5 Things You Learn As A Sociophobic Student Journalist.

For as long as I can remember, which usually means forever, I have been sociophobic. I know in the old talk that is shy, and that me using anything else is utter hypocrisy given my loathing of wankers. But this one feels more medical and so less like I have a choice in the matter, as passing-the-buck on all of my shortcomings is a consuming priority of mine.

What does this mean? Well, probably close enough to what you think. I avoid making phone calls, I dread a knock at the door, my small talk is more small than talk, I dodge friends I have dodged for too long as they are now strangers and I hope for long lines at the supermarket so I can think of something clever to say to the checkout chick or chap.

                                                             My Dog Has Diarrhoea.

I am also a student-journalist and, as it turns out, that involves talking to a lot of strangers. While I have done various journalism subjects over my degree, none of them involved as much stranger-contact as this one. I actually bailed out of this same class a year ago for my fear of contacting people.

Though this year I am a little older and a little more afraid of falling into that class of irrecoverable weak-sauce. I really like writing feature articles and would consider this a real career prospect, like Gladwell or Ronson. Plus I am within pissing distance of my bachelors. Nothing for it but to sack up and bite the bullet.

Through the process I learned some convenient truths, some of which are:

What Is The Worst They Can Do?

In preparation for some of these big interviews I would continually ask myself this question. It turned out, probably because I was a student-journalist rather than a real one, that most were very accommodating and worked around all my nonsense.

But then, what was the worst? I suppose in philosophical extremes they could have killed me. But realistically they could have said no or told me to leave. Not so bad. Not worth ageing over, though probably a devastating shot to the esteem. Lucky I am a student and don't have to face the real world until I am in my thirties.

Even An Apparently Boring Subject Can Yield Good Stories.

As part of this class all the stories have to be community based. When I went to film school our first semester we edited on Steenbeck's and worked the audio on magnetic tape, totally redundant technologies in the real world but the idea was to gain an appreciation for the craft. I can only assume this was the same idea, to learn from the bare bones, though probably also to set an achievable goal for a bunch of 20something fuck-wits.

                             I Think These Two Have A Story, Way Better Than Your Dumb Story.

At first I thought it too limiting, not in line with my grandiose aspirations. I tried to work myself in and make it a participatory type of journalism. Though through the interviews I realised how stupid I had been. Subjects will give you everything if you let them speak and realise you are not god's gift to the world of the word.

You Want More.

Going into these interviews I had a magic number in mind, one hour. That is conventional wisdom on how long you need to get enough out of a subject. That is also how long I would have to ignore my itchy nut-sack, wonder whether the microphone on my phone was getting everything and chewing my lip, literally chomping at the bit, to get out of there.

What I found was, most of the time, I was genuinely interested and wanting to talk for more time. Most of the interviews lasted longer than an hour and I only ended it because I felt like a nuisance on my subjects.

                                               For the Love Of God! Please Continue. 

You Realise Your Worth.

Yes, it is probably because I am a student these people agreed to sit down with me. But they, nonetheless, sat down with me. What I expected was party-lines, the default answer, the easy way out. But they were open and honest. I know I am not covering a sex-scandal, political wrongdoing or case of bigotry. Still, it is nice to know if you put it on front street, they will too.

It is, essentially, nice to know they will put their words and story in your hands. It is a huge boost to the ego, mine is already bulging, and a nice vote of confidence. Basically, you realise you can do it; the interview, the thing that seems so conceptually impossible. And you feel like a million bucks walking our of there.

                                                   And What A Great Feeling. 

You Aren't As Good As You Think You Are.

Yes, it felt good climbing that mountain. I know, if I do what I want to do, I will have to do it many times more. But I know after each one, I could have done better. There were moments of lull that I could have filled with a good question, I could have redirected the conversation away from the repetitive, I should've asked about about everything that would make my story a well rounded piece.

For me it is enough climbing the mountain, I will be able to have a cigar there with time.

Journalism is, in the words of the Irish, a tough crack. Questioning strangers is, to me, the horror of all horrors. But I am getting better at both, and both are my future. There is a weird amount to learn outside your comfort zone.

NP.  

I Almost Avoided Shitting Myself In India, and So Can You.

I have probably written of it before, but I went to India in the June of 2012. I had to look that up as my date memory is famously shitty. Reading the visa application form is, at three years later, like relearning something about yourself. I am an un-married atheist, for the record.

Anyway, I am sure if and when I did write on this before that mentioned I was going for a friends wedding. Which, in my opinion, is about the best reason to go to India. I got to dress very colourfully (and on the cheap), saw a monkey at the ceremony and fought over a shoe. Just splendid.

India was splendid also, what a country. In some ways it is kind of an unknown unknown, something you think you know but don't. At least you don't know the extent of its awesomeness. Everything is cheap, for a start, and it is hard to imagine many places where getting ripped off feels entirely reasonable. The bars don't kick you out after two beers, you can smoke in the bars, they do this spiced nut combo version of bar nuts. I guess it is fair to say I had a fair bit of fun in the bars.

But the country, at least what I saw of it, is splendid also. After hitting Europes hot-spots the year before it was nice not to see another Australian. I saw two white people (not connected to the wedding or my party) while I was there. I cannot mention the food, it is tough for me in the same way as reminiscing on a dead relative.

Now to brass tacks. What was not so splendid was what we call Delhi Belly. I am pretty sure more than the food was to blame, but I shan't elaborate as I may incriminate myself.

I had become used to, and an avid fan of, the Indian method of wiping ones bottom. That is, ironically, not a wipe at all but a purpose built tap to wash out the orifice once defecation has taken place. I found it works better than any deck of shit-tickets I have come across and, on the whole, seems a more economic option. I saw one in the house of an Japanese friend of ours and was, to say the least, overjoyed.

But naturally, like the kidney shaped swimming pool or the self-cleaning oven, the shitter tap is not afforded every home or venue. In India, at least in Bangalore, proceedings are stretched longer than they are here in Australia. Here, be it our penchant for alcoholism or our busy and important lives, the 'Special Day' is just that, a day.

In India, it is more like a week. They know how to commemorate and or party. The day of the wedding is, traditionally and from what I have learned, teetotal and sober. The day after is what we would call the 'reception'. A meal and money on the bar. The latter appealed to me so I hooked in

We had danced a lot the night before, me never really grasping the Indian style. Im no natural dancer, all the more proved by the style and grace of the Indians. I was well and truly punching above my weight.

The next day, the reception, there was more dancing but it was more relaxed. It felt less like anyone cared and so I, particularly after the open bar, let loose. And somewhere in the throng of emo tion, colour, smiles and splashed drinks my bowel hit red alert. I rushed to the toilet and did my devils work looked for the little shower I was used to.

I instead found an ice-cream tub full of water. I washed up the best I could and thought hard on sacrificing a shirt or a pair of jocks. I was shocked, this place was like a god-damned Novotel, and it didn't have the cool little shower head.

Cigarettes have done a good number on my sense of smell but emerging from the primitive toilet I immediately smelled myself and thought of going home. I opted instead to go and smoke and hope good company would eventually need to smoke also.

As a smoker I am used to sitting out of nose-shot of others, but this was something else. Among smokers I had to sit further away. Pretty young women sat next to me to have cigarettes and I did my best to manufacture a reason to move.

Eventually my friends and I left and the crisis was over. Except that we were due in two days to go further south, an eight hour bus ride. I enquired about toilets.

'Well it stops every couple of hours' my Indian friend deadpanned back to me.

At that point every couple of hours might as well have been every couple of days. I couldn't leave a perimeter that wasn't within running distance of a toilet. To their credit, my friends stayed with me.

I had been there two and a half weeks and could not believe this hadn't happened sooner. I spent three days on the toilet. I almost got away with it, my weak guts almost conquered India.

And I would've gotten away with it, if not for those scheming kids.

NP.

Why the Guy Sebastian Prospect is an Embarrassment and a Travesty to Both Australia and Eurovision.

If you are even faintly aware of Guy Sebastian you will know his potential for cringe. Sure he has a great voice, sure he won a bullshit competition, sure he teamed up with the objectively killer Lupe Fiasco.

But on the other hand he took a long ass time to get laid which is not how playboys do, has an unusually wide and boxy face and made his pretty-much white-guy afro front and center of his Australian idol campaign. Unlike Shannon Noll who had the damn class to make his terrible soul patch the focus of his. I have always been a Noll man, even despite this bitchy shit:

This fuckin' thing.

                                             All lifes regret in one small patch of fur. 

While it is pretty-well undeniable that Guy Sebastian is the biggest success to come out of Australian Idol and arguably one of the most successful Australian singers in the last decade or so I still don't trust him. In some ways he is too vanilla, in some ways he is too weird and not in the fun way. He seems like the kind of guy who would fuck with his socks on or would call his parents to get him at midnight on a sleep over, never quite able to commit.

If you know anything of Eurovision, you know it is weird. It made its name on the back of ABBA; to some a carefree disco band, to some a group hitting at the very humanity of love and life, to me a bunch of Aryan nihilists unhappy with their fat wallets and effortless good looks. Obviously it goes deeper and gets way weirder.

Lordi, the Finnish heavy metal band who dress somewhere between Rob Zombie and Kurt Russell in the Escape movies, won in 2006. Apparently this was classed as 'making history'. Weirdly though, they are a good band who make good music. They just spend a bunch of time getting made up to look like Davy Jones in Pirates.

Conchita Wurst, who won last year, was a bearded lady.

In 2012 these delusional Russian weirdos entered.

Except they weren't really delusional. Europe is weird, purely because it is a relatively small land mass to contain so many conflicting and old cultures. Russians love vodka, Greeks love ouzo, Brits love piss-warm beer, Germans love good beer and the French love themselves. It is a real hot-pot of different ideas and ideals. Slot this into the context of an intercontinental song contest and there is no earthly reason off-key nuns shouldn't be proudly singing the song of their equally weird people.

Eurovision is popular in Australia; the winners get a good run in the press, the contest is televised to big audiences and watercooler conversation runs rampant that special time of year. Call it good tacky fun, it is probably the fun of the piss-take that enthralls us.

And being the staunch competitors we are, shouldn't we love the idea of a real competitor entering this domain of weird? For the win, for the gold?

No, we should not. Here are a few reasons why:

It is Eurovision.

I know the second part is vision, which is obliquely common to us all, but the first part is Euro. We are, geographically and culturally, on opposite ends of the spectrum. Can we not just let them have their fun? And watch from a distant land with a pizza coagulating on the coffee table, a bong within arms reach and a cold slab in the fridge? Is that not Eurovision to us Australians?

Why not Iran, they are borderline Europe and would be a shitload more fun to watch than this guy...Sebastian.

It is Not A Fair Fight.

Name a world competition where a nation need not compete but proceed directly to the finals? Name one and I will show you a bullshit competition. Allowing Australia in at all undercuts the very ethos of Eurovision and allowing us to proceed without challenge undercuts the very ethos of competition. To quote that douchebag Derryn Hinch, 'Shame, shame, shame'.

It Takes A Spot Away from More Deserving Countries.

I don't know but do imagine with confidence that winning Eurovision, or even competing, is like the fuckin' lottery to countries like Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Estonia, Moldova and Georgia. Putting Australia in pole position automatically snuffs a chance for one of those countries; more deserving, more enthusiastic and you know it would mean a whole bunch more to them.

Our Entry Doesn't Really Represent Australia.

Eurovision, despite all it's insanity, is a patriotic affair. It's about being blindly proud of your country and what it can do in 'music'.

I am not suggesting Guy Sebastian is not Australian, just that he is not quintessentially Australian. By that I mean he is not drunk, racist, a keen cricket fan, on centrelink, the owner of a Monaro or brewing his own beer and cooking his own meth as a matter of pride.

Surely a better representative would be this guy:

He is Doubtless Weird, But is He Eurovision Weird.

As I mentioned above, Eurovision demands a certain amount of weirdness. I also mentioned Guy Sebastian is weird and, once more, the difference in types of weird. He is, at least to me, comfortably straddling the line between weird and creepy.

Put it this way; I cannot picture him gently delivering his lyrics to the sound of rhythmic glass breaking, the back-beat of a hairy fist on a dead goats stomach, all while having his hair corn-rowed by an ageing over-weight Hatian prostitute.

So then the bigger question looms, is he really Eurovision material?

NP. 

Meditations In The Loss

I saw my brother on the phone and trembling, only slightly, as his voice ploughed to the next plane. Wilting as it involuntarily rose to the upper level of his range. If our siblings could be marketed as a superstar pop group he would unquestionably be 'The Sensitive One', though if you stuck us in a yearbook he would also doubtless be 'Least Likely To Show Needless Emotion', I saw tears develop.

This was not the usual 'Life is Shit for the 20-Something' kind of deal, reading his face I knew something serious had happened. What had happened was that a Japanese friend of ours, Ayumi, had taken her own life.

She had been here a few years on a travel/work holiday and her English never advanced to the point that she could express the pain she was in, though common wisdom on suicide might mean that translation difficulties would have meant little either way. It is this sort of question that ricochets around your head when someone goes like this, only hushes, never fully leaving.

I first met Ayumi, probably in 2014. It may have been late 2013, though my date memory is notoriously bad. She had become the third room mate in a sharehouse of two of our other friends when a third friend moved out. I am 6'3 and ,though not exactly Andre the Giant, fairly used of being marginally taller than others. But Ayumi was petite, practically four-foot-nothing with a thick head of jet-black hair, a perpetual smile and a real enthusiasm for the world.

As we did, and as we do, we would mainly run into each other on drinking occasions (Saturday or Wednesday nights, or come to think of it, any night people had the next day free or could slog through it with a fog-head) at the house. Ayumi, probably due to her miniscule stature, was among the cheapest drunks I have ever seen. Three drinks in she would be rolling drunk, but always smiling and laughing more heartily at herself than anything else, which is a rare quality in drunk people.

I have a penchant on a certain amount of drinks of trying to learn words in other languages. It's nothing really new, but pronounced when I drink. So I would bore or crack-up Ayumi with my drunken and way off the mark Japanese pronunciations. She would work hard to correct me in between syllables of complete laughter and I would work hard to try again, with zero progress and more hysterical noise at my utter failing.

It was great to watch her laugh. Even in my failings, my fortified confidence being drenched would usually turn me to a sulky beer-soaked cretin, but that laugh could cut through the worlds pettiness in a heartbeat. You never got the feeling she was laughing at you or with you. Just that she was laughing, laughing at everything and you felt OK about being a part of everything.

In all this I became attracted to her and worked up the courage to ask her out...on Facebook. She accepted and I decided I wanted to show her some Polish food. I cancelled under the strain of school work, but rescheduled. I was excited on the prospect and thought long and hard about how to make a date good, and how to make it good for this girl, then I cancelled again under the strain of self-doubt and sheer weakness. I tried to reschedule, a glutton for self-punishment.

'I have the feeling you will just cancel again' she told me.

'I probably will, but I don't want to disappoint you'

'If you were my boyfriend it would be disappointing, but you are my friend so it's OK'

Her logic and realness let me know I had let myself lose something I really wanted. Another question to ricochet around the mind for eternity.

I miss you Ayumi.

NP.

Note: The name has been changed to spare family and others who might be concerned.

Locked Out, or As Anastacia Might Put It, Left Outside Alone.

In my youth I was a massive Anastacia fan. Sure my cousins gave me epic shit about it. They spoke of how her voice was utterly awful and annoying, how I would be embarrassed one day and how she was basically devastatingly undermining the important efforts of more important bands like Pearl Jam and The Fugees.

To that I say, fuck the 90's. And also I was like 12 they could have cut me a break with my Bieber level worship of Anastacia, I didn't need to have taste then.

You might remember Anastacia as a sort of female Bono, also with an allegedly annoying voice and also who did Evanescence before that was...cool?

This song and video conveniently display all three.

But they also express something I am hitting at. The chorus, or hook, notes the isolation of being 'Left Outside Alone', quote:

'I wonder if you know, how it really feels

To be left outside alone.'

I can only assume my girl Anastacia is referring to emotional neglect in a relationship that likens itself to being outside, with all its weather, and alone with all its lack of people.

Years later, I would know exactly what that is like.

We are at a bar on Oxford St., Sydney’s gay street and also one of the more fun. Not uncommon for us; we lived four blocks away, enjoyed partying and, well both those things.

I am with my house-mate, a sociable fellow and a very dear friend. We have a new house-mate and because of this a shortage of keys. Thinking back on it, I have no idea why the new house-mate resulted in a lack of keys.

We drink and party and have fun, a usual Friday/Saturday night. Then my social friend wants to leave but has no keys. No big deal, take mine. I am too drunk to care or consider the implications. I hand over the precious metal and assure him I will meet him back at the house in the next hour or so.

He disappears, I drink on. Good times, I am having fun. I go on like this for a while. Then, the pain of being human, the fun is over. I am too fucked and it is, regrettably time to go home.

I knock on the door. Nothing. I knock again, louder, still nothing. I knock once more, louder still, and again nothing. I pull my phone from my pocket, dead.

I am drunk and weary. My friend and my keys are both inside. I sit on the step for forty minutes in the brisk Sydney barely-morning. I wonder how this situation will end. I try to prop myself in the door jam thinking I might be able to sleep it off there. No dice, I am too big and the jam too small.

I look up to his window and notice it is open. I want to shout through the unsecured membrane but reconsider, my better judgement pulls me to earth. Our neighbours are working professionals and yuppie families, I can't fuck their tomorrow.

I sit again on the step and notice it is bin night. His window is pretty big, his bed is nearby enough that window that with a good throw I can wake him . I begin lobbing rubbish through the window. Well, mostly through, a fair amount bounced back. I choose from the recycling because I don't want anything soiled to land in his sanctuary, I am desperate but not a monster.

I land around a dozen good throws. No dice. I figure something heavier might do the trick. I fish a large red-bull can from the bin, pedantically drain it and begin throwing. Part of my problem is that to thread the garbage through the window I need to text-book lob, essentially garunteeing a soft landing and disallowing a wake-up call.

I throw the can maybe half a dozen times without hitting the spot. It loudly clangs on the building and falls to earth, over and over.

A pissed-off neighbour, hopefully unaware of my plight, yells.

'Could you please shut the fuck up'

Let it not be said that manners are lost on the affluent.

With this latest defeat I walk to a local park. I am now more weary than drunk, the sun is cresting but it is still cold and I desire a cigarette. I s ee a fat, bald and designer-jeans man walking his abomination of a dog. I am lapping for the smoke relief of a cigarette but have no lighter (I threw that through the window, made a shit load of sense at the time). I see his smoking. Anti-smoking snobbery is not yet a thing.

I ask if I might borrow his lighter. He passes one to me, somewhat passive aggresively, and I torch. We smoke together and I explain my plight. To him I am, on some level, homeless. Though on every level, pathetic

This is how I am to this weird guy and his dog, on some level. 

         He stays on, I figure, because his dog is in ecstasy and probably because the poor little bastard spends all his days in some affluent, post-modern shithole. I bludge his lighter one more time before he leaves.

I sit and smoke alone. The sun is making it's way now. The suburb is lit up. The light looks, and feels, like a supreme hangover. I take that first lit cigarette and use it to torch a second, and a third.

Then I decide we might be close to the hours when the waking might offer assistance. Tough call in any city but I sincerely have no other call. I check my watch, 6 A.M. I have the smouldering butt of the third cigarette and no lighter. I have five cigarettes left, I chain them all. I know the guy next door is a family man.

I know a family lives there so figure the wife is also a family woman, and that the kids are probably family kids. I smoke and shield my cold body in the foetal position with the t-shirt over the knees.

At 7 A.M the woman next door asks me if I would like to walk through her house to get to my backyard. I don't know too many real-life saints.

I stroll across the floor, complete with road map carpet, and promptly hop the fence. The windows are barred and the back-door latch is just out of my reach. I yell up the stairway. It is late enough in the day that I can.

'Noel' comes the eventual reply.

'I'm locked out'.

My social friend and room mate is awake. He let's me in.

'I Woke up and my room was full of garbage'

He buys me a Dominoes sandwhich as repayment.

I promptly accept.

We watch Colbert Report and get stoned.

So, yes Anny, I do.

NP. 

On A Cock-Blocking Polish Grandpa

I was in Europe with my grandfather some years ago. I spent my twenty second birthday there (which I only know because, on the advice of an Irish rugby team, I spent the night telling people I was twenty one to solicit more free drinks. Which would make it, 2012. Or 2011. Somewhere in there, beer in Europe is a huge player.

Anyway, we were in the south of Poland in a town called Muszyna. I guess kinda the bum-fuck of Poland, though in a weird twist, the bum-fuck of the great grey industrial east of Europe is kinda the place to be. Eight kilomeeers from the shitty border into shitty Slovakia. In summer, as when I was there, it looks like

My grandfather, a Polack and a fucking weirdo, is a health nut. He goes back to the mother country to get fifteen minutes of sun on each of his four sides, eat mackerel and walk a lot. He expects the same of me, I don't have the heart to tell him I want to meet our family. I want to see Europe. He has seen Europe and suspects the family is trying to kill him, for all his millions I guess. So we walked. Well, we walked after a bus ride.

Krynica is the neighbouring town, bigger and with more to do and see. We would fork out our weird coins every day, get the bus 8 kilometres up the road and walk around for most of the day, or until lunch time as old people are weirdly preoccupied with lunch. To the elderly, and I didn't know this, lunch is like Friday night beers to the working man, Centrelink pay-day beers to the non-working man and any-time beers to the student.

We would have lunch in a 'home kitchen', essentially someone's house run as a a resturant. The food was killer though it seems to be some sort of compromise for the women not working. Then we would walk a little more and pay more weird coins to go back to Muszyna. After doing what he wanted to do, we did what I wanted to do; drink cheap Polish beer.

We did this for a month. A solid daily routine. Our walks through Krynica would inevitably start, end or go though the town square. In the town square, most days, was a stripper handing out flyers for an upcoming skin show.

This stripper was something of a beauty, though her glory years had long passed. She was oddly tanned for a Pole, buxom, a big arse (my favourite) and cropped peroxide blonde hair. She kind of looked like a more fuckable Jessica Rowe.

I took one of her flyers and committed myself to seeing her nude (seeing her show, that is). I know now this is crass and crude and piggish and all the other bad penis shit. But at the time I was coming off Warsaw, Krakow and Bratislava. I was coming off grey cement cities with the most divinely sculpted things, things inconceivable to me, a kind of astonishing human that I had never seen.

Plus I was very horny. I admired all these women but did jack shit about it. I couldn't even play the rugged Australian angle with any good faith. When my grandfather went for a shit, I would go for a wank. Another different generational obsession.

I got the flyer and told him I wanted to go. He said with the great confidence of the foolish, that he would go with me. He knew full well the non-Polski speaking where ripe for punishment in the open. I did too. He translated to me, in Catholic old guy speak, a torrent of vicious abuse directed at me on the bus from Krakow to Muszya. So, we walked on. I was very keen to see the Polish Jessica Rowe's bits. I reaffirmed with the old man every day that he would chaperone and each day he affirmed he would.

I was, indeed, all the more keen when one day I was drunk at the Muszyna bakery (you can do that shit there) and the aforementioned stripper approached me to ask if I was O.K (At the behest of the bakeries lovely matriarch and owner). The love of my life approached me and was talking to me. The reason was that I desperately needed a piss and was positive the toilet was occupied. The bakeries owner conversed with the stripper and through my shitty Polish it was apparent the stripper spoke English, a cultured sex-pot. I told her I needed to use the toilet, she informed me it was empty and I did my business. Smitten again.

Then the day came. The day I put up with all my grandfathers bullshit for, the day I stayed in Poland for. The strip night.

'Oh I don't think I'll go to that'

Though it sounds like the words of a snobbish Englishman, it was the words of an old Pole looking through the fog.

He had his back to me, straightening out one of many khaki-safari pant and vest combos that he thought made him look taller.

'Why not, you said you would?' I asked, given my natural connection to the lady paid to make false connections with people, I thought this outrageous.

'Oh, I don't know. I just don't feel upto it'

THAT MOTHERFUCKER! After he had agreed twenty times, promised me, told me the horrors of how Australians and English speakers were treated at these kind of things. He really wasn't going to use his language skills to help me see naked women.

'I wouldn't mind paying them to come here for a bit of sex with you' he said.

I wouldn't mind either.

He went to sleep, I went for a wank.

NP    

I Saw Someone Famous in a Wine Bar This One Time.

I don’t run into famous people all that much. There are some notables; I saw the guy who played ‘Rick’ on Home and Away at a Motorhead and Motley Crue concert, I saw renowned Australian music critic Glenn A. Baker at both an Eric Clapton concert and on King St. in Newtown, exiting one of Sydneys great record stores as might be expected. But overall, the A through Z list is far from my day to day.

This Fuckin Guy

Also This Guy...

But there was one notable day. I was in Surry Hills, in a wine bar, with a friend who loves wine. It is kind of the only reason I would ever be in a wine bar. This particular wine bar was on Bourke St. nearby my home and it's days were spent closed with brown butchers paper over the windows. The aforementioned friend is a social animal, though also holds something of the detective spirit within her. In this case, the two aligned perfectly.

So, we go. I am swayed to enter the unbridled wank-fest that is a wine bar on the promise that it is not my shout. My companion and myself drink heartily (I drink heartier, trying to chase sour grapes with sour grapes and be comfortable as wallpaper with no earthly business in a place where jeans have given names on them and things are sent back).

We talk films, my friend has just had a medical ordeal in which she was scared and promised to build churches and so on, and so has some fresh insight on what life can dish out. She has vision and passion for a project, still in its infancy, I support the idea and suggest I could write it. I highly doubt I could make a film worth a damn, but I am fairly certain I can write one. At that age I still believe in myself. We laugh and plot seriously, as you do at one bottle in, the moves we will make to bring her vision to term.

And then the second bottle, then more fun. It is closing in on 9 P.M. In walks, flanked by a group as large as that of a rapper or prize-fighter, Natalie Bassingthwaighte. Though at first we don't know that, of course we don't we are talking movies and writing and art. We are talking everything important .

Closer to the end of the bottle my notoriously awful bladder let's me know of the psychopathic rush it needs. I scan the room for the male toilet. Then I spot her. A tiny person among leeches.

'Isn't that the chick from neighbours'

I was, at one regrettable time, a massive neighbours fan. A moment later my pocket shakes, agitating the already radicalised contents of my bladder. My friend, a foot away, has texted me.

'That's the Rogue Traders chick!'

                                                        This Piece of Shit. 

At that time the Rogue Traders where...kind of a big deal.

Now we share something real. Something more than wine or co-drunkenness. We are both in the room with an awful famous person. The urine recedes into me. Nat, as we now know her, is only mildly famous. Still you wouldn't know it from the kid gloves her possy wears. Each of them seems to be gunning for fame by association. My friend and I laugh our asses off at the dancing each of them does to keep on her good side. She is a dictator, by mild fame only.

Then a slightly racist joke is made. So barely, barely racist it doesn't register to me. It is non-funny, it falls on its face. But the eternal Miss Bassingthwaigthe needs to make an issue of it.

'I just don't feel like that is, I just don't wanna be that way'

And a chorus of 'Sorry Nat' sings pedantically.

My friend and I drink on, laughing, one table over. It seemed pathetic, it was pathetic. At the urging of the ring-leder they leave after two bottles and not a one seemed happy. We leave after three, smiling and singing through the bowels of a Surry Hills Friday night.

NP.