My son’s school is peddling lipstick as its latest fundraiser. No seriously. Why? Because every woman uses lippy – or so says the pamphlet that came with it. Now I think we all know that isn’t the case but what an interesting train of thought to use when deciding what to use as your next fundraiser. All women poop too, so how bout fundraiser two ply?
It’ll never catch on but I’m wondering just how far they’ll go to get their hands on our money. Back in my day our fundraising consisted of selling calendars, school ones at that, which every relative would buy so that no matter where you went whilst on your holidays, you’d be reminder of school whilst you took a slash in Aunty or Grandmas carzie. Now it’s chocolates, hot cross buns, pastries and cosmetics. Next week it will be strap-ons and anal beads. Engraved with the school logo for your pleasure!
And I’m sure we only did the fundraiser thing once a year. Now it’s every other week. But then that’s the financial situation that most public schools find themselves in these days – in the red. They literally have to raise tens of, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own accord just to keep running. Now this is election year and we’ve already started getting fired up about just how big a tax cut we should all get but I reckon there is a more important question to be asked; What’s happening to the taxes that we pay because they sure as fuck don’t seem to be getting through to the places we expect them to go?! Like schools, cops and hospitals.
Don’t start me on hospitals. My week long gestation on the couch at home came to an end this week when I finally got the call up to return to Ward 17, the ward with the higher mortality rate than Ward 16, the ward where they put the people on deaths door. Go figure. Now I realise this place isn’t a hotel, but I can’t help but feel that when you’ve been given a time and date to show up the least the buggers could do is have a bed ready for you. They knew I was coming dammit; it was hardly a surprise admission! Terribly selfish of me to think that I know but that’s just how I roll.
Now four hours is a long time. It’s even longer when you have to spend half of it sitting alone in an empty triage room waiting for a bed to become available. Those rooms always look cool on TV, like in ER and shit, but there are exceptionally boring in real life. Even I was to open all the bagged up tubing and start a colonic irrigation on myself it would still be boring. Cleansing, but boring.
I spent the other two hours in the TV room where I was able to share in the delightful presence that was Andre. Andre is one of those guys that got himself heavily tattooed up and down the arms as soon as he was legally allowed to because it made him look like a hard bastard. Then he shaved his head and spent the next 20 years listening to Judas Priest to remind himself of just how hard a hard bastard he was. Now pushing 50, he still shaves his head, wears a puffy vest over a small boys tee-shirt despite it being freezing outside just so you know that he’s still a hard bastard. He no longer looks hard mind you, he looks like a scrotum, only with tattoos.
He likes to use the words ‘shit’ and ‘its fucked’ a lot, mainly when referring to the state of his cellphone and especially when in the presence of his mother who has to be pushing 70 just to remind her how hard he is. She didn’t seem to mind that young Andre has developed a bit of a potty mouth and infact promised to take him out for a roast dinner at the local takeaway. It doesn’t get much more hard than mum taking you out for a roast tea that’s for sure. Andre – as you may now have deduced – is a Mummy’s boy and is not at all hard. He does manage to succeed in pulling of a look though, the look of a fuckwit.
So needless to say the first day back was not a good one and any troubles I might have had in firing up the Mr Angry persona I was hoping to bring with me were gone in the first five minutes. Since then – and I write this on day two – I’ve even managed to piss off some hoighty toighty theatre staff by not being on the premises when they called for me. I had left the building and was actually on the sideline coaching my sons soccer team because personally and this might just be me, but I find stuff like that a tad more intrinsically rewarding than sitting around waiting to have a tube shoved up my arm.
I had four hours free yesterday in which they could have done that!
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