Month: May 2004

S organised a drinks outing at where else because it is his birthday Wednesday. There’s cause for celebration because he’s the last of the Mochikens to get to Thirty. Would’ve been less raucous if not for the fact S and H decided out of curiousity to attempt the Monster Mug Challenge. They failed.

I read in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, ‘it is easy to make any banal situation extraordinary if you treat it as fateful’.

But life’s little moments are always banal unless one treats it as fateful. Great epic adventures don’t need a voice! Ordinary things do.

So… today (Monday) I went to the gym, and who’d have thunk it? The twit my mates almost got into a biffo with was there, just as my mates descibed: In a very, very ugly neon (yes!) green tank-top, black basketball shorts, black socks (yes again) and black shoes. Seeing him as ugly as he was, there wasn’t much else we could do except to do little things like dropping verbals here and there just within his earshot, being the childish little shits we were. Thankfully he was smart enough to leave the gym before we could lay on the really damaging sledging. (Another habit we’ve gleefully adopted from Australia, no doubt).

Speaking of sledging (‘trash=talking’ for those more used to American sporting jargon), the Aussies are generally pretty slick, but they’ve been trumped by some gems from outside Australia:

Australian bowler: How’dja get so fat, ya fat fuck?

The bowler conceded on the sledging front, and smiled at the batsman.

But the Aussies are probably the masters at seemingly self-deprecatory sledging:

Heckler at a beach charity event: Hey Merv, we’ve got crabs that run faster than you.

It’s not that I am not over you. I have been healthily over you for some years now. But you’re getting married. I wish you well and all that. Your well-being is no longer in my realm.

I once loved you. That love lasted forever.

Forever came and went in five years, and I spent a little while trying to trace where I left from. Then I forgot. Then you called me one night and told me you were getting married, and for the first time in some years, I looked back and I saw where I came from.

You once loved me. Your love lasted forever.

The push and pull has not stopped. But it doesn’t jolt me, it lulls. We might have been you and me once.

And what wounds time heals, what kisses time also conceals.

~also posted on Twice-Poisoned Dog

I had to get out of the house today, so I went and had dinner with a close friend, his brother and his mother.

Then we went to his house and watched tv with his housemate, his boyfriend and his housemate’s girlfriend. We watched Mars Attacks. It’s been awhile since I’ve sat down and watched a whole show. It was good.

My friend had Sunday night plans which I didn’t want to be a part of. Centro on a Sunday night isn’t my cuppa.

I did agree to pre-Centro drinks at a new pub called Tantric (Is it you go there, they serve you beer but you don’t drink only look and touch?) on Neil Road, in what’s now apparently known as the Pink Triangle, or Tanjong Pa-Gay.

It almost made me homesick for Sydney, as my friends warned me that I’d have to be gay-friendly to be there. It’s not that they’re hostile to straight guys. They’d just rather not have straight guys at the establishment. The owner of the club stopped by our table to chat, and asked one of the waiters to keep the door closed – we were on the front courtyard, and would’ve been facing the road if this had been a straight pub – because he didn’t want any straight guys to wander down Neil Road, look inside, go, oh, there’s a cool looking pub, and wander in.

I didn’t announce I was straight, though I think the owner would’ve sussed me out by then. Anyway, I just wanted to enjoy my beer, and it was a nice place to have one, even if the weather was a bit too hot – 34 degrees today I think – to be sitting in the courtyard.

Company’s always good, even when you don’t really want to talk about your week. Beer helps a bit too. Life could be worse.

As if I needed a pick-me-up.

Checked the letter tray and found something addressed to me. But it had ‘On Government Service’ on the envelope, and had my rank before my name in full.

Thankfully it wasn’t another ‘love letter’, or SAF100. It was a brochure from the Army’s 9th Division, telling me, Operationally Ready National Serviceman, that the National Servicemen Services Centre has gone totally ‘E’. Everything will be electronic. The next call-up notice (which should be in July) will be disseminated via SMS, mobile phone voicemail, landline voice message, fax, three times a day until I acknowledge receipt. And I can check unit briefings and instructions on a new revamped one-stop web portal. So efficient, the bastards.