An Easter with no chocolate (but far too much beer)

A couple of individuals at work wonder why I regularly have my hair changed to a funny colour and arrive late to work every day only to sit at my desk and eat constantly. I explain that these habits are justified respectively by the fact that I am a gay insomniac with a fast metabolism. One also questioned the sense in me having my nipple pierced (as do I, constantly) but then after experiencing some considerable change of heart she offered to do the other one for me with the secretary’s holepunch. But we have a nice sort of understanding – the expression of surprise this morning when I turned up before ten o’clock counts for a lot in my books. How I ever got to 8am maths lectures in first year is beyond me. My reasons for studying a course that includes maths also elude me, as does much of what was taught. But I digress, and that was probably all of scant interest to anyone with a life.I wondered last Friday why it was a particularly Good one while Robbie and I searched high and low for somewhere to buy a drink, only to find all prospective venues firmly boarded shut. Made up for it on Saturday though. We were solidly blotto at the Hampshire by five in the afternoon before I realized I’d have to hang for a bit and sober up to drive home, where I slept for a few hours, only to get back on the piss again at Mars later on. The recently re-opened Hampshire is quite a swish looker though, as was David the barman who, with an obviously ironic comment about the tables out the back being “a decoration, just like the rosette soaps in the bathroom”, informed us that they served meals as well. My enquiry as to whether he was on the menu was thankfully halted before reaching my lips by what was left of my inhibitions, which by this stage had been severely depleted by some Semillon which proved almost as irresistible as the person pouring it. I was almost my sober self by the time I got to Mars (to be handed a free condom at the door and told “here, you’ll need this”) so I remembered to ask Beejay about a famed drag queen called Queen Bee. Coincidently, he had only recently swapped web links with her . Beejay said he would put a link to my journal on his site too. Mind you, he offered to do this before he had actually seen it. Got me wondering if there are six degrees of separation on the internet, so you can get from any site to any other site by following no more than six links, should you actually want to. Another friendly DJ, Roger, claimed to have seen my Gaydar profile. Well I guess that makes one of us. To be honest, I have to believe Roger on this one. I set up a profile to dip a toe into the online scene in Adelaide but have not checked it for weeks and, having tried it, now hold Gaydar in about the same regard as unwanted body hair. No, I’ll just continue with my unassertive ‘wait until the right one comes along and offers, preferably by written invitation’ approach to finding a boyfriend. Gaydar seems to have been made overly complex to use by the inclusion of unnecessary gimmicks. Reminds me of a Fischer-Price kids’ toy, except that it’s aimed at and used by people aged from 18 to (alarmingly) 93.We hung around the beer garden quite a bit that night and chatted to the sometime staff-member and fulltime gayboy named Nick - yes they’re spreading. He has a boyfriend but apparently cares less for him than I do for Gaydar. Most headed inside for the show and, in a noteworthy divergence from routine, the intermission this week featured no nudity. I think Rochelle learnt a lesson from last week’s episode during which the Mars bar virgin who she asked to reveal himself was rather too enthusiastic. The third showing of his member was the final one, possibly because of one heckler’s interjection of “do you have a name for your little friend?”.Dad and Verity arrived at my place on Sunday night, after undertaking the short drive over from Perth. We spent Monday afternoon at the Belgian Beer Cafe where I sat teetering on the edge of feeling okay to drive, knowing that later I would somehow have to pilot Dad’s Pajero to the airport in time for Verity’s flight back to WA. My father was in no state to operate a motor vehicle, having found well-poured Stella Artois even more alluring than I did. Driving duties behind me, Dad and I sat at home, drank Coopers and chatted with my neighbour. She said she had been to the Coorong Peninsula (two hours drive South) for the weekend. I replied that we had been to Rundle Street (two minutes drive North). Beat that! Later on we watched Queer as Folk so I have now watched QAF with my Mum, my Dad, my sister-in-law, my nappy-clad nephew and a room full of hairstylists (don’t ask). Dad’s only comments were rhetorical questions, specifically “it’s quite graphic isn’t it?” and “is there really this much drug use in the gay community?”. Yes to both.

Je ne veux pas coucher avec toi ce soir

“The Twingo is still so cute I don’t know whether to drive it, root it or eat it.”Michael Stahl, in the latest edition of ‘Wheels’, on the Renault Twingo hatchback (pictured).Speaking of pictures, I’ve come to the conclusion that the quality of my writing is inversely proportional to the number of pictures I include. This being the case, I’d better not go jpeg mad like spaced_in with his enormous 1024x768 photos that make each page take several hours to download over a dial-up. (You know what they say about men with big photos!) The pics are usually very pretty though and while waiting you just go and do something else. The other night I read ‘War and Peace’ and still had time to go and put the garbage out before they all appeared.Happy Easter.

Mars Bar Chronicals - Chapter 2945

Firstly, here is the photo of a pair of bison that some fellow Bluetooth-enabled phone carrying person sent to me at the Ed on Friday night.Right-o then.But my weekend wasn’t dominated by bison-loving freaks. Really it wasn’t, because I went into the office on Saturday. This despite my refusal to be a pawn to the corporate world (which is my morally respectable sounding way of saying that I’m too lazy to work for more than the minimum required hours each week). But I qualify this by saying that it wasn’t really out of dedicated service to my employer. No, I just felt sorry for someone who has become a pawn to the corporate world and decided to help them get a project finished, mainly so they would have time on the weekend to partake in extravagant self-serving activities like eating and sleeping. Also, I have learnt to make my hours at work more tolerable by doing some legitimate delegation of tasks and also by contriving the possible sexual insinuations of the engineering terms I encounter during the day. Well you try saying ‘fluid injector’ without laughing. And ‘venturi nozzle’, well that could mean anything.My good deed done it was time for some hedonism at Mars. Armed with my phone’s camera attachment, I was able to capture some of the local wildlife. I will leave it to you to decide whether they, or the bison pictured above, are the more human-like.Here you see myself and DJ Beejay, the man responsible for the music. (NB ‘Responsible’ is probably not the best word to describe him, as he himself freely admits.) He looks a tad demented in this photo, which at least makes up for the horrendous one of me that he put in Blaze, Adelaide’s equivalent of the Sydney Star Observer. (If having my face in Blaze means I’m now part of gay Adelaide’s bourgeoisie then that’s cool but they could have at least Photoshopped it a bit. It’s really bad. Ugh.)Now we have Sweet Bar Staff Boy Shannon from my last post. (Not that silly song I wrote about Ronald’s wisdom teeth. The proper one. The one before that.) Here is Shannon while locked in the cloak room for six hours.He says this job is boring until people start checking in substantial portions of their clothing. Next is myself with the delightful Rochelle, of “How the fuck are you all?” fame.She is great and, unlike myself, always photographs well. Indeed, the radiance you can see here is indicative of her charisma generally, proving that all you really need in life are boys and poise. Later on, one of the other drag queens could have done with some of Rochelle’s charisma as she unwillingly had her vinyl-clad crotch vigorously rubbed by some nut whose apparent aim was to give the boy beneath the frock a hard-on. Oh, don’t be shocked: this is about the standard of normal Mars bar behaviour.I’ve included some photos of the dancefloor, mainly to reignite memories harboured by those of you who have been there. Cruel aren’t I?

Ode to Ronald's wisdom teeth

This is an ode to ron_ 's wisdom teeth, inspired by Chingy.
I don’t like the way they hurt me right thurr.
Make my gums sting; when I talk they make me slurr.
I don’t like the way they hurt me right thurr.
They come through, make me angry, I say ‘grr’.

Oil, sweat and tears

I borrowed “Holding the Man” from the library on the weekend. I am only half way through it but it has already had me in tears three times so I’m not actually sure if I would recommend it to anyone. A bit heart wrenching.Met Robbie at Mars on Saturday night and had an unusual time there in that I spent a total of only about ten minutes on the dance floor. A few of us sat out in the beer garden being witty instead. Fun. Then we drove over to a very straight club called Rise and contemplated entering but couldn’t be bothered lining up probably only to get beaten up in there anyway. So we chilled at sweet bar staff boy Shannon’s place instead and sat laughing at stuff like the fact that for the $4.50 it costs to buy a 500mL bottle of spring water at Mars you could buy a ten litre cask of the stuff from Coles. And that it cost eight dollars to get in even when the air conditioning doesn’t work. And the time Julian Clary was there and Beejay refused to play any trashy music in case we humble Adelaidians were looked down upon. It’s probably worth me mentioning that while people in Sydney talk about real estate at dinner parties and the like (“Oooh Gillian, do you think the market has leveled out yet?”), people in Adelaide talk about bottled water and air conditioning. True.I was planning to fix my car on the weekend as well. It sort of needed attention. This was the sight I was greeted with last Monday morning.Repairing it properly would have involved removing the old damaged oil sump and replacing it with a new one that I would hopefully get from some wrecking yard. I borrowed some car ramps from a colleague, got the fucker up onto them……took one look at the maze underneath and realised that getting the sump out would be harder than I thought……and decided it was most definitely a job for someone else. Will just try and seal it with silicon in the mean time. And hope for the best. And stay off dirt roads.With this job abandoned my weekend was freed up for other things like attacking the weeks worth of dirty dishes that had built up around my sink and threatened to take over my while unit, if not the whole suburb. I also made a trip to the snobbiest public pool in Australia, Burnside Swimming Centre. Sure it’s nice but what sort of public pool charges five dollars for entry? It’s like expecting people to fork out four dollars at a sausage sizzle – it was always a buck fifty in my day.I went looking at new laptops as well. I made sure no-one I knew saw me go into the Apple Centre at Norwood. When I enquired about this thing called Virtual PC, the application designed to emulate Windows and therefore run Windows-only programmes, the salesman told me just that and also that “Windows stays in a window, where it belongs”. I wonder how many times he had rehearsed that line. He seemed very proud of it. The highlight at work this week was when we got an invoice for zero dollars. You’d think it was the public service. Otherwise there has been little worthy of note. The number of large, never-ending, boring tasks for me to do has gone from two to four. Thankfully though there have been some lighter moments.Colleague One: “I think you left your coffee here.”Colleague Two: “Oh thanks, do you know where my three course lunch is as well?”Me: “Yeah, and my new Audi?”Amusingly, a few company branded corporate gifts have made their way into the office. I was given a screwdriver and stubby holder. Good-o. Michelle scored one of those backpacks with the padded slot for a laptop. Pity that massive Dell they’ve given her to use doesn’t fit. How that thing could be regarded as portable is beyond me. And the fan slows down when the hard drive runs – perhaps Dell’s power supply people should revise their basic circuit theory, paying particular attention to Thevenin’s equivalent circuit model. Fuck, did I just remember something from first year? Yeah that’d be two things in one day from first year actually - had to use FTP to upload those pictures and it’s been a while since I touched that. Must be time for bed.

Guess who's coming to Sydney!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just dopily forgot to mention that I am coming back to Sydney for the ANZAC long weekend, having now booked a ticket, as well as some sort of hire car ("Corolla, or similar") for the four days. I hope I can find some willing individuals to participate in many hours of Sydney scene-queenery on Saturday the 24th of April - and would also appreciate somewhere to eventually crash on Sunday morning.Recent interchange with work colleague while I was booking flights through virginblue on the web:Colleague: What are you doing?Me: I'm booking a virgin over the internet for the 23rd and 27th of April.Colleague: You're what?Me: Yes, it's costing over $300 dollars, and that's just for the economy service.

Oils aint oils. Boys aint boys.

I went to get in my car on Monday morning to find it sitting in a pool of its own oil that it had pissed out overnight. Looking underneath, I found a very small and very neat slice through the sump (the bit at the bottom of the engine that holds the oil, usually) that was probably a result of Sunday’s gravel road escapade near the charming town of Hahndorf, which is located in the hills just outside of Adelaide. The massive rock I slammed the sump into on a camping trip last year didn’t cause a leak, but some nasty little South Australian shard has. Until this is fixed I will have to top up the oil every time I drive and put a plastic tray underneath it when I park. Makes a bit of a myth of the idea that a car provides convenient transport hey.So apart from causing what will probably turn out to be a couple of hundred dollars worth of damage to my Charade, what did I do on the weekend? On Friday night I met up with Daniel and his fabbo friend Nina at the Edinburgh Castle Hotel before we went to Mars for a bit. Beejay let me have a go at mixing some tracks together but I don’t think he will again because I’d had too much to drink and therefore fucked it up quite badly and everyone on the dancefloor stared at him/me. Dan stayed the night, dashed home in the morning and then reappeared at 10:30 bashing on the door, having climbed up to my 1st floor balcony, to wake me up to go for breakfast on Hutt Street as, some hours earlier, we had sleepily arranged to do. We went and saw ‘Camp’ on Saturday night as well, which was nice, and then had a late dinner at this little place off Rundle Street where people seemed to just walk in off the street and sit down as if it was their own living room.On Sunday, I did nothing really. This was good because on Saturday, in between meetings with my psuedo-boyfriend, I also helped my brother install the stainless steel frame for a pergola into the brickwork of his courtyard, so I kind of wanted a rest.My immediate reflections on the weekends events? Dan is, to quote Kim Day-Craig again, rather “unique”. Hammer-drilling into masonry is noisy and makes your arm sore. I need a four-wheel-drive. But things turned a little bizarre on Monday night. Dan messaged a request that I join himself and Nina at the Ed to watch ‘Queer as Folk’ and have a quiet drink. I took this up but went home soon after the conclusion of this Monday night televisual icon - with the excuse that I had to work in the morning and needed to go before my car emptied ALL of its remaining oil onto the road – and left them to continue.And continue they evidently did – for some time and with considerable enthusiasm. At nigh on 4am who rings from my doorstep but a very smashed Daniel. (He thankfully refrained from climbing up to my balcony on this occasion – I have no doubt he would have fallen and finished up lodged in the oleander tree.) After stumbling up the stairs he gets into my bed and proceeds to sprout a phenomenal backlog of manipulative emotional drivel of a caliber I never envisaged, attempts some hanky-panky and, noting my obvious lack of enthusiasm at this hour of the day/night, promptly re-dresses and moodily leaves. He appears to subscribe to Kim Day-Craig’s mantra of “yes I’m high maintenance, you have to be”, not a trait I have a lot of time for. Why can’t I just find someone sweet and funny and down to earth? When I do I will treat like gold. Damn it, I will through thick and thin stand by a friend or lover who is having a hard time emotionally (just as I have been supported when I needed it), but not for a one night stand who happens to hang around for a bit and sporadically lob-in at his own leisure. I haven’t properly spoken to him since but when I do I will tell him exactly what I have said in the previous sentence.

(Not very) entertaining quiz results.

Mmm. Not sure 'bout this one. AQUAYou enjoy life, humor, and being exuberant. Wherever you go you usually find yourself stealing the spotlight without even trying. You love to let go and have fun.Find out your color at Quiz Me!Did it again and got this. YELLOWYou are very perceptive and smart. You are clear and to the point and have a great sense of humor. You are always learning and searching for understanding.Find out your color at Quiz Me!Can you be both yellow and aqua - sort of turquoise-khaki coloured?

It's a littuw bit hot in here.

Not having made any attempt to crack into the Stonewall Bourgeoisie while in Sydney I have toyed with trying to attain for myself the equivalent tag here, while a sort of big fish in a small pond. However Mars Bourgeoisie are more difficult to identify than their Eastern states counterparts since they display a rather erratic set of behaviours which I would also not be able, or even want, to emulate. Basically I have met very few people on the scene down here who actually approach what you might call normality. Would fate just please introduce me to someone down to earth? Robbie is I guess – he has spent enough time in Sydney to have had any unbridled kookiness erased out of him. Should give him a call. He might even have some friends who have similar presence of mind. Incidentally, I was amused to note on Tuesday evening that one of the glassies from Mars works at my local Coles. Talk about moonlighting. My journal gets updated twice in three days this week because I am at work and not really feeling like doing anything productive. This is partly because I am recovering from getting sunburnt on the weekend (again) and because it’s hotter in the office than it is outside courtesy of an air conditioning unit that has leaked most of its refrigerant out, frozen itself, blocked its evaporator and now doesn’t blow any air, let alone cool air. There is a bloke named George in the utility room fixing it now but he doesn’t say much because he doesn’t want to get involved in the politics between us and our landlord. Love it. Gets better though. We now have approval from the head office to use company cash to buy ice creams for ourselves, if it’s over 25 degrees in here after 2pm, everyday until it’s fixed.The silent-end-of-word-L Adelaide accent continues to amaze. Down here if you have a headache you take a ‘Panadow’ (Panadol). If you like something you say it is ‘coow’ (cool). To do some shopping you might go to ‘Runduw Street Maw’ (Rundle Street Mall). Mice are ‘littuw’ (little). ‘Deww’ (Dell) is a popular brand of computer and you might ‘instaww’ (install) programs on it. ‘Wawws’ (walls) keep the wind out of your house. It’s very cute and even sounds slightly British although I’m not really exposed to it that much because most of the people I work with are from the Eastern states, drawn to Adelaide because there is actually a lot of work in engineering here. Unlike in Sydney the meaningless prefix ‘uber’ appears not to have infiltrated the local vernacular, which is good because it’s use in any context shits me to tears.

Dead wood, Nudity and Rochelle. Among other things.

It’s amazing how clearing a bit of dead wood out of your life improves things. I took that bloody Kloss stereo and its boomy bass back to where I bought it and ordered a proper sound system. Did someone say retail therapy?Just to forewarn you, I am going to start on about the Mars Bar again since it’s about the only thing that is regularly of any significance in my life at the moment. Yes we have sunk to new depths I tell you.Every Friday and Saturday night at about 2am they put on a drag show and in line with drag show tradition it is repeated week after week. About half way through it a man dressed as a woman, who calls him/herself Rochelle, struts out and yells to the crowd “HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU ALL”. (It’s the same every week but it’s funny every time.) She bangs on for a bit about what events are coming up on the Adelaide scene (trust me, this is brief) and then gets anyone having a birthday or hens night or bat mitzvah up on stage and asks them to reveal their genitalia. And some people actually do. I was particularly impressed last Saturday because while I was in the DJ booth talking to Beejay the DJ/MC guy I noticed a scribbled note on the desk saying“21st birthday here tonight, name is Steve* - will strip”.which just proves how organized they are with all this. (*Names have been changed so as not to incriminate people who should know better. Actually - fuck it - they damn well deserve to be incriminated: his real name was Corey.) Incidentally you can check out Beejay’s site here. He puts photos up as well. He uses that as a threat to people. In fact I think he put one of me on there – no genitalia on show though, thankfully.Just before the ugly lights came on I saw Daniel (my near-fiancé from last week) and, out of concern for his welfare in regards to him walking through the parklands in the dark, I offered him a lift home. The offer was taken up and of course then we had to ‘go in and have coffee’ and it sure wasn’t Nescafe Blend 43 instant because I didn’t end up leaving his place till after 10 on Sunday night. Actually, I think I may have had more than one coffee while I was there, if you can read the subtext. And they were more like iced macchiatos than short blacks. Was this slothful iniquity? Yes. But was this fun? Yes. Am I unnerved at people who mention the L word a little too early on in the getting to know phase? Resoundingly, yes.

WTF?

Having realized in the last couple of days that the lead blanket of depression has recently been enveloping me again, I am now a bit disturbed that I didn’t notice my worsening mood until Thursday, by which time I was almost rendered incapable of functioning. But on a lighter note I am happy as Larry just now which is kind of weird since I am writing this on a Sunday morning – not a point in the week that I would normally feel at my best.Thanks to the initiative of a Sydney friend, Shaun, I yesterday met up with his ex-flatmate Robbie who has now returned to his hometown of Adelaide. This is unremarkable except that, through what was an utterly extraordinary coincidence, Robbie and I had unknowingly already sort of met, then spoken and rescued each other from a septuagenarian drag queen (true) at Mars only the night before. Actually, Robbie undeniably embodies much of the qualities of Adelaide gay boys in general by having a fun-loving and unpretentious attitude, that cute don’t-pronounce-the-L’s Adelaide accent, and cool hair.Last night he generously introduced me to another of Adelaide’s queer venues, the Queen’s Arms Hotel. Here they cover up the fact that the drag performers’ dance moves are out of synch with each other by only having one in the spotlight, and therefore visible, at a time. Clever. During the show, two ladies (real ones) helped themselves to the other chairs at our table. They proved friendly, with the somewhat larger of the two volunteering not only her phone number but also the information that she works at the Haigh’s Chocolate factory and that one of the perks is that employees are allowed to eat the chocolates. Robbie and I decided that perhaps she ought to lay off the chocolates a bit. I think that was when we left and, perhaps against our better judgment, headed to Mars.Unlike at Queen’s the Mars Bar performers’ mistakes are on show very clearly. Still, this is forgivable since they were last night performing for free in order to raise money for their 2005 Mardi Gras campaign. There’s nothing like starting early I guess. Bear in mind that the 2004 parade would have barely finished what I understand was a rather damp procession this year, the participants’ washed off make-up probably still smeared across Oxford Street. (The news about the wet weather in Sydney actually made it to Adelaide somehow and was confirmed via a 1 minute 57 second voicemail that Nickmac left for me this morning, about half of which was actually intelligible.)The Mars Bar is not only responsible for wasting a few hours of my life last night but probably also for taking a few years off it as well. After the third round of the resident DJ’s trademark Kylie megamix I decided it was time to cut my losses and leave. I was seen and hastily embraced by Daniel (from last week) at this point. I think he was about to propose to me when I told him I was going home before the ugly lights came on at five o’clock, the rather unsubtle incandescent signal that another of the Mars Bar’s four day weeks had come to an end. I have been there on other occasions for this most distressing occurrence and can say that I have never seen a faster mass exodus of people from a building since the power went off in Macquarie Shopping Centre last December and every wood duck in its concrete confines bolted manically for the nearest exit, thinking there had been a terrorist attack. Hilarious. On the domestic front I have accessorised my unit with a Tivoli Audio Kloss Model Two stereo. I am basically happy with it except that, being an audio product designed in a place with no sense for this and many other things for that matter (America), it has a nasty boom in the bass response between about 100 and 200 Hertz before losing the plot at lower frequencies. So it makes, say, Kamahl’s voice too thunderous but then doesn’t play any sound that’s deeper such as the bass lines on Kylie’s Body Language album that I foolishly bought last week. Nothing a subwoofer won’t cover up though and this boomy mid-bass does make the thing sound bigger than it is, at least if you listen to Kamahl, not Kylie. And it looks very cool, in a retro sort of way. I didn’t get the optional and very wheezy Kloss Model Sub and instead will find a better one, preferably one that actually works properly.For the moment, if I want to hear deep bass I’ll just have to go back to Mars. How tragic.