It's definitely Wonderland here...........
Only there's a time to have the good taste to take something closer to home more serious under certain circumstances.
Gawd knows there are are some sick things going on out in the real world and its good to let our hare down (pun intended) and to just "Forget" and indulge in some non-ego-driven, light-hearted entertainment, because life's too short to dwell on stuff that is entirely out of our control and because its too dark and depressing to imagine. We are all victims of injustices and don't need reminding for fear of going mad.
Anyway, I just can't help wondering how much it would damage someone, spiritually speaking, to find their close family with their head shot to bits, we have to respect that surely? So I am not surprised he was offended by the Guffidge. (see what I did with that) yeah it stinks to be reminded of it.
Comparing The duck to Hitler was in my humble opinion, was extreme and was unrelated to the fecklessness of certain individuals who are on the prowl in Britain's neighbourhoods with access to guns, who can live outside the laws we all have to abide by.
If we want egos rubbing, I don't do that, if I didn't respect someone they would know about it by now.
I don't need to imagine that Moley. I wish I did have to imagine something like it. But I don't. I
know.
I will tell you...I will tell you all in a bit more detail than I tried to tell him what I attempted to share with the Duck. In the email he outright told me he could not be arsed reading because I (quoting here) had "given him a headache." by having bothered to write to him personally, at some length; in a conciliatory and indeed pleading manner.
I was 14. I was at my first proper teenage party. It was organised by some boys in Year 10 at my school. They had won their Rugby League Zone grand final. They were happy as piglets in pooh. Especially Pete, who, though he had done his cruciate ligament in the process, had scored the winning try with a breakaway 50 metre clear run. He had been in hospital having that repaired when the official team bbq had been held so he and his three best mates decided they'd have their own celebration. With girls and better music and booze and everything.
And my special mate Dom got his youngish uncle to loan us his backyard, his spit roast - and his presence as a sort of cool chaperone to satisfy the more protective urges of some of the parents.
It was so terribly grown up a thing to do. I was in year 8. I was one of the few in the junior school to be included. I was included because Dom had been my first boyfriend. I was in Kindy and he was a big boy in Second Class at the time. Though his marriage proposal had kind of faded into the background, we had always remained the best of friends. I was just starting to think that maybe there was a way out of the fugue of confusion; of sad and rage and insanity that my brother's disappearance had brought down upon my life. It was in fact the first thing I had truly looked forward to in almost two years.
Well we were westie teens. There was beer and wine coolers of course. The cool Uncle had allowed that but warned he wasn't taking any flak for people who got so blathered that they spewed and passed out. There was also I found out much later in the evening, when everything had gone about as far to cock as it was possible for a good time to go, a bucket bong going in the back shed. But the Uncle had been quite careful to ensure that the younger party goers, esp the 14 year old girls, didn't have access to that. He
was a good chaperone. He was as cool as Dom.
Everything was going swimmingly. I remember exactly what I was wearing. A white halter top and black skinny leg jeans. 4 inch stilletto heel ankle boots and all my best silver jewellery. I'd washed my hair in specially purchased Vidal Sassoon shampoo and spent hours taming the unruly curls with expensive salves into the sexiest waist length spiral tendrils my untutored hands could manage.
For the first time in my life I truly felt that I might be beautiful.
My dad insisted he was dropping me off. Utter humiliation, as the family vehicle was his green Bedford table top truck. Bloody handy for a builder's labourer I'll grant you, but more a pumpkin than a coach for the belle of the ball to arrive in I felt.
He spread a blanket over the dusty seat so that my top wasn't sullied and drove me to the house. He then insisted on coming in and assessing the suitability of the chaperone. Turned out he knew the Uncle. It was "Young Steve" a sparky at the same building company dad laboured for. He stayed for a beer and left happy after half an hour, assured I was in safe hands. No gobshyte tradie who worked with my old man would have dared allow any harm to come to the moral or physical welfare of his baby. They'd all seen the effects of his uppercut on miscreants often enough to know that would be ill advised.
The wine coolers came out of hiding. Black Sabbath, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd and The Sex Pistols took turns blasting out of the best sound system any of us had ever experienced. Sparkies always have good stereos.
Christ it was so much fun. Dom and I had begun to rekindle our juvenile romance. Hand holding, slow dancing and even some tentative open mouthed kissing was engaged in.
About 9ish there was a kind of kerfuffle occurred in the driveway. Raised voices and a few " yer fucken slack cunts" drifted down the yard to us. Dom and I went out to investigate and there in the driveway, leaning over the bonnet of a red Commodore (Vauxhall to you Poms) was a scruffy looking "old bloke" - he was I later found out 37 - drunk as 20 men and insisting he was coming in to the party because he "wouldn't mind gettin' a bit of some of those little sluts."
Dom's Uncle was equally insistent that he could get to fuck. He was manhandled into his car and told to fuck off. Staggering and raving he promised "I'm going home to get me gun. I'm comin' back . I'll shoot all youse cunts that think you and yer sluts are too fucken good for me!"
What an arse we all thought. Laughed at him as he drove away . Dom made a pistol with his fist and shouted "Bang fucken bang you stupid old cunt!" as the car drove off.
Spirits raised even higher by the side show we go back to the yard. Another wine cooler. Another slow dance. Pink Floyd. Innit funny how things can be so prophetic and yet pass without being noted till its well too late?
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom,
blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter,
come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine.
You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
I was leaning on Dom. My head was swimming with wine and adolescent sexual possibility. The yelling had started up out the front again. Lots more "fucken cunts" and "filthy little sluts" floating down that driveway to us. Uncle Steve got up and all but ran down the driveway. He was ropeable. We giggled and kissed again. "Steve'll drop 'im. Your old man taught him to box."
I used to go rabbiting with my old man. And occasionally pig shooting. Just as an observer. I was after all, the son he no longer had. I didn't want to kill anything. I used to leave camp while the butchering happened. But I knew the sound of a gun shot was different from the sound of the crackers we had been letting off throughout the night. It's distinct. There's a report. I knew what it was right off. Two of them. One after the other.
But we were kids right? Idiots. No sense of self preservation. I yelled out "That's a gun" and down the driveway we all go...right into it. Not away from it...not down the back like any sentient grown being might have had the sense to head. Not over the fence and into the bush around the creek. No...out there. Into the street lights.
And there's cool Steve, lying in the driveway right near the kerb, with a great big bloody hole where his gut used to be..and all this pink and red shit all over his white t-shirt and his girlfriend screaming like something from a slasher film. And running. Running back towards us yelling "get out get out of the way".
But it's really weird because it's like it's all in slow motion and people's voices are kind of slurred and blurred. I know Dom half dragged half carried me back down the drive and I remember very clearly that he literally threw me over that back fence. He vaulted it himself and we lay in the scrub as more and more of our friends followed us over it. Crashing and running and screaming down towards the creek. And then I hear Pete's voice."Help me over. Dom! I can't get over mate!"
No. 'Course he couldn't. He was in a full leg brace. On crutches.
So over he goes. Dom. One hand on top of the 5 ft paling fence. He vaults it. Everyone else has fucked off down to the creek bed. I stand up and look over and here's the old bloke. The pathetic drunken cunt with the empty threats.
Only his .303's not empty. And Dom's got Pete by the arm, dragging him, trying to hoist him as he'd hoisted me. But Pete's a big lad. Bigger than Dom by a long chalk. He's a front row forward and Dom's a hooker. It's not gonna fucken happen is it?
And I'm stuck there. I can't make myself run. I can't make myself duck back down . I can't make myself go over and help them. I can't make myself look away. I'm just this lump. Staring. Like a fucking useless numpty.
And the ugly old bastard smiles at them and says all conversational like
"Bang fucken bang you stupid cunts."
Bang. Fucken bang.
And most of Pete's head is gone. And Dom's got this hole in his chest the size of Tasmania. You wouldn't believe what a .303 cartridge can do to a 16 year old boy's chest. And they're both on the ground and I'm still staring.
And the old cunt just turns and walks away like he didn't even see me there. I don't know how I got back over that fence but I can't look at Pete. It's too horror movie scene. But Dom's on the ground next to him and he's foaming blood out of his mouth and his nose and he's making this noise. Like a blocked drain. He's drowning and he's staring right up at me and he's afraid. He's so afraid. And shocked. He looks as shocked as I feel and I'm holding his head up trying to keep him from making that fucking awful noise and his blood's all over me. My pretty hair is all full of it and my pristine white top is scarlet now and I can hear neighbours running in and screaming and crying and then sometime between a minute and a decade later Dom's not making any noise any more.
So then I'm in the kitchen and I don't know how I got there and there's coppers and people all over the house and the yard and I can't hear anything but this dull roar in my ears. I can see people's mouths moving but all I can hear is this roar like the ocean coming at me from inside my brain and I have these lumps of wet sticky shit in my hair and on my face and down my chest. They're all over my hands and I've got this fucking great butcher's knife that we'd sliced the side of lamb up off the spit with and I'm hacking at it. Hacking at my hair and throwing it on the floor because I could smell it and feel it and I knew... I knew from watching the men gut the pigs.
It was Dom's. I had bits of his lungs and clots of his blood all over me.
So now you know why I don't like Pink Floyd very much.
But I don't expect every random I run into to know that. Or to make special arrangements not to inflict too much David Gilmore on me. Because you know...that's kind of unreasonable. And kind of none of their fucking doing.
And I don't think organ harvesting is small change in comparison to that experience. It's just another, larger scale kind of cunt act. Perpetrated by the powerful against the weak and the defenceless. And maybe
because I was so fucking useless then...I kind of try to do what I can to prevent any more cunt acts happening. Even if it's just by showcasing my
"white middle class guilt" in a few pithy words of protest against such things when they come to my notice.
So you know as I said to the Duck - he's not the only poor bastard to have suffered a traumatic event or two in his youth.
He just seems to think his pain matters a shitload more than anyone else's might do. And that we all ought to somehow empathically know what his particular buttons are.
And I think that's a bit of a big ask.
In MY humble opinion.