from my pocket. Flicked it to life. Held the flame to my anus.

And let nature take its course.

The methane that had built up in my body the last two weeks would’ve gassed a small country. My anus flapped like a bust balloon for what seemed like an hour, and the flames lit up the night sky and obscured the stars, the roar of the fire drowning out the squealing of the swine below me.

Nothing sweeter than the smell of crackling in the morning. The smell, that sweet pork smell. Smells like victory.

And that’s what it was. Victory.

When the plague was over, or rather, the worst of it was over, I told others of my tale of survival. They called me a hero.

And when the world was stable enough that some forms of manufacturing could resume, some forms of commerce, the people at Heinz, they called me, they said they were repackaging their most popular product, renaming it.

Victory Beans.

In ham sauce.

They put my picture on the label.

Goddamn, if that didn’t make me swell up with pride.

I wished the old folks could’ve been around to see it, but, fortunately, they had passed several years before the plague hit.

One thing for sure, they didn’t raise no nancy boy, no sir.

They raised a man.

Damn right they did.

Illustration courtesy of c N m © 2009 c N m. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission. Ta very much.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DISAPPEARED CAT

The next door neighbour’s cat has disappeared.

Its fate concerns me.

You see, over the last 18 months or so, the next door neighbour’s cat and I have become … friends.

This, despite the fact that I’m not overly fond of cats, having always regarded them as rather dumb and stupid. Dumber than a box of rocks, in fact.

Yet, over time and beginning from kittenhood, this creature has wormed its way into my affections, paying regular visits (morning and night) to demand my attention, to eat bugs from the balcony, and to play with my shoes, the latter being an activity that appeared to amuse it no end.

I have never fed the animal. It has an owner whose responsibility that is, and the cat always appeared healthy and untroubled. To feed it again would be an act of cruelty and negligence on my part. I did, however, leave a bowl of water on the balcony for it should it happen to be over my way and fancy a drink after a bug-eating banquet.

Wouldn’t you?

Anyway.

Over the recent Easter long weekend, the next door neighbour and her son went away for the break. I expect they made arrangements with some friend or whatever to have the animal fed and watered during their absence. I would hope so.

Wouldn’t you?

But the cat, confined to a limited area in which to roam (the neighbours flat and balcony and my own), has become a socialised animal and it knows only the company of other humans.

Therefore, its own humans being absent for an extended period of time, it sought my company throughout that weekend and spent most of the four days sleeping on the various chairs on the balcony or, when it was raining, coming inside to sleep behind the couch.

Very obviously, this is a people cat. And, being a people myself, and a people who has no objection to its presence and wishes it no ill will, it seemed happy in my world during that time. And I was happy for its company.

It’s a nice cat.

And then, when the owners returned from wherever it was they had been, the adult owner went out to her balcony and called for it.

But it was at my place.

Inside. Asleep behind the couch. And it didn’t so much as lift its head in recognition at its owners voice.

And so, I picked it up and put it out on the balcony so that it could go home.

It didn’t seem particularly keen at first, but eventually, off it went.

And I’ve not seen hide nor hair of it since.

Which is strange, don’t you think?

What has happened?

I would inquire of my neighbour as to the animals wellbeing, but I’d rather not. You see, she has one of those voices, those voices that seem always to be teetering on the edge of hysteria, do you know? As if, were you to inquire perhaps, “How are you?”, you would receive a catalogue of petty concerns and worries and problems that she feels she is besieged by in response. And, having thusly exchanged words, she would consider you a “friend”, or at least an “acquaintance” from thereon. And you would be bugged endlessly by this, that or the other thing from thereon. Good grief, no.

I live in a block of flats, for God’s sake. I do not want to get to know the fucking neighbours. To do so is to invite oneself into a world full of pain.

If you are my neighbour, mind your own damn business and I’ll mind mine. “Fuck off” in other words, got it? I don’t want to be your fucking friend.

Nevertheless.

Would I be far off the mark to assume that the owner, disturbed by the fact that her cat has been in my company during her extended absence, is jealous of this? And has confined her animal to quarters, has somehow managed to restrict its movements outside so that it can no longer roam of its own free will? This strikes me as cruel.

Or, perhaps, has she surrendered the animal to some pound, some refuge and that she did so due to some perceived infidelity on the animals part?

That would be extreme, don’t you think?

And disturbing.

Very disturbing.

It disturbs me.

Would it disturb you?

Yes. Yes, it would. Of course it would. Unless you are mad.

For it would seem I have lost a friend. And to what and why it has been lost, I do not know. I don’t have that many friends left to lose (refer attitude to neighbours).

This saddens me.

I even looked on a number of animal pound and refuge websites this morning to see if a picture of the animal in question may have been there.

No.

Nothing.

Where is it?

I am worried and I keep asking myself this question. Again and again.

Wouldn’t you?

And I don’t even know the animals name.

I used to call it “Cat”, as in, “Hello, cat. How’s things?”

He’s a cat, for Christ’s sake, why would he need a name?

But where has cat gone?

Cat?

Cat?

Hello?

Cat?

Come back, cat.

Hello?
…

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Ah, crap.

I’m definitely going soft in the head.

Definitely.

Goddammit.

Goddammit all to hell.

GOD TAKES A HOLIDAY

Now that I’ve been a God for a bit now, I thought I’d take a break and go down to Sydney for a visit.

But then I realised that being a God means you’re everywhere all at once and all at the same time, so I must’ve already been there when I arrived.

I could have saved myself the fucking air fare.

I’m so dense at times.

Anyway.

…

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…

Food tastes the same when you’re a God. You’d think it’d be spiffed up a bit, wouldn’t you?

…

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I had a burger with cheese for lunch yesterday. And a Coke.

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We have a vending machine upstairs. You can get Coke for a buck forty a can. At the shop it’s two bucks.

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That’s sixty cents.

Difference.

…

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If you had, let’s see, if you had a can of Coke every day of the year for lunch, and you bought it upstairs instead of the shop, that’d be, it’d be … about two hundred bucks a year.

Difference.

Saved.

…

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I did that without a calculator.

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We’re good at stuff like that. Gods.

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I might have a pizza today.

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Or a pie. And a sausage roll.

There’s a good pie shop the other side of the station.

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It’s okay, I mean. It’s not fantastic. What I mean by “good”. You know?

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I must be in a mood.

Do you think?

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It’s not easy being a God. Lots of stuff to do. To think about.

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Lots.

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There’s a curry house up the road.

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I like curry.

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THE TONGUE COMMANDMENTS

This morning I woke up and declared myself a God. Why not? It beats a cup of coffee.

Anyway, now that I’m a God, you have to follow all these rules …

1. Thou shalt not Twitter. Twittering art for tools. Twitter not.

2. Don’t forget to breathe.

3. Thou shalt not read Shakespeare, rather, thou shalt speak it, for that was the purpose for which it was wrote.

4. Do something else.

5. In matters of art, do not condemn thyself as a fool by claiming that thou “couldst have done that”. If thou couldst have done it, thou wouldst of done it. Thou did not. They did.

6. Thou shalt devote at least one day of rest in a year to the watching of Marx Brothers movies. Give sport a rest.

7. Melancholia is not an illness. Take brief occasions of time to be so afflicted and reflect upon regrets on the things that may have been but were not, or the things that were that went wobbly. It will pass.

8. Place thy words upon, and speak with and through thy breath and not through thy throat for thy breath is open and thy throat is closed.

9. Forsake all ideologies and indulge not in belief. Be lief what thou art and only what thou art and be no other.

10. Enough with the shoes or shirts already. Buy thyself a very nice hat and wear it often. Thou shalt feel splendid and rather spiffy.

These rules work better than all the other rules do, so obey these ones and not those other ones. Those other ones are shit.

I’m a God, so I should know.

You need to go and find me some girls now and send them to me so that I may bless them. I’d like to bless them somewhere private, so go and build me a big shed or a barn or whatever. With big heavy doors.

Yes. A dungeon would be nice. I’ll pick out some shackles.

A nook? I can’t bless girls in a nook. I’m a God. God’s don’t lurk about in fucking nooks … Oh, alright. If it’s only temporary. Leave some towels out. And a bowl?

Why are you eating fish? You should eat fish tomorrow.

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…

That’s a nice lamp.

I’ll have that.

BY THE WAY, HAVE YOU HEARD? ...

A song in 10 verses from today’s hymnbook …

1. (i) NATIONWIDE RECESSION.

1. (ii) GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS.

1. (iii) GLOBAL ECONOMIC DOWNTURN.

1. (iv) MASS UNEMPLOYMENT.

1. (v) MARKETS CRASH.

1. (vi) BILLIONS LOST.

1. (vii) TOTAL FINANCIAL COLLAPSE.

1. (viii) AND THE DEAD WILL RISE … and rip the flesh from our wombs and feed upon the organs of the unborn and the skies shall become black with demons whose wings shall rain poison upon the earth and scour it of skin. Women will tear the heads from their children and use the flayed and ragged face skins for boot-cloth, and the men shall use the excoriated skulls to adorn their weapons and boulders shall fall from the sky.

1. (ix) AND NOSFERATU’S MINIONS, … riding upon a litter of fire-licked hellhounds, will spread through the barren desanctified lands to do the bidding of the black agents of darkest night, to gather the living and render them dead, so that soul after soul after tortured soul can be tumbled unto the flaming red maw of Hades, whilst their mortal bodies are drained of each final drop of thickening blood which shall then plenish the thirsts of the damned.

1. (x) AND A FURIOUS DARKNESS SHALL BOIL … the very skies to dust which shall then cover the earth and blind a defeated God’s eye to all that once reigned upon it, and man and all his works shall be rendered unto oblivion and the ignorance of history, whereupon the planets shall align themselves to the triumphant orbit of an annihilating Anti-Christ and hurl themselves towards this desecrated rock so that it may be blasted beyond the dimensions of all known and unknown time.

After which, things get really bad.