Regular visitors to Clubdes – yes, all four of you – will have noticed that the right hand side of this page hasn’t been updated this week. Rest assured its not through lack of inspiration because we at ClubDes are blessed with a fertile mind, unfortunately the body is not so well endowed. Except for the huge chopper that is.
So we’re back on the wards for another 10 days of fun filled excitement in what I like to think was a pre-planned sabotage of my last course of treatment by all the hot nurses who never got to give me the bed bath they were all clearly gagging for. That’s my story anyway and I’m sticking to it. Coincidentally, although I’m on a different ward this time round, I did notice my old murse Arvind had transferred wards too and he still has that glint in his eye…
It was quite the surprise to find that I was no longer on the ward where all the cool kids hang out. It was even more of a surprise to find that Ward 16 has a higher mortality rate than 17. Considering that two people died on my last visit to Ward 17 I’ve been expecting to witness a steady stream of bodies to start trucking their way past my room each day. It hasn’t eventuated and to date there have been no deaths which is even more amazing considering that in the week that I’ve been there I’ve been given the wrong medication - not once, but twice - and have even been ‘misplaced’ by my duty nurse. Admittedly I was on my bed the whole time but my room is a big place, I can see how she missed me there.
Infact it’s been all rather quiet and dare I say it – peaceful. That was until the lady with explosive diarrhea moved into the room next to me and started using the bathroom we share. There’s nothing quite as invigorating as hearing someone ablute throughout the day, especially when it sounds like they’re exploding every time they take a dump. To her credit though, despite sounding like a espresso machine on steroids, I never found the toilet in such a state as to look like one, so she either cleaned up big time or it was all for show. Thankfully her stay was a short one and my carzie has returned to sole occupancy.
The Beijing Olympic committee is my other neighbors. An elderly Asian lady is in Room 1 and true to form, so are 47 members of her immediate family. My Chinese is not what it should be but they seem to be coping well despite the space restrictions. I'm best placed for when the food starts cooking though, I'll be first in line for a Number 5 and some wantons.
What a multicultural world we live in aye? Why at this very moment I am typing this in an Internet cafe run by a Somalian couple. They run the wig and hair extension shop next door too which is handy really because I'm in the market for some braids. Unfortunately I still have the remnants of the ADHD boy haircut my wife gave me a few weeks back so it's going to have to be my pubes this time round.
Back on the ward there is a large Maori nurse that spends her evenings phoning the whanau from the front desk right outside my room and speaks to all 23 of them in turn. Sometimes they discuss the content of the Ngati Porou website she spends the rest of her shift surfing. And I can’t forget the Chuman who bought me mandarins (the fruit, not the people) on his visit with the Help Desk Massive last week.
So it’s fair to say that yet again, it’s been emotional. I can’t say that I’ve found this visit quite as inspirational as the last but I have had a few small highlights, my sexy blue eyed blonde Saffa physio, Sam, being one.
She’s worth getting sick again for.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Real Men Eat Jaffas.
There are some seriously disturbing trends with young men these days and for once it’s got nothing to do with porn, drugs or sex. Why is it that just about every adolescent boy is trying their best to look like a girl?
Every time I'm anywhere I’m struck by just how many long fringed, long sided, long mulleted bouffant hairdos there are being worn by fellas. Throw in some daggy sunnies – present company excluded Big Al – skin tight jeans and you have something that’s neither hetro nor metro sexual, but asexual. It’s not even grunge or alternative, which in my day was about as asexual as a fella could get but even then everyone knew Kurt Cobain, who we were all trying to mimic, was a fella. But now our young men are dressing more and more like the Hanson boys and look where it got them.
‘Freedom of expression’ this looking like a girl might be, but its also making them look a lot like a waster. How do they see exactly with their long fringes pasted over their eyes? If it’s impaired vision you want why not just whack a pair of testes on the forehead as well and complete the look? It can only be described as not wanting to look like anything but trying to look like something. Make up your minds I say and either choose to look like a man or tuck it between the legs and go girl. And don’t get me started on the lady boys who then want to look hard by wearing their hoodie up whilst in the mall, thus removing their last bit of sensory perception. I’ve decided that to combat this I’m going to start giving a downtrou to anyone wearing a hoodie inside. We'll see how long the hoodies stay up when the tweeds start a comin down.
It’s a sad indictment on society today that mothers are happy for their boys to look like shaggy dogs rather than make them cut their hair and risk having little Tarquin resent them for it. Fathers are too scared to be real men in case they get done for abuse and are not dragging their sons down to the barbers every six weeks like our Dads did with us. And lets get one thing straight right now - a barber shop is not to be confused with a hair salon either. You don’t get a wash, a shampoo and a pair of boobies in the face like you do at Rodney ‘Titty’ Wayne when you visit a real barbers, which is a good thing because frankly, teats have no place near a real haircut. That's why these haircuts exist todays because these wasters go to the salon and have some chick boob bag them rather than using a bowl on the head as a guide like Mum used too.
My step father was like clock work when it came to haircuts. We’d be down at the Naenae barbers five minutes after it opened at 7am to wait in line with all the retired guys who were there for three things only; a cut, some tobacco and to get the hell out of the house and away from their wives. Old Les was my favourite barber, he’d been doing in so long that he had a permanent hunchback which meant you could never quite tell if he was looking at you or not due to the height of his head and his inability to raise it. He knew everybody by name and their favourite cut but then that was easy because there’s only one cut at a real barbers shop; short back and sides.
There’s nothing quite exhilarating as walking to school with a new haircut on a cold morning that still stings around the neck because Les ran the clippers a little too close. Recently my wife gave me an unexpected blast back to my past when she gave me a number one all over whilst cutting my hair. It’s really quite something to see a man in his thirties with an ADHD kids cut but I’ll tell you what, I never got mistaken for a girl.
To top all this madness off, Reading Cinemas – the arsehole of cinemas – apparently no longer sell Jaffas, Snifters or Pineapple Lumps. Well fuck me, what else is there to eat at the movies? And it’s typical really of a company like Reading, who charge exorbitant prices for movies that if you haven’t already downloaded it off the Net you can buy on DVD in a week’s time anyway, to deny you your favourite sweet. Reading's like to think that their big chairs and big screens make the difference when compared with other cinemas but when they’ve run all the other theatres – whose seats and screens are fine by the way – out of business then I’ll tell you what will be even bigger at Readings; the prices! The pricks.
I’m going to go to Readings every weekend now just for the hell of it and conceal on my persons, quite possibly in my cavities, one of those catering sized bags of Jaffas that you get from Moore Wilson’s. I’m not going to eat them mind you; I’m just going to roll them around the theatre so that when they’re cleaning up they’ll think “Shit. Jaffas. We don’t sell those how the hell did they get in here! Someone’s bringing in food they bought elsewhere…”. The ultimate mindfuck. Then they’ll want to start searching everybody who goes in to see a movie from that point on and my work there will be done, because no one is gonna put up with that shit, no matter how big the seats are.
Because you see real men eat Jaffas. And get their hair cut at a barbers and not Titty Waynes. That’s just how we roll.
Every time I'm anywhere I’m struck by just how many long fringed, long sided, long mulleted bouffant hairdos there are being worn by fellas. Throw in some daggy sunnies – present company excluded Big Al – skin tight jeans and you have something that’s neither hetro nor metro sexual, but asexual. It’s not even grunge or alternative, which in my day was about as asexual as a fella could get but even then everyone knew Kurt Cobain, who we were all trying to mimic, was a fella. But now our young men are dressing more and more like the Hanson boys and look where it got them.
‘Freedom of expression’ this looking like a girl might be, but its also making them look a lot like a waster. How do they see exactly with their long fringes pasted over their eyes? If it’s impaired vision you want why not just whack a pair of testes on the forehead as well and complete the look? It can only be described as not wanting to look like anything but trying to look like something. Make up your minds I say and either choose to look like a man or tuck it between the legs and go girl. And don’t get me started on the lady boys who then want to look hard by wearing their hoodie up whilst in the mall, thus removing their last bit of sensory perception. I’ve decided that to combat this I’m going to start giving a downtrou to anyone wearing a hoodie inside. We'll see how long the hoodies stay up when the tweeds start a comin down.
It’s a sad indictment on society today that mothers are happy for their boys to look like shaggy dogs rather than make them cut their hair and risk having little Tarquin resent them for it. Fathers are too scared to be real men in case they get done for abuse and are not dragging their sons down to the barbers every six weeks like our Dads did with us. And lets get one thing straight right now - a barber shop is not to be confused with a hair salon either. You don’t get a wash, a shampoo and a pair of boobies in the face like you do at Rodney ‘Titty’ Wayne when you visit a real barbers, which is a good thing because frankly, teats have no place near a real haircut. That's why these haircuts exist todays because these wasters go to the salon and have some chick boob bag them rather than using a bowl on the head as a guide like Mum used too.
My step father was like clock work when it came to haircuts. We’d be down at the Naenae barbers five minutes after it opened at 7am to wait in line with all the retired guys who were there for three things only; a cut, some tobacco and to get the hell out of the house and away from their wives. Old Les was my favourite barber, he’d been doing in so long that he had a permanent hunchback which meant you could never quite tell if he was looking at you or not due to the height of his head and his inability to raise it. He knew everybody by name and their favourite cut but then that was easy because there’s only one cut at a real barbers shop; short back and sides.
There’s nothing quite exhilarating as walking to school with a new haircut on a cold morning that still stings around the neck because Les ran the clippers a little too close. Recently my wife gave me an unexpected blast back to my past when she gave me a number one all over whilst cutting my hair. It’s really quite something to see a man in his thirties with an ADHD kids cut but I’ll tell you what, I never got mistaken for a girl.
To top all this madness off, Reading Cinemas – the arsehole of cinemas – apparently no longer sell Jaffas, Snifters or Pineapple Lumps. Well fuck me, what else is there to eat at the movies? And it’s typical really of a company like Reading, who charge exorbitant prices for movies that if you haven’t already downloaded it off the Net you can buy on DVD in a week’s time anyway, to deny you your favourite sweet. Reading's like to think that their big chairs and big screens make the difference when compared with other cinemas but when they’ve run all the other theatres – whose seats and screens are fine by the way – out of business then I’ll tell you what will be even bigger at Readings; the prices! The pricks.
I’m going to go to Readings every weekend now just for the hell of it and conceal on my persons, quite possibly in my cavities, one of those catering sized bags of Jaffas that you get from Moore Wilson’s. I’m not going to eat them mind you; I’m just going to roll them around the theatre so that when they’re cleaning up they’ll think “Shit. Jaffas. We don’t sell those how the hell did they get in here! Someone’s bringing in food they bought elsewhere…”. The ultimate mindfuck. Then they’ll want to start searching everybody who goes in to see a movie from that point on and my work there will be done, because no one is gonna put up with that shit, no matter how big the seats are.
Because you see real men eat Jaffas. And get their hair cut at a barbers and not Titty Waynes. That’s just how we roll.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Cold, Hard Trading Cards
It has been a few days since I last cracked a fat over anything but thankfully the wife I never had, DougalMougal, has made me see the error of my ways and reminded me that with great power comes great responsibility. Well he didn’t say that in so many words. Or any of those words actually, in fact I made that entire bit up.
I’ve actually been busy finishing the biggest bag of Twisties I’ve ever seen. No not really but actually that’s not so far from the truth. My son, ClubDes Junior, is collecting the rugby cards you find in the chippie packets these days and shit has been getting serious. I’ve eaten so many potato chips I now bleed when I poo. Those cards are playground currency I tell you and they’re more valuable than cold hard cash. The kids won’t even accept cash for them actually, the only legal tender they recognise is a 5cm square bit of plastic with some meathead on the front.
It wasn’t long before Junior soon became a Don of the playground with his mega collection, thanks to my pimping the crew at ClubDes for their cards from the packets they’ve been getting out of the vending machine in the hall. What started out as a harmless bit of helping out the boy though has quickly become a race to see whose kid can get the full set first between me and the Hard Out Harry parents of the Saffa he’s best mates with.
Initially their Mum was having none of it because her boys were ripping through the packets and not actually eating the chips and if there is one thing that rips the undies of a Saffa it’s wasted money, but as soon as she got a sniff of competition then shit really kicked off. Typical bloody Saffas. I wonder if they’ll consider a winner takes all competition to see whose cable contains the most chip fragments, theirs or mine.
All of this reminds me of my school days spent collecting trading cards. Back in my day you got bubblegum with your cards. It tasted like crap and lasted about all of four chews and was made from jandal cutoffs but we didn’t care because it was all about the cards. Batman, Ninja Turtles, WWF, Rugby League – you name it we collected it. The token Indian boy at my school, because there really weren’t that many back then, always got the whole set first because his Dad owned the local diary and he bought boxes of the stuff from wholesalers. You see that’s the secret to buying trading cards, as I would later learn whilst in the early days of my inauguration to the world of comic book shop geekdom, because each box is guaranteed to contain a full set plus rare cards.
There was no flogging rare shit off on Trade Me back then either, you begged, borrowed or stole your way to a whole set in those days and I stole anything that wasn’t tied down. I remember fleecing all the girls in 2nd form of their Neighbours cards, not because I collected them but just because I could. I was exempt from the suspicion of the theft too on account of being a fella and no fella would have been caught dead with Neighbours cards. Who collects Neighbours cards, I mean really? My sister did and she got the whole set too.
I reckon my violating of the girls collections stemmed from the fact that I had been burnt before with trading cards. Karma had paid me a visit earlier in ’86 when me and Willie Gee went halvsies in the Soccer World Cup collectors set. There were 52 playing cards to collect and through our collective resources we scored the lot, including the four very rare ace cards. Once we had the set we took turns in holding on to them for a week, laying them out, admiring them, that kind of thing. We were too young back then to know how to have a jimmy but you can bet if did we would have over them, they were that good.
Only they went missing onetime whilst on Willie’s watch and I never ever saw them again. It was very nearly the end of a beautiful friendship. They were good cards too dammit and I’d be living of the profits of having sold them cards today if I had them, not that I’d ever sell them. But they’d be my retirement plan. Willie lives up in the Coromandal these days cultivating the ganja. I bet he sold those cards for a bag of fertiliser or something. I got mine back in later years though when I pinched half his G.I.Joe collection.
Ah well. That’s life and you’ve just got to get on with things really. As I write this Junior only needs three cards to collect the set while Saffaboy needs only the one. It’s gonna be a close call. Maybe I should break into their house and steal his…
I’ve actually been busy finishing the biggest bag of Twisties I’ve ever seen. No not really but actually that’s not so far from the truth. My son, ClubDes Junior, is collecting the rugby cards you find in the chippie packets these days and shit has been getting serious. I’ve eaten so many potato chips I now bleed when I poo. Those cards are playground currency I tell you and they’re more valuable than cold hard cash. The kids won’t even accept cash for them actually, the only legal tender they recognise is a 5cm square bit of plastic with some meathead on the front.
It wasn’t long before Junior soon became a Don of the playground with his mega collection, thanks to my pimping the crew at ClubDes for their cards from the packets they’ve been getting out of the vending machine in the hall. What started out as a harmless bit of helping out the boy though has quickly become a race to see whose kid can get the full set first between me and the Hard Out Harry parents of the Saffa he’s best mates with.
Initially their Mum was having none of it because her boys were ripping through the packets and not actually eating the chips and if there is one thing that rips the undies of a Saffa it’s wasted money, but as soon as she got a sniff of competition then shit really kicked off. Typical bloody Saffas. I wonder if they’ll consider a winner takes all competition to see whose cable contains the most chip fragments, theirs or mine.
All of this reminds me of my school days spent collecting trading cards. Back in my day you got bubblegum with your cards. It tasted like crap and lasted about all of four chews and was made from jandal cutoffs but we didn’t care because it was all about the cards. Batman, Ninja Turtles, WWF, Rugby League – you name it we collected it. The token Indian boy at my school, because there really weren’t that many back then, always got the whole set first because his Dad owned the local diary and he bought boxes of the stuff from wholesalers. You see that’s the secret to buying trading cards, as I would later learn whilst in the early days of my inauguration to the world of comic book shop geekdom, because each box is guaranteed to contain a full set plus rare cards.
There was no flogging rare shit off on Trade Me back then either, you begged, borrowed or stole your way to a whole set in those days and I stole anything that wasn’t tied down. I remember fleecing all the girls in 2nd form of their Neighbours cards, not because I collected them but just because I could. I was exempt from the suspicion of the theft too on account of being a fella and no fella would have been caught dead with Neighbours cards. Who collects Neighbours cards, I mean really? My sister did and she got the whole set too.
I reckon my violating of the girls collections stemmed from the fact that I had been burnt before with trading cards. Karma had paid me a visit earlier in ’86 when me and Willie Gee went halvsies in the Soccer World Cup collectors set. There were 52 playing cards to collect and through our collective resources we scored the lot, including the four very rare ace cards. Once we had the set we took turns in holding on to them for a week, laying them out, admiring them, that kind of thing. We were too young back then to know how to have a jimmy but you can bet if did we would have over them, they were that good.
Only they went missing onetime whilst on Willie’s watch and I never ever saw them again. It was very nearly the end of a beautiful friendship. They were good cards too dammit and I’d be living of the profits of having sold them cards today if I had them, not that I’d ever sell them. But they’d be my retirement plan. Willie lives up in the Coromandal these days cultivating the ganja. I bet he sold those cards for a bag of fertiliser or something. I got mine back in later years though when I pinched half his G.I.Joe collection.
Ah well. That’s life and you’ve just got to get on with things really. As I write this Junior only needs three cards to collect the set while Saffaboy needs only the one. It’s gonna be a close call. Maybe I should break into their house and steal his…
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Shooting Blanks.
Forgot about the politically correct stealing bull rush, they’ve gone and fucked up something far more important – fly spray.
We’re doing the eco-friendly thing at our house by starting to build a compost bin. It’s early days and given that its still warm this time of the year the thing is starting to smell a little – it has food scraps in it after all. It's now attracting so many flys that you’d think it was a long drop we’d put in round the back and not a compost bin. Being the crafty buggers that flys are, they’re even managing to make their way indoors in record numbers, despite the house being locked up all day!
We’ve gone through two cans of flyspray in about a week and I thought it was down to sheer numbers that they were still hanging around en masse, but one read of the can and I now know why. It has no smell, it’s safe for the environment, it doesn’t stain and it doesn’t affect those with allergies. Great. I’ll tell you what else it doesn’t do; fucken work! I’m surprised they didn’t list that little gem of info on the can but maybe there wasn’t enough room for it after they finished listing all the shit they must think we buy it for. I thought I was buying insect killer but it appears I purchased a can of air. My bad.
We had the same problem whilst holidaying in RotoAnus where there are just as many flies as there are Asian tourists. We literally carpet bombed the main living area – hourly – and struggled to find a carcass afterwards. It was like Vietnam all over again! The only logical conclusion was that they were either taking their dead with them, or the fly spray was shit.
I remember the days when fly spray was Agent Orange in a can. Sure it stung your eyes like mace, and burned your tongue so bad that it made everything you ate for a week taste like marmite, but it bloody worked. So what if it left a film so thick that you could write your name in it or left all the asthmatics in a semi-comatose state? It bloody worked. Truth be told, it probably caused genetically abnormalities in the unborn child it was that potent but even that was cool, because Mum still enjoyed a shandy and smoked her Menthol Lights whilst preggers back then anyway because no one had made that particular link yet either.
Menthol Lights, by the way, are not the coolest fag with which to kick off your life long addiction. There’s no street cred to be had with Menthol Lights. I picked them because I liked the green Mackintosh Toffees best - so green had to be good right? Little did I know that Menthol's are the light beer of smoking. I figured that the minty aftertaste had to be a plus, but of course I smelt like a chimney after having stood behind the bike sheds all lunch time so it didn’t matter what my breath smelt like, none of my mates would come close enough to give me a pash anyway. It was only after my one month long smoking career back in college had finally finished did I come to realise that it was down to my choice of Menthol's that had the Smoking Massive cracking up whenever I lit up.
But killing flies was hardcore back in the day. I remember the sticky strips everyone used to buy and hang from their ceilings to trap the little buggers. Genius. I can’t imagine that that would ever catch on again today though, what with everyone so anal about status anxiety and maintaining sparse houses with sparse interiors, but back then it got quite competitive between houses in the street as to who could display the highest body count. My sister and I used to roll a few in a big pile of raisins and chuck it up in the furthest corner of the lounge, just far enough away as to not be scrutinised by the naked eye. Killing flys was the shizz back then.
Sometimes I wonder what became of these sticky strips and then I watch my son eat fruit roll ups and I’m left in no doubt as to what’s become of them.
Remember when everyone had those fly barrier curtain things over the front and back door that were long strips of plastic all joined up? That shit was the bomb. The flies couldn’t fathom it, couldn’t get through. Never could we kids, especially Granddads which was a home made one from some industrial thickness rubber he had had lying around n the shed. Hit that thing at speed and on the wrong angle of trajectory and you could asphyxiate yourself in a way that only Michael Hutchence would approve of.
Yep. Them were simpler times but at least we had our priorities right. It’s a sad day when you can’t even nail the airborne buggers that spread the shit they’ve spent all day walking in.
We’re doing the eco-friendly thing at our house by starting to build a compost bin. It’s early days and given that its still warm this time of the year the thing is starting to smell a little – it has food scraps in it after all. It's now attracting so many flys that you’d think it was a long drop we’d put in round the back and not a compost bin. Being the crafty buggers that flys are, they’re even managing to make their way indoors in record numbers, despite the house being locked up all day!
We’ve gone through two cans of flyspray in about a week and I thought it was down to sheer numbers that they were still hanging around en masse, but one read of the can and I now know why. It has no smell, it’s safe for the environment, it doesn’t stain and it doesn’t affect those with allergies. Great. I’ll tell you what else it doesn’t do; fucken work! I’m surprised they didn’t list that little gem of info on the can but maybe there wasn’t enough room for it after they finished listing all the shit they must think we buy it for. I thought I was buying insect killer but it appears I purchased a can of air. My bad.
We had the same problem whilst holidaying in RotoAnus where there are just as many flies as there are Asian tourists. We literally carpet bombed the main living area – hourly – and struggled to find a carcass afterwards. It was like Vietnam all over again! The only logical conclusion was that they were either taking their dead with them, or the fly spray was shit.
I remember the days when fly spray was Agent Orange in a can. Sure it stung your eyes like mace, and burned your tongue so bad that it made everything you ate for a week taste like marmite, but it bloody worked. So what if it left a film so thick that you could write your name in it or left all the asthmatics in a semi-comatose state? It bloody worked. Truth be told, it probably caused genetically abnormalities in the unborn child it was that potent but even that was cool, because Mum still enjoyed a shandy and smoked her Menthol Lights whilst preggers back then anyway because no one had made that particular link yet either.
Menthol Lights, by the way, are not the coolest fag with which to kick off your life long addiction. There’s no street cred to be had with Menthol Lights. I picked them because I liked the green Mackintosh Toffees best - so green had to be good right? Little did I know that Menthol's are the light beer of smoking. I figured that the minty aftertaste had to be a plus, but of course I smelt like a chimney after having stood behind the bike sheds all lunch time so it didn’t matter what my breath smelt like, none of my mates would come close enough to give me a pash anyway. It was only after my one month long smoking career back in college had finally finished did I come to realise that it was down to my choice of Menthol's that had the Smoking Massive cracking up whenever I lit up.
But killing flies was hardcore back in the day. I remember the sticky strips everyone used to buy and hang from their ceilings to trap the little buggers. Genius. I can’t imagine that that would ever catch on again today though, what with everyone so anal about status anxiety and maintaining sparse houses with sparse interiors, but back then it got quite competitive between houses in the street as to who could display the highest body count. My sister and I used to roll a few in a big pile of raisins and chuck it up in the furthest corner of the lounge, just far enough away as to not be scrutinised by the naked eye. Killing flys was the shizz back then.
Sometimes I wonder what became of these sticky strips and then I watch my son eat fruit roll ups and I’m left in no doubt as to what’s become of them.
Remember when everyone had those fly barrier curtain things over the front and back door that were long strips of plastic all joined up? That shit was the bomb. The flies couldn’t fathom it, couldn’t get through. Never could we kids, especially Granddads which was a home made one from some industrial thickness rubber he had had lying around n the shed. Hit that thing at speed and on the wrong angle of trajectory and you could asphyxiate yourself in a way that only Michael Hutchence would approve of.
Yep. Them were simpler times but at least we had our priorities right. It’s a sad day when you can’t even nail the airborne buggers that spread the shit they’ve spent all day walking in.
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