Achoo on the choo choo

The train is a long, cold hell-tube for people who hate themselves and feel keenly about the public's right to go nose-to-armpit. To butcher Clerks 2, never go nose to armpit!

Of course this cylinder of despair morphs into an even more tyrannical canister of awful when you have a cold. I wouldn't call myself a germophobe. I once ate a mud pie as a child and, although my mother looked upon this act less than favourably, it was not an experience that caused me any long lasting harm.

I also briefly held the crown in primary school of Most Voluminous Ant Eater after placing several, one after the other, on salt and vinegar chips and wolfing them down. I rode this wave of fleeting popularity into Year 7 and discretely used it as my platform on which I ran for School Captain and won. Those were the heady days of meaty policy issues.

My point being: germs have done me no harm, really, and - in fact - have afforded my early career in politics the springboard it so rightly deserved.

But I don't handle colds well and am acutely aware of my own germs when I have one. This makes riding on the train a particularly harrowing experience.

I have never taken well to blowing my nose in front of other people. As a child I would crawl into boxes and ventilation shafts to avoid doing it around anyone, my family included. I once fell asleep during a rather forceful nose blow and my family found me much later with my head resting in a dirty tissue, wedged in a kitchen cupboard.

I've carried this snotty inferiority complex into adulthood and the thought of blowing my nose on a crowded train is tantamount to being the person responsible for taking all the pretty ponies to the glue factory while hordes of young girls watch on. You might think this is melodrama. This is legitimately how I feel.

But anybody who has attempted to delay a necessary bodily function will tell you, there is only so long you can abstain for. Then it becomes an impossible choice between blowing your honker or letting it slowly, awfully, creep down your nostril.

At this point I feel keenly the presence of those around me. I indulge in fanciful daydreams about a better world where I have no nose and instead it is replaced by a sign that says 'nothing to see here people, move along'. I weigh my options. Blow trumpet. Let drip. Manufacture miniature hang-glider from tissue paper and paperclips and spring to safety.

All terrible options, really. So I just blow my nose. Quietly.

Of course this does nine tenths of fuck all and you're right back to square one again two minutes later. What are you Rick? Man or mouse? Blow your nose proudly! My inner monologue is a hetero-normative Queenslander with pride issues, by the way.

So I blow it. Loudly.

The heads of the fellow commuters swivel 180 degrees on their terrible necks just to stare at me. Their eyes are boring into the very essence of my being, clearly affronted. They're looking at me, as if to ask: "It was you that shot Bambi's mother?"

I imagine them all breaking out in a chorus of "Bambi Mother Killer!" chants and children bursting into tears because obviously I am just the worst person in the world. Even worse than that person who invented Vuvuzelas. Yes. Even worse.

And I briefly consider spontaneously combusting.

I hate colds.

Every little bit

I think we tend to suffer from disaster fatigue. Particularly in 2011. At the best of times I have trouble imagining that the more than 10,000 people who died in Japan were in fact that, 10,000 people. Not a sentence. Not a line written by a journalist on deadline.

People.

The same goes for the people of Christchurch.

We tend to sit back and ogle and send our sympathies and donate if we can but usually we feel so detached. That's the global village for you. More involved than ever before, but further away.

So when you get asked to participate in a small writing project with the aim of raising a few extra dollars for those people affected, you kind of jump at the chance. Particularly when that person is Matt Granfield, a bloke whose writing over the past few months I have come to admire.

The man can write.

And he asked me to contribute with a whole bunch of other talented people like Clementine Ford who is one of my favourite writers. Period. And of course I said yes because I thought he had made a mistake.

So, the book can be downloaded here.

It's an honesty box system. We're not going to police it, but if you want to have a read just donate $10 to the Red Cross, following the links on the page, and then download and read to your hearts content.

The money will be split 50:50, with some going to NZ and some going to Japan.

It's a good cause and, if not for my stuff, go check out the other writer's pieces because they rock my little cotton socks.

Enjoy.

The secret science of dog walking

Smokey is so energetic he is banned in three states.

You can see it in their eyes. That...that ability to judge from a thousand paces. Even around corners. It's an important pre-requisite of owning a dog, of course, that you can do these things. You must be able to scoop poop, yell mush indiscriminately and, most importantly, scowl out of the corner of your laser eyes at other dog walkers.

I went for a walk on the weekend with my good friend Seema and her Puppy Dog Smokey, a border collie of such unmitigated energy that he once short-ciruited a coal-fired power station because we walked him too close.

Dog owners are inherently judgmental of other dogs and dog owners because they select the breed and personality of their pooch based almost entirely on their own. Hence why miniature fox terriers are owned by tiny, yappy things and Great Danes are owned only by Danish people who are also great at things.

It's science.

I'd never realised this before because when I walked my dogs in Boonah I only ever came across people who were saddling horses. But in Balmain, Sydney, the judgment is palpable. Any aspersions cast on the dog itself are cast equally on the dog's owner.

There's a moment that all dog owners recognise, when you walk around a mulberry bush and into the path of another dog owner with a corgie cross kelpie (yes, we found one of these).

There is a pause. An appraisal of mortal enemies from across the way. Size. Mental acuity. Ability to fight with a mace and / or meat cleaver. If you don't believe it is gladiatorial, don't get a dog. You'll be caught off guard with your King Charles and sissy Defence ChopSticks.

It's evolutionary. It's a throwback to the age of scouts and hunter gatherers when (wo)man and beast would wander the distant lands with man's best friend and a half eaten corn cob for defence. If you stumbled across the path of another scout from another tribe there would always be the briefest consideration of eating them.

This still happens today. The only reason nobody gets eaten anymore is because nobody likes walking with knives and forks.

You say nice things to each other, which are all terrible euphemisms for what you're really thinking. Watch and learn:

Oh, you're puppy is just adorable! really means 'I hope you fall in a pit of tar you dull wench'.

And 'how old is he?' really means 'you look like you've been alive since the Ming dynasty'.

And 'oh it looks like he's just an absolute peach' really means 'I have never in my life encountered somebody so uncompromisingly awful, I hope several bad things happen to you in a row'.

It's an unspoken exchange of judgment which transpires in public places, disguised by high pitched voices and apparent praise of each other's dog. But dog owners know.

The only thing that has stopped dog owners everywhere buying chains and knuckledusters and bringing the fight to that blue heeler bitch from down the road is a vestigial sense of decorum and a desire to get back home to making cupcakes in the shape of schnauzers.

Thank God, else our doggie parks would be blood baths.

Happy birthday to me, from the other day

I've been so busy involving good friends in long and drawn out, engineering-quality analyses of my hip function that I forgot to tell you I turned 24 this month. And I feel old. Not old as in 'all the kids have gone to hell in skinny jeans' old (although, a little bit) but old in the sense that I am way out of my comfort zone and all I'd really like is a cup of coffee, a few Equals and a game of fucking Mahjong.

It began when I left Queensland - my home - for Sydney, my spiritual home. I've always liked the idea of having a spiritual home. Every time a gay dies his soul turns into sandstone used to create one of Sydney's iconic storefront facades. Or something. I haven't worked that bit out yet.

I think getting older is tantamount to becoming more uncomfortable. Change. Getting old(er) is about change. And I'm smack bang in the middle of my own change narrative right now. Nothing around me is like it was and I feel like I'm 104.

I'm filled with thoughts about how things were back home and how things aren't done the same here. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing but noticing so much that is different is exhausting and I am so tired I could eat a horse and mix my metaphors.

It might also be the fact that I only just found a place to live and cannot move in until the beginning of April, which in turn means I have been living out of a suitcase and sometimes a backpack for almost a month. Which fucking pocket did I put my shampoo in?

I don't know. It's like trying to find a God-damned Horcrux.

And figuring out new public transport options is my very own version of mortal terror. Ever since I was a baby I worshipped at the altar of routine and didn't like it when my routine was tied to a horse and sulky and dragged through the street.

So when I swapped from one friend's house (on the train line) to another (not on the train line) I had a little meltdown in the morning as I walked out the door for work. It was pouring rain. I had barely any money, no umbrella. The bus was a walk. The ferry was a walk.

And I stood there, paralysed, for a good few minutes as I considered whether I would have time to hem together several palm fronds into a rudimentary rain sheath under which I could traipse to a mode of public transport which I didn't like while practicing my broody face.

In the end I caught a cab which cost me $24 and almost my life when my driver virtually refused to stop, completing my transaction with one hand while drinking coffee and steering with the other and mounting the curb.

So, no, I've never been very good at change. Don't get me wrong, I love Sydney. I adore it with every fibre of my being. But it's new. And new things scare me.

That's why I was never much of a fan of Christmas. I never knew what was in my wrapped presents. Sure, it could have been the life-like tyrannosaurus rex from Jurassic Park like I wanted or it could have been a punch in the face. You. Just. Didn't. Know.

So here I am, older. And I've gnawed directly through the cast iron chains of the support mechanism that was my former life, uprooted my roots (as you do) and spent almost every morning on the way to my awesome new work with my nose pressed firmly into the armpit of a commuter who has seen it all before.

I love life.

The Aussie Loggers Conference

I've never been to an actual conference. I'd always pictured them as staid affairs where people go to learn about the value-adding brilliance of brass door knobs and vertical integration and maybe things get titillating a bit later on because Bob the accounts executive gets a bit drunk and tells his team that he likes men.

But I wasn't prepared for the Aussie Bloggers Conference 2011 where none of the gorgeous men admitted they were gay (bastards) and all of the women were amazing. It was a cross between Oprah and a tranche of fascinating people with stories to tell.

I'll be honest, I didn't get into blogging because I wanted to make money or because I enjoy a friendly afternoon of beating myself across the head with an HTM-fucking-L textbook. I did it at a time when I needed to write because my job didn't allow me to do it.

And last night I met people who were rather similar. Similar also, in the sense, that they could knock back two bottles of wine and plough on to the dance floor with all the subtlety of a firecracker wearing a strap-on dildo. Awesome.

I found my tribe.

And boy did we get up to a bit of mischief. I briefly married and then divorced The NDM because I didn't want to have sex with her even though her tiara made it a borderline possibility. We also took a picture of ourselves holding a camera that had a picture of ourselves holding another picture of ourselves.

People could stare at that shit and scoop up the brain melt as it dripped from their noses except that the camera screen ended up just being a flash of white anyway which was equally dangerous but in a general 'don't stare into the sun kind of way' and totally not because we were the philosophical thunder Gods.

Poor Mark Pollard was almost set upon by a throng of fancying lady types, wolf-whistled at on stage and generally accosted in a manner as definite and strong as the lock-jaw of an actual bulldog. He left the building not under his the locomotion of his own two feet but on the tangible, residual soundwaves of a collective PHWOAR which I may or may not have contributed to.

We were there to talk about blogging, sure, but if you can absorb ten rows of wine in the process and sidle up to an eligible type while you're at it you're re-drafting what success actually means.

My good friend Bern Morley tried to find out if another man was gay for me. It was a mission steeped prematurely in the failure that gender politics discussions tend to invoke. To Bern's credit she was tactful and didn't ask the man directly (or use the words 'waddareya, a poof or somethink?') and instead asked somebody close to him.

Married. You know what they say, all the good ones are either married or straight or hate me.

The dancing was a throwback to the time I burned my hands in a campfire and ran around, two types of flaming, for about 20 minutes in tears. That's exactly what it was like. It was hot, it was frenetic and a few people got hurt.

I'm a huge proponent of the 'if nobody gets injured you're doing it wrong' dancing school of thought and my only regret is that somebody didn't pop a shoulder while doing the sprinkler. God, that would have been awesome. I used to cry whenever our actual sprinkler stopped working, but that was usually a symptom of the crippling drought we were in and not symbolic of a prematurely ended dance move.

But still.

I ended the night helping Julie walk to Kings Cross train station at 12.03am in the morning carrying a 10-week old baby, goodie bags, a suit case, my laptop and the Dyson vacuum cleaner she won.

I can guarantee you that there were so many acid-dropping munchers walking that stretch of road who, having seen that site and if only for a second, decided then and there they had finally gone too far.

"I could handle the fucking polka dotted unicorns but when my trips start making me see infants and domestic products I am throwing it all away and going to do a fucking engineering degree," I imagine they said before stumbling head first into a pot plant and arse-dialling their Aunt.

Sigh. Good times.

Of hope, despair and chocolate eggs

I just saw an ad for Kinder Surprise and it brought back so many memories, mostly of trying to break in to our chicken's eggs and not quite learning from the ensuing, crushing disappointment that my chickens were not chocolate makers and had almost zero ability to make small, pointless plastic toys using only their beaks and an assortment of tools.

I say almost zero ability because I have yet to meet all the chickens in the world and it remains possible that there is an obscure chicken cult somewhere in the Amazon that has figured this bit out. I have every expectation that I will one day meet all the chickens in the world because this seems to have been my mother's calling and she insists on naming each new chicken and then introducing them to me in the world's most absurd roll-call.

Hessy and Bessy and Ita and Sammy and, the chicken with what must be a chip on its shoulder, Silly Chook. These all have or do exist and lead me to worry for my mum's wellbeing when my sister eventually finishes high school.

Anyhow. The Kinder Surprises, to be completely frank, are shit. If you had to design the most perfect applicator of crushed hope for a child it would be a pointless object hidden in a shell of awful chocolate. The Kinder Surprise was a metaphor for later life. You will dig and dig through the shit, only to be confronted by something that looked like a cross between a front-end loader and death row.

The egg itself is labelled on the outside with big block letters that say CHOKING HAZARD which makes you wonder why they put the choking bits in the middle of the fucking egg.

My brother and I later graduated to Yowies, the university of chocolate toys. These had the unique twist that the toys were purportedly native Australian animals that somehow all ended up looking like front-end loaders.

In the world of children's gimmicks, there are no winners.

The same could be said for Happy Meals which might more accurately have been named Buckets of Despair. Especially where the character Grimace was involved. What the fuck is Grimace anyway? He never failed to look, in plastic form, like a purple medical instrument that had been inserted into your meal by mistake, a harbinger of purple doom.

What does one do with a Grimace? Where are his parents? Are they red and blue?

All the other kids at the time seemed perfectly happy with their half-hearted plastic monstrosities, cobbled together with equal parts disdain and toxic chemicals. I, on the other hand, could never shake the undercurrent of mockery that seemed to spring forth when I looked once more into the box or the egg in the hope that this time would be different.

This time. But of course, it wouldn't. It would be another unidentifiable toy of questionable function that would be shaped in such a way as to not even be useful as a doorstop or a paperweight or even a source of minuscule joy.

The Kinder Surprise is the chief offender, however, and has led to a lifelong aversion to surprises of any kind. Especially surprises that required tiny fingers and an engineering degree to assemble.

Put it this way. If Ikea ever came in an egg, they'd go broke.

Scamming the scammers

So I've been house hunting. Which is about as fun as playing chess with a chicken. A chicken who is really good at chess. But today I had my first sheer joy during the process, at the expense of a scammer. I had applied for a number of central Sydney rooms, all of which had looked way too good to be true for $300 a week. But still, I persevered.

The first reply came from Lustin in broken but not unmanageable English. It wasn't until I received the exact same reply from two different rooms and two different names that I twigged.

Scammers!

But rather than just ignore their stock standard responses to my, admittedly, stock standard email of inquiry, I decided to have some fun. Alas I might have gone out with too much gusto for the game to have dragged on forever but it was an exercise in short and sweet.

The emails are copied below, verbatim, for your enjoyment. Also, don't be scammed by this trash.

Rick Morton to John

10:46 AM (6 hours ago)

I need to know that you will be a good landlord, somebody who cares about my wellbeing so before I put pen to paper and say 'yes' I need some advice from you.

I have this weird colouration and spots on my genitals. I'm not sure if I got it from my previous sexual partner or the goat. It's really starting to worry me. Should I go and see a doctor or do you think it will go away on its own? Have you ever experienced anything like this before?

- Hide quoted text -

On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 10:43 AM, John Gracone <axonemu@gmail.com> wrote:

My favorite colour is blue. The apartment is ready. You'll need only to receive the Keys and Lease Agreement to check it and see if you like it. Obviously we need a way to complete this deal that will allow us to make sure we receive what we are after. You can also share the apartment with a friend. In order of that I have found a way for us to complete the deal safely and fast, and in this way you will receive the Keys in less than 2 days, if you move fast as well. The solution is provided by a company called Express Real Estate (www.express-realestate.com) which is similar to FedEx, TNT or UPS, which will handle both payment and delivery of the Keys. I have found a procedure that will allow you to pay for the rent of the apartment after you will receive the keys of it and through this way you will see it and decide if you will stay in the apt or not before I receive my payment.

Cheers

On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 1:42 AM, Rick Morton @gmail.com> wrote:

Hello John.

What is your favourite colour? My favourite colour used to be pink but then somebody told me it made me sound gay. I hate gays. You'll understand before I can move into your apartment that I really need to understand what your favourite colour is?\

I also have a pet goat and assume this will be fine to keep in the apartment as well?

Please get back to me as soon as you can.

Many thanks

Rick

On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 10:37 AM, John Gracone <axonemu@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello..

My name is John Gracone. i'm a project mananger in civil engineering. I just moved in United Kingdom because my company has won an auction for a big construction project so i will stay here for the next 3 - 5 years or more. The apartment is in the best conditions, it is newly furnished and equipped with all the dependecies. It is near the public transportation, a shipping, a gym and other facilities. The apartment has a parking space for one car. I have spent a great amount of money refurnishing the apartment and my request is that you treat it like it was your own. I am not interested to make a lot of money from the rent as I am interested to find a tenant that will take good care of the property until my return (minimum lease period, 2 months). I will tell you from the beginning that I don't have a problem if you are a student or if you would like to keep pets there, as long as you clean up after them. I hope you understand me. Also please let me know a little something about you, like how many persons do you intend to live in my apartment, for what period etc... The apartment is exactly like in the pictures. The rent is $1250 per month including the utilities (water,electricity,gas,internet,cable,parking). First payment will be for 1 month + a security bond of $1500. I'm 42 years old and as I told you, i'm a project manager and my job even if is paid very well, requires that I move a lot and without notice. I bought the apartment while I was working there. You can move in the apartment in the same day that you will receive the keys. The only problem is that I'm already in Manchester, UK because we started the work, but you don't need to worry because i've made all arrangements to rent the apartment from here. I can guarantee you that this is a great apartment so looking forward to a future collaboration and friendship.

Cheers

My blog is sort of like a cat

I have neglected my little blog. My little blog is like the cat my grandma adopted once because it was roaming the neighbourhood doing cat things. And then she adopted some other cats and became, inexplicably, locked in a vicious competition with another lady in the street to see who could muster the most cats.

It was kind of like a feline race to the bottom, really.

I think there was some bitterness when my grandma realised that the other lady had won, with 22 cats. My nan had stopped many kittens before this number on account of space issues and vet bills.

Then one day we were watching the news and found the RSPCA had raided the other lady in the street. She was seen wailing as the cats were ferried away, one by one, and somewhere, deep down, we all felt a deep sense of satisfaction.

There is absolutely no moral to this story that I am aware of. That's why, like all the best things in the world, you get to invent your own.

The point being, I have neglected my little blog.

Most camp

I went to an inordinate number of camps when I was a kid. There is more ‘camp’ in my childhood then a hat full of poodles. If you’re a fan of linguistic omens, this may well have been what turned me gay. That and my penchant for rock hard abs though, sadly, not my own abs.

Anyhow. There was Year 7 camp, Year 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 camp, a Rotary youth camp (tricked!), writer’s camp just after Year 7 camp and another in the backwoods of Boonah where we had to talk a lot about Jesus. It was organised by the Catholic Church and, in no insignificant sign of its popularity, we were all forced to go by our mothers, invalidating the first Genesis Biblical lesson that we were all given free will and that is why we no longer get our bits out in paradise.

The God Camp was filled with a lot of praying but we still had to do our own dishes and that was mostly what I prayed for. I figured with the collective spiritual power of it all that a saucepan would have at least washed itself, but alas.

What do you do on God camp? Pillow fights, mostly. We spent a lot of time asking for forgiveness after whacking one another, pillow raised in self-defence: “Please, I’m sorry, don’t hit me back!” For a room filled with Christians, there was little turning of the other cheek.

Year 7 camp was all fine and dandy until we experienced the biggest floods in a decade. We had intended to canoe across a small inlet on the lake to get to the 4WDs waiting to take us home, but the dam filled to 110% and the only way home was to canoe all the way across it back to base camp.

It took hours. At this point in my life I had never intended on spending five hours in a canoe on a hot summer’s day and therefore had not in the slightest prepared for it. My classmates turned into chicken drumsticks and there was a brief mutiny where we unlashed our canoes from the teachers’ and made a half-hearted break for freedom across the still pond of our own despair.

Year 10 camp was worse. It was a ‘leadership’ camp. You can only become a leader, it turns out, by spending five gruelling days hiking through the mountains around Boonah, putting our high school on par with the armed forces of Bosnia, Sparta and Israel. At the end of the five days one is conferred with both leadership qualities and any and all required medical attention.

We had to hike to a new campsite daily, some 9km each day up the steepest mountains you have ever come across all while wearing your entire campsite and food on your back. I always assumed the benefit of having one’s home on one’s back was that you didn’t have to go anywhere.

Walking groups were divided into office bearers and jobs, with each person being chosen for one based on merit. I was the team historian which basically meant a lot of writing around a campfire. Others were the ‘ecologists’ which is basically a fancy way of saying ‘the people who dig the trench you are meant to shit in’. It was an interesting microcosm of the class struggle that would eventually break out between us as we left high school and found our place in the world. There are historians and poop trench diggers among us all, of course. All vital. All necessary. Especially if you’ve yet to install a functioning toilet where you live.

The Rotary Youth camp was a great deal of fun. It was billed as the event to gain friends, build confidence and motivate your success which was sadly undermined by the theme music ‘Let’s Get Loud’ by J-Lo which played every lunch break and made rather a lot of us consider throwing ourselves under the amphibious water wagon.

Fun times. Year 9 camp was very nearly cut short after a structural flaw in the 100-year-old buildings was exploited by a boy, pushing the wall out from his cabin and sneaking his head through to watch the girls getting changed.

The teachers very nearly didn’t believe the girls when they explained he was able to spy them because the walls did not join up like they are required to under most council planning laws.

Man, I feel like going on another camp now.

No whey!

Also pinged for inaccuracy because that spider is totally not to scale.

There are several things in life surrounded by an impregnable barrier of implausibility, by virtue of which I simply cannot come to have faith in them.

The elaborate brickwork of ‘no fucking way’ has walled itself around several of life’s little pleasures (or at least, I imagine them to be) such that even if I wanted to swallow them whole into my little gullet of belief I couldn’t, because they are inherently, dramatically, bullshit.

As a child, for example, I remained uncompromisingly hell-bent on authenticating every nursery rhyme.

I mean, honestly, I had enough to worry about without having spurious lies spoon-fed to me in helpful rhymes and iambic pentameter.

Jack and Jill may well have gone up the hill to fetch a pale of water but who sent them, on whose orders and was ‘pale of water’ code for ‘nuclear armaments’ where Jack and Jill are metaphors for heavily industrialised enemies of the West?

Exactly, and do you think my mother could tell me? She couldn’t. She may well have been complicit in the plutonium enriching agenda of developing economies and I would never have known.

Furthermore, Little Miss Muffet (whose birth certificate was never presented to me) sat on her tuffet. Whoa. Just whoa. Other variations of a tuffet are pouffe and hassock. Pouffe! It’s a gay conspiracy and, one would assume, just step one of the homosexual master plan to indoctrinate our children and turn them all into pillow-biters…and…and lesbians!

And, one must ask, why was she so afraid of the spider when all evidence suggests the spider did nothing even remotely aggressive. There was no pre-emptive arachnid strike. It was probably just having a picnic. Little Miss Muffet, ergo, is a racist bigot.

I certainly didn’t appreciate having nursery rhyme recitals where the authors of said nursery rhymes were either heavily bent on acid or so cynically ambivalent toward the English language.. Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon. What. The. Fuck. Honestly, I’ve seen clearer statements pour forth from the almighty maw of legitimate meth addict Charlie Sheen.

That the dish ran away with the spoon is evidence of an adulterous undertone, suggesting that this nursery rhyme at least was written by several willing participants in an outrageous and entirely child-inappropriate swinger’s party.

Retrospectively off with their heads!

I put these questions to my mother and watched her flounder, wondering why on Earth a child so young would be so unwilling to believe a cow could leap bodily over the moon (not least of all because it would be a major detraction from every human-led space milestone to date).

She knew then, as I now know, that sometimes things are not conspiracy theories. Sometimes things just are. Sometimes people do nice things because they want to. Not because there is a reward or because their moral code is being monitored by a supreme being. Sometimes occam’s razor really does cut straight to the truth of it.

Maybe Jack and Jill just wanted some water. They may have wanted some illicit rumpy pumpy, but why is it so hard to understand they also might have just been thirsty in the most basic, non-innuendo forms of thirstiness?

Why indeed.

This is why today I generally steer clear of the comments section on news websites, peppered so liberally (scoff, I said liberal!) with conspiracy theories that appear to have been formulated at the bottom of a meth lab.

No, BevanofBankstown, I do not believe that Julia Gillard is bringing on the carbon tax because she is secretly a lizard inside. Besides, that doesn’t even make sense! If she were a lizard she would want the world to get warmer because lizards are cold-blooded and they need the sun’s energy to function.

It’s science.

The Carbon Flack

I find it diabolical that nobody in this whole media circus has thought to focus on the real victims of the carbon tax. The carbon atoms themselves. All this coming from a Labor Government too – taxing working carbon families like this is just an instrument of cynical politics.

Those little carbon atoms do a lot of work. They make you and I, for instance. They help us make little, tiny things like carbon nano-tubes. And here we are, thinking about taxing them. And so soon after the global financial crisis as well!

It seems the only thing less popular in this country right now than a carbon tax is reading about the carbon tax. And who can blame them when all the literature paints a dastardly future for struggling carbon families who already had to stop using the air-conditioning in summer because they couldn’t afford to pay the electricity bill.

Which is why I propose an alternative, morale boosting policy platform. The carbon sax. It would be a stimulus program for working carbon atoms to build this nation’s next novelty over-sized highway feature. The carbon sax.

It will be an investment in infrastructure and jobs. It’ll be robust. A beacon of what we can achieve when we put our minds together and try and stop thinking about la-la-la-la-la climate change.

I just hope the giant carbon sax never catches on fire, because it’ll really fuck up the atmosphere.