A Twisted Tale of Woe and Coincidence.

20 Sunday Jan 2013

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

Tags

Story by Gregor Stronach

So, there was trouble last night. I got into strife for putting a hole in the television with a pistol I’d bought from a guy with some money I’d made stealing a car.

I’d taken the car from a woman with a disability who had hurt herself trying to end her life after discovering her husband had a secret family stashed away on Christmas Island.

That guy had put his second family there in the mistaken belief that no one would find them – and that even if they did, they could claim refugee status and plead for asylum.

Problematically, they were shipped off to a detention centre, where their primary caseworker was a woman whose boyfriend was disappointed that she was still a bit plump.

She had spent thousands of dollars at the gym, he said, to look like she was about to get fat at any moment – like it could happen in an instant, while his back was turned.

She could walk into the kitchen to fetch him a beer, and he’d hear a muffled ‘thoompf’. She would emerge from the kitchen with an extra 20 kilos in her saddle bags – and probably just pretend like nothing had happened.

But he would know.

Her weight problems were due largely to a secret addiction to consuming bags and bags of coloured popcorn. What made it strange was her fascination for eating the pieces one by one, but only after they had been sorted by colour and segregated.

First blue, then yellow, followed by red which preceded green which, in turn, lead to purple. The orange ones she stored in Tupperware containers, with the date of confinement etched in permanent marker on the patented burp-seal lid.

The containers were hidden in a storage unit that she paid for with a portion of the funds her boyfriend gave her to visit the gym.

For the low, low price of a personal trainer, in the course of four years she had managed to fill a three-metre cube with Tupperware, which in turn was filled with orange popcorn, which in turn was chock-full of food colouring and calories.

Third Sunday of every month, she would become contemplative and moody. He blamed it on her menstrual cycle. She let him, knowing that the truth of the matter would surely shatter his feeble mind.

She would let him slump awkwardly on the couch to watch sports on pay TV, slipping quietly to her sensibly small car.

In the boot of the vehicle, which she’d bought from a man with a beard on a hot Sunday marred only by an inexplicable swarm of bees, were that month’s containers. Tiny, air-tight plastic coffins for hundreds and hundreds of pieces of garish, orange popcorn.

They were at the lowest rung of popcorn society, she believed. Her conceit had her equate them with workers in high-visibility vests. Sweaty, dirty men who called her names and commented loudly to each other about her mildly wobbly bottom as she walked to the gym.

She would drive, then, to the storage space – a converted warehouse that had once been the manufacturing base for a company that specialized in the production of luminous watch faces.

The earth beneath her storage unit contained a terrifying quantity of radium. It had leeched through the concrete slab, and had made its way into several of the lower-lying plastic containers.

The popcorn within was already glowing with an admittedly mild intensity – but I have little doubt that someone, somewhere would find this detail interesting:

On the coldest of nights, when the inside of the storage unit was as black as the inside of a cow, cockroaches would gather, forming circles and swaying rhythmically, side to side, for hours and hours.

They were like ancient druids of centuries long gone – with more legs, less robes and absolutely no desire to raid the local village and burn a virgin on the heath to ensure a bumper crop of turnips.

Which was lucky, really – because she didn’t like turnips. She was more of a Swede girl. Kumera, maybe. And Parsnips, never – on the basis that parsnips a the cruelest joke of the vegetable world. Shaped tantalizingly like carrots, they take nine years to cook and taste like Pinocchio’s nose.

But I digress.

She rented the storage space from a chap with a limp and a strange skin condition that covered his entire body, including his face, with wart-like lumps. He liked to smile at the almost-fat girl with what he thought was a debonair attitude.

To her, it was like being leered at by a blanched chokito bar – but he was at the very least polite, in that way that most horribly disfigured people are.

I say most, because I once met a girl who had been thrashed by a neighbor with a broomstick for stealing passionfruit from a vine in her backyard. The beating was as comprehensive as it was lengthy, leaving the young girl with a shattered patella and permanent, rose-red subdermal scarring on her thighs, calves and left shoulder.

She was bitter – much like the juvenile passionfruit she had stolen – and would complain at length to anyone in earshot about how the pummeling she’d received had irreversibly ruined her life.

She called herself a victim – a shameless endonym countered by the near-universal exonym of her rapidly dwindling social circle. To them, she was simply The Bitch

That group of friends had met at a party hosted by a guy who once came second on a reality TV show. He had survived nearly four months cooped up in a house on the Gold Coast with a bunch of idiotic, self-obsessed meatheaded men and an equally charmless cohort of women of loose virtue and even looser undergarments.

As the only cast member to not have his pickle plucked on national TV, he became an unlikely national hero. The Man Who Couldn’t Get Laid, they called him – and, indeed, it was true.

Were he to be lying prone, face up and sporting an erection in the midst of a cunt storm, his lions would remain unmolested. He caused the precise opposite reaction to women’s knees than the one Moses had on the Red Sea.

That event, I feel compelled to share, is only accurately described as a miracle in the sense that Moses would have to be one of the luckiest people to ever draw breath.

After 40 days and 40 nights (which is Bible for “a really long time – no one’s quite sure, because the guy who was supposed to be counting went on annual leave) of being pursued by chariot-driving Egyptians, he had the extreme good fortune to arrive at the shoreline at the precise moment a tsunami would strike.

Sucking the sea back, as all good tsunamis do, it laid bare the muddy bottom of the bay. The Israelites fled across the mud – and, in the manner of third-world country drivers everywhere, the Egyptians followed. They did so enthusiastically, at first. But that enthusiasm waned somewhat when their horses, chariots, slaves and the massive marble obelisk the Pharoah had demanded accompany them on the pursuit became stuck in the slurping, goopy mess of mud beneath their feet.

When the tsunami finally disgorged its load of salty liquid death upon the shoreline, the Israelites were on the far side of the bay – most likely wondering what the fuck had just happened.

“What the fuck just happened?” they asked Moses.

“Dunno,” Moses replied. “But thank Christ it did, or we’d be completely fucked by now.”

“Thank who?” the Israelites chorused, mightily confused by the sudden anachronistic appearance of a key figure in a religious movement that would be started inadvertently by a young woman who deftly avoided being in huge trouble with her family (and most likely stoned to death by them) for falling pregnant so she blamed it on God and the whole family bought the lie and some kings turned up when the baby arrived and there might have been a comet and a little kid playing a drum of some sort.

But I digress.

The young lady with the slightly flabby derriere and her secret, warty admirer would exchange pleasantries. The last occasion upon which this happened, they spoke briefly about a reality TV show, and the sudden disappearance of the young man who had come second in the previous season.

Unlucky, was how her lumpen Casanova described the mildy-famous man whose inability to appear at work or scheduled family gatherings was being erroneously blamed on foul play.

She nodded. It was, quite literally, the very least she could do.

Carting her precious orange cargo into storage, her contemplative mood returned. What would become of her Tupperware containers and their countless orange prisoners if something untoward were to happen to her?

The answer to that became apparent when the young woman was ambushed by a Socialist while walking into the detention compound where she worked on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday morning.

In an unfortunate series of events, the socialist in question had become even more embittered with the world, when his proposed lecture series – “Socialism and You – How to remain politically irrelevant but still feel like you’re doing something about seizing the means of production and returning it to the people” had been turned down for a government grant on the basis that it had nothing to do with refugees, art or public transport.

On his quest to find a genuine refugee that he could paint murals of on the sides of trains (preferably stationary, but he was prepared to be flexible), he presented himself at the gates of the detention facility.

Denied entry by an enthusiastic member of the Security Business – a large Tongan man with ties to several outlaw motorcycle clubs whose hobbies include long walks on the beach at sunset and the rebirthing and sale of stolen motor vehicles – the socialist became quite animated.

His sock-clad feet trembled within the spacious confines of his Berkenstock sandals. Finally, he thought to himself, I have a chance to be outraged.

His voice rose in pitch and volume, somewhat tremulous. He launched into a tirade, gesticulating wildly at the guard. Between the times of 8.15am and 8:55am on the morning in question, he delivered an impassioned speech, laden with equal quantities of invective and spittle.

He railed against the inequalities inherent in the system. He screamed about the ad hoc police state, governed by unqualified members of society whose only claim to authority were sky-blue uniforms and the weaponry they possessed to quell dissent. He wailed about the need for those in uniform to rise up against their masters, to re-join the ranks of the common man and turn the weapons of the elite back upon those who had purchased them with money stolen from the working class.

But mostly he whined about not being let into the facility to find someone whose likeness he could paint upon the side of some trains (or one train, really. Just one. It wouldn’t be much, but it would be a start).

At 8:56am, the Tongan “lost his shit”, as they have described it in classical literature since the invention of the written word – an achievement scholars suggest really came to fruition with the emergence of the scratchings of Mycaenean Greek we know as Linear B.

It has been 60 years since Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B – a feat he achieved with the help of his dentist.

It turns out that Linear B is actually the written form of Oral B – the universal language spoken by dental patients when they have four sets of fingers, a vacuum pump and a fistful of cotton bollards in their mouth.

That discovery gave rise to two things – the brand of toothbrush that bears the name of the spoken language, and the common parlance “It’s all Greek to me.”

Neither of those statements is true.

Truth, as a concept, is a difficult one to encapsulate neatly. But what I can attest to with all honesty is that, on that Tuesday morning, a large Tongan man’s desire to punch a hysterical socialist in the face overcame him.

He wound up his beefy, Islander arm and lashed out – at the precise moment the left-leaning antagonist did precisely that: he leaned to the left, ostensibly to check on the condition of his sandals, moving deftly – if inadvertently – from the path of a high-velocity fist that resembled a miniature nut-brown Rhino, hell-bent on charging a Land Rover full of screaming Japanese tourists on safari in South Africa.

The punch, having missed its target, rocketed on with the tedious inevitability of a comet hurtling through the unimaginably vast distances of space. It’s travel was halted by the right temple of a young woman whose buttocks weren’t really all that large and who harboured a terrible secret about a stash of orange popcorn in a storage unit overseen by a man with lumpy skin – which, in time, would turn out to be one of the first-recorded Zebu-to-Human transferals of a strain of Neethling Virus.

It would be a red-letter day for medicos – a brand new disease that could be used to justify a rise in consult prices. It would be a slightly awkward day for the custodian of the storage units, who was required to explain to his doctor, then the lovely people at the zoo, then an increasing number of incredulous police officers, then a judge and finally to a group of extremely puzzled fellow prisoners how he came to find himself in the Zeebu enclosure at the Western Plains Zoo on the night of January 5 – the date that doctors had determined he caught the virus.

However, the day currently under discussion, would turn out to be a very bad day indeed for both the fist-happy Tongan security officer and the young woman whose moderately ample buttocks did little to cushion her impact as she fell to the floor.

There was some argument amongst the doctors who performed the autopsy as to whether she was actually deceased before she hit the floor. It was an argument that raged into the night, continuing on as those involved finished work and retired to the local drinking establishment to get to the bottom of the issue.

By 3am, in an unusually reflective mood, a junior morgue worker suggested that the young lady in question, philosophically speaking, was in fact dead the moment she left the house that morning.

He was shouted down by several colleagues and eventually ejected from the hotel because he had a funny haircut, given to him by a well-meaning but extremely intoxicated stranger at a party thrown by a man who had since been in the news for disappearing after rising to national infamy by being unable to score a root in a house full of horny 20-something women whose lust for men was matched only by their lust for fame and who weren’t afraid to swap what was between their legs for the chance to have everyone know who they were.

Lying dead on the slab in the morgue, the young lady plays only a minor role in this tale from here.

The socialist – a witness to the attack – refused to co-operate with the police on the basis that he was, and I quote, “unable to understand the porcine ramblings of the uniformed cretins who are trying to verbal me into admitting that I’ve killed that lady with the nice bum.”

Charged with obstruction of justice, he was remanded to Silverwater Prison, where he met a kindly man of the Muslim faith and was persuaded that the religion of peace was a far better road than the politics of yesteryear. He swapped Marx for Mohammed, and never looked back – until his sandals were stolen from outside the Lakemba Mosque by an elderly man with dementia who had wandered from a local nursing home on a quest for a ‘decent pair of shoes and maybe a cup of tea and a biscuit if I’m lucky.”

The Tongan, however, was not so lucky. Charged with manslaughter – confusing for him, since he’d actually slaughtered a woman – he managed to make bail a week after the incident.

Requiring funds to mount an effective legal defense, he rang around to find a buyer for a rebirthed Mercedes he had stashed in a storage facility that was operated by a strange lumpy guy who never stopped talking about a girl with a great arse who came in once a month with boxes of Tupperware.

He had no luck moving the Mercedes – but did receive a request for a BMW M3 from a guy in Bankstown who spoke with a lisp, walked with a limp and only ever drank champagne on an evening of a blue moon.

Two of those characteristics were utterly useless affectations, designed to elicit a sense of curiosity and an air of mystery. The limp was caused by a defective hip-flexor tendon, injured while clambering hurriedly over a fence to escape an angry neighbor who had caught him and his friends’ friends’ cousin stealing passionfruit on a hot Sunday morning.

And so it was that the Tongan man called me, and I – perennially short of cash – knew precisely where I might find a BMW M3 that would fit the bill perfectly. It was owned by a guy who won an enormous sum of money on a reality TV show by successfully bedding every single woman in the house (and two of the men) in a six-week rampage of testosterone, latex and water-based lubricant.

It wasn’t at all difficult to take the car – the young man in question had lent it to his mother, a kindly middle-aged matronly type who had difficulty getting around after a nasty run-in with a train, prompted by the terrifying betrayal dealt to her by her two-timing husband and that horrible refugee he called his ‘second wife’.

I delivered the car to a storage facility – waved through the gate in the dead of night by an obsequious wart monster, who simpered and smirked at me as I parked the M3 in an otherwise empty garage.

For one hours’ work, I was paid $2000 – 60 percent of which I promptly spent on a nickel-plated 9mm hand gun that, it’s previous owner assured me, “hasn’t been used for anything serious yet so the cops don’t know nothing about it.”

I purchased the weapon as protection. The Tongan soon discovered that I’d stolen the car from a woman with mobility issues – apparently a no-no in the eyes of some criminals. I, of course, argued that – technically – the car belonged that blonde guy from that TV show where prostitutes and surfies lived in a house on TV for four months while degrading themselves in the hope that they might get famous or win some money.

No harm, no foul, I thought.

Word reached me that the Tongan was both happy and angry – a state of being usually reserved for hyperactive children on a sugar rush and Catholic priests. And – on balance – it turned out that he would be quite happy to hurt me for delivering a car that was ‘too hot’.

I didn’t understand until later that night, when I flicked over to the evening news in time to see three very important things.

Firstly, a report on the very vehicle I had purloined – complete with weeping invalid and chisel-jawed reality TV star son, pleading for the return of his car because “it’s got all my CDs in the stacker in the boot. Oh – and mum needs a car to get around. Yeah.”

Second, I learned that the young man who had appeared with our recently de-BMW’d TV star had been located, semi-conscious in a brothel in Croydon with a serious rash on his genitals, a savagely depleted bank account and a hurriedly-scribbled note that read simply “Fuck you, I got laid.”

The news cut to an ad break – where I learned that the next series of some god-awful reality show about hookers and footballers trapped in a caravan in Toukley would be starting “after the tennis.”

It was too much to bear. So I calmly (and very carefully) removed my newly-purchased pistol from the waistband of my jeans, and put two well-considered rounds of 9mm ammunition through the screen.

While the television ceased to operate according the manufacturer’s specifications, I felt completely justified in my outburst of weaponised violence because the living room in which that television once operated remained as solid as a rock, part of a home hand-built of bricks on a quiet suburban street in a well-to-do neighbourhood of a large metropolitan city on the eastern shore of a country that can’t decide whether it’s an island or a continent, which floats morbidly at the bottom of a watery planet that orbits a sun which has only, realistically, got about 12 billion years to live before it implodes upon itself and issues forth an astonishing cocktail of light, heat and base elements that will drift through the endless vacuum of space for aeons, settling eventually on a distant interstellar object, amassing quietly before forming a small planet orbiting a newly-formed star, providing the basic building blocks of life that will develop along evolutionary branches over countless millions of years, giving rise to plant and animal life that will come together in a collision of coincidence as a young woman with a perfectly normal backside and a single piece of sweetened, orange popcorn which she shall devour without a second’s thought, or remorse.

Also: the television had it coming.

On Life, Crime and Parenthood

25 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

COPS, Crime, Life, Parenthood

No Sleeping Here !

Story by Gregor Stronach

I have two children.

I can remember a time when I had none. It was a blissful time of late nights, binge drinking and being glued, zombie-like, to the TV watching COPS with the sound down so as not to wake my wife.

These were Good Times.

But now, I have two children. My life is now overtaken with late nights spent feeding Son No. 2, and scoffing whisky in the Golden Hour between Son No. 1 being placed comatose in his cot, and my own bedtime, only to be woken a few precious hours later with the beginnings of the dreaded Scottish hangover, so I can sit on the couch like a zombie, and watch COPS with the sound down so as not to scar Son No. 2 for life.

So… nothing much has changed.

I like watching COPS. Actually, I love it. It’s not the gritty realism, nor is it the unbridled machismo of the heavily-armed “men and women of law enforcement” dealing with the life and death situations that they call ‘work’.

It’s the elevated feeling of self-worth that comes from watching the slack-jawed denizens of the US of A as they show the world precisely what a vacuum of infinite stupidity and hopelessness looks like. Black holes of idiocy, so tremendously dumb that not even irony can escape their gravitational pull.

COPS isn’t a TV show. It’s a funeral procession – a 30-minute long parade, casket held aloft on the shoulders of police and sheriff’s uniforms. And in that casket is the Great American Dream, embalmed in a blend of 40-ounce bottles of rot-gut liquor, cranked up by a liberal sprinkling of crack cocaine and methamphetamine shards.

From the shambling, mumbling hookers who hawk their tawdry wares along the hard shoulders of the interstate, to the inevitable Angry Young Man with a bad haircut and a drug habit that would put Elvis to shame, it’s a free-wheeling circus of violence and crime.

Gap-toothed, and desperate, they are. You can see the fear, and occasionally rage, in their eyes as they gawp gormlessly at the camera, before breaking every single cardinal rule about being arrested. Not only do they speak openly about their crimes to the police, but they do so on camera – filmed to be broadcast, and have their immeasurably dim brains beamed into the living rooms of people around the world.

People like me. People who watch them for entertainment. People who watch them for sport. I feel like a Roman, watching slaves being put to the sword in a coliseum. And I feel no regret.

I only share the surge of adrenalin that the officers clearly feel, as they huff and puff like unfit wolves in pursuit of society’s little pigs. Miked up for the camera, they produce noises not unlike poorly stuffed punching bags, accepting punishment at the hands of Ju-Jitsu masters. Oof oof oof, with a staccato jangle of handcuffs that mimick the chains that hold Everlast bags aloft in gymnasiums throughout the world.

Invariably, the pursuit ends with a wrestle. A solid, manly, no-holds-barred-and-definitely-not-gay struggle for freedom. The police fight with tactical weapons – they fell the felons with long-range electrical probes, tenderize those fallen with night sticks and batons, before flavouring them with capsicum spray and trussing them up with metallic adornments designed specifically to deny freedom, and steal dignity – like a Thanksgiving turkey bound for the oven of justice.

Those hell-bent on decamping the scene fight like cornered wolverines, amped up by alcohol and whatever pharmaceuticals their dealers have managed to cook in the bathtubs and bottle-labs, bagged up and sold. Their eyes roll wildly in their sockets, arms pinwheel and legs flail.

The script is more often than not, the same.

“Stop hurting me!” they will shriek.

“Stop resisting!” comes the reply.

“I’m not resisting! You’re breaking my arm!”

“Stop. Resisting.” – this is universally uttered through gritted teeth, often punctuated by insistent grunts that signify the landing of a non-fatal blow to a part of the body known for being both soft and exquisitely painful when tampered with.

The police then stuff their prey into the back of their vehicle with the care and attention of a postal worker stacking a warehouse of boxes marked “Fragile” – indeed, if the felons bore stickers crying “This Way Up”, they too would be cheerfully ignored.

And then suddenly, it is over. A strange calm befalls the living room, while the officer in charge drones on about how much he loves his job. The magic, like the drugs that fuel one half of the combatants, wears off – the spell broken by the sudden and shocking insistence of a white-toothed, well-groomed idiot practically begging me to purchase not one, but two steam mops that I know I will never use.

Then the bottle clamped between the rosebud lips of my infant son makes a sound: Pfuff Pfuff Pfuff, it goes. That tells me he’s done. The bottle is dry.

I hoist him to my shoulder, and through a semi-conscious limp satiety he lets roar a thunderous belch, blasting foul, milky air past my ear and depositing the glug of half-digested breastmilk down the shoulder of my only clean pyjamas.

I wrap him – swaddle him like an infant messiah – and gently, oh-so-quietly, we tiptoe together to his room.

I place him with all of the care and love I can muster. My precious, precious cargo. A brush of my lips across his forehead to let him know I love him. One last glance stolen as I creep from the crib.

A sly shot of whisky. A warm bed awaits.

I remember when I didn’t have children. They were, indeed, Good Times.

But nothing – absolutely nothing – will sway me from the understanding that my life, right now, is blessed beyond belief by the presence of my two little boys.

And on the days I feel run down – neglecting myself, and feeling near death through fatigue, the antidote is simple.

“I’ll feed Tobias tonight, my love,” I’ll say. He’s a well-trained boy.

He wakes for his feed when COPS is on. And the circle of life turns once more.

Advertising

13 Thursday Sep 2012

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

advertising, satire

BUY ALL THIS SHIT !

by Gregor Stronach

Companies are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to tell us about their products – how good they are, how tough they are, how white they’ll make your teeth, and how effective they are against mosquitoes, rapists or politicians. But who really pays attention to advertising any more?

Your average Joe who watches his three and a half hours of television a night will be exposed to a total of about 49 minutes of ads, most of which he will have forgotten by the time he goes to bed. The only ones we remember are for products we already want, or ads that are so very, very bad that they get stuck in your head and won’t let go of your cerebral cortex. They dig in, cause migraines and strokes, leaving us as vegetables incapable of even the simplest of actions, save humming the advertiser’s jingle somewhat tunelessly while we colour in.

I watch advertisements for the simple expedient of boycotting any shops or services that offer annoying advertisements that dilute my televisual experience. For example, I will never buy floor coverings from any company who euphemise their product’s stain proof qualities buy making a small puppy sit very still on their quality wool carpet. I guess I’ll be walking on floorboards for the rest of my life.

But I’ve often wondered what life for the average punter would be like if I was allowed to write advertisements.

I figure 28 seconds of ultra-noisy static followed by a white text on black screen message: “You’re a piece of shit if you don’t buy product X.” It’ll work. People will go out in droves, buy the product and proudly display it on the front of their homes to prove to their neighbours once and for all that they aren’t the snivelling shit they’ve been accused of being all these years.

Or perhaps I would appeal to the children. “You have cancer. Mummy didn’t tell you because she didn’t want you to worry. But the fact remains, you’ll be dead by the time you turn twelve. So – you don’t need to save your pocket money. Go out and buy yourself a Coke. Live for today – that’s our motto!” Or is that too easy?

However, the real future of advertising is in endorsements, and I’ve hit upon a scheme that’s gonna make me rich, just for being me, and sell a few shoes and tracksuits along the way.

I’m a slob. I despise exercise, and would rather dig half-smoked butts out of the ashtray than wander half a block down the road to buy cigarettes. I drink excessive amounts of coffee, take stimulants and sundry other consumables to maintain my figure, where half an hour of walking a night would probably suffice. I eat takeaway food when and where possible, but only the home delivery type. I always order three times too much, and eat the leftovers cold for breakfast while I’m in the shower. It saves both time and washing up.

I figure the lovely people at Nike, one of whom might read this, will pay me not to wear their product. I’m such the antithesis of what Nike wants their consumers to be that they’ll pay me a seven figure sum not to wear their shoes, track pants, jumpers, earrings, sweatbands or tee shirts.

I’ll be the world’s first anti-endorsement man. Other companies, upon seeing the massive success in sales that Noke has achieved by putting me on telly as a shining example of what they don’t want people to be, will be queuing up to have me not wear their stuff at all as well. Reebak, Fola, Levos…you name it, I won’t be wearing it. And I’ll be not wearing it very, very publicly.

Eventually, I’ll be nude on television. And that’s where the real money will come in. Some random fashion company will do the world a favour, ‘Community Service Announcement’ style. They’ll clothe me to save the world from seeing my pimply backside during the evening news. And pay me to wear their stuff.

I’m gonna be richer than God.

first published and borrowed with thanks from rum & monkey http://rumandmonkey.com/articles/67/

Gregor’s Vintage Fanmail

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

comedy, humour

Simianlated Photo of Gregor

By Gregor Stronach

Things are slow in the world of Gregor at the moment, so I figured I’d take the time to be nice and publicly answer some of the fan mail I’ve received. This serves a number of purposes. Firstly, it allows me to appear to care about the folks that take the time to write to me. Secondly, it allows me to pamper my ego by slyly suggesting to you all that I do, indeed, receive fan mail. Last, but not least, it’s just another forum in which I can make fun of you all where you have no right of reply. Everyone’s a winner…

I get some freaky mail. It’s seriously unusual stuff, most of it, which concerns me a little. Is it me, my writing style or a combination of both that attracts the unhinged, the desperate and the lonely?

Unfortunately, most of the letters I receive come anonymously – they’re sent through the author’s bio page, a link to which appears below. It’s infinitely easier for me to make disparaging remarks about you when you include your email address, so be sure to do so if you require a rude or amusing reply.

Otherwise, you’ll end up being quoted in public, like the following people. Where possible, I’ve included the name of the article to which the sender was referring in their message. This is for my own peace of mind. Without this reference, these letters make no sense whatsoever, something I find confusing and vaguely disturbing.

(A little knowledge, R&M, Dec 7th, 2002)
Dear Gregor,
By some strange synchronicity my husband Chris Stronach, also of Australia, has been taking some recent interest in reptilian uberlords of the fourth dimension. Are you and he one and the same? You must surely be related.

I’m not related to your husband in any way, but I would suggest you get your hubby along to a shrink quick-smart. Sure, they’ll test him and probe him and make him perform embarrassing procedures, but the more he talks about the lizards, the more likely it is they’ll abduct him and eat his eyeballs. It’s for his own good.

(God’s Diaires, R&M, Jan 24th, 2003)
Dear Gregor,
I’d like an interview with God, if you please. I’m with Modern Gods magazine, and I want to talk with him about his new book.

Ahhh… I see what you’re doing there. Very clever. But, to quote someone whom I respect quite a lot, “This joke only works when one of us is telling it.” Thanks for your letter though.

(Narcisse Vol II, R&M, Jan 10th, 2003)
Dear Gregor,
Do you have any idea how close your words reflect the deffinition of a Missanthropic Megalomaniac? (Human hater with big ego..) Just so you know, Missanthropes of that sort are more dangerous then Psychpaths (no natural understanding of right and wrong) because they think they are ABOVE right and wrong,. and feel disconnected from people. You are a scary mofo.

Aside from the horrible spelling and the fact that you’ve completely missed the point of the article, that’s a wonderful letter. What was it about that piece that made you think that I was really like that? I feel a little bit like James Woods, always on the search for credibility in his acting roles… but to have someone believe that I am truly like that warms my heart – it means that someone, somewhere, is even more stupid than I am.

(A little knowledge, R&M, Dec 7th, 2002)
Dear Gregor
roaarrrr
Hisssssss
Lizzzzaaaarrrddssssss
Hisssssss?

You’ve no idea how much this one freaked me out for some reason – the first overtly sibilant email I’d ever received and truth be told it scared me silly. Mind you, it was very early in the morning, I hadn’t had my coffee yet, and the mere thought of lizards that can type is enough to give me the willies at the best of times.

(Performance Review: The Four Horsemen, R&M, Dec 26th, 2002)
Dear Gregor
You rock 🙂

Admittedly this letter did come from my sister in Milwaukee, but everyone has the right to feel loved, do they not?

(The True Spirit of Christmas, R&M, Dec 1st, 2002)
Dear Gregor,
Do you still believe in Santa Claus? What ever happened to Mike Butler? And can you tell me if the Easter Bunny is involved?

Sheesh – no, I don’t believe in Santa Claus. I stopped believing in Santa Claus months ago. Mike Butler is now serving time in a maximum security prison for his part in the conspiracy. He also stole several motor vehicles and injured himself fleeing from the police. He’ll be eligible for parole in 19 years. And yes – the Easter Bunny is involved. Very involved. Hence, I don’t have the time to go into it here.

The following letter arrived with no apparent source of inspiration. I have a feeling that one of my workmates has also discovered this wonderful site. This could have something to do with the fact that I frequently walk to their desks and stand over them, pestering them until they log in and read every word of my latest article. I’m so vain.

Dear Gregor,
I’m going to the coke machine. They’ve only got vanilla coke left, just checking if you want one. And isn’t it funny how normal coke has now suddenly become a tough man’s drink. It used to be “a girl’s drink” but now with new “poofter coke” on the market hetero hard cases can now order a tinnie of black gold without fear of anyone questioning their sexuality. Anyway let me know if you’re thirsty and I’ll come over.

It was during a conversation with this person that the concept of ‘The Official Drink of the 2002 Gay Games’ was discussed. We settled on the idea that ‘Vanilla Coke’ would be the perfect candidate, but closer inspection and a moderate amount of investigative journalism found that the official drink was, in fact, semen.

I really enjoy hearing from you all (even the complete lunatics). So send me messages, the more the merrier. I love writing for the Pig’s Arms, as it’s entertaining for you and cheap therapy for me.

I love you all.

Staying Home

13 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Family Holiday

Simulated Family Holiday - 1967 (Gregor was minus 1 year old at the time)

By Gregor Stronach

In my real job, I get to travel. A lot. For some folks, this would be a dream come true, but for me … well, I’ve been likened to a cheap wine – I don’t travel well. It’s a crying shame, I know. I have the world at my feet (or Australia at least) in my current capacity as Travel Editor for Overlander 4WD. Why, dear lord, can’t I travel with any real sense of ability? It shouldn’t be that difficult, surely.

I know a young man who has backpacked through the Gaza Strip, at the height of conflict season (differentiated from the increasingly short ‘tourist season’ by an influx of armed men, tanks and the excitingly named helicopter gunships), on less than seven cents a day. His diary reads like the battalion logbook; ‘Hiked three miles, counted fifteen dead (three friendly, twelve enemy). Dried beef for dinner. Again.’

Even my beautiful partner Renee travels better than I do. She recently dived in the deep end, heading off overseas for the first time ever to backpack around South America for a month. She arrived home tanned, fit and only slightly less wealthy than when she had set out.

But I, on the other hand, have difficulties when I get further than 100km from home. Even a weekend trip to Katoomba is enough to have me packing a good 50kg of clothes, bedding and other sundry accessories into the back of a 4WD, knowing full well that I’m going to spend a minimum of $60 a day that I won’t be able to account for. It’s lunacy.

The problem, I’m sure, stems from the holidays of my childhood. Yes, I know, it’s an ‘easy answer’ to blame one’s parents for an adult’s ills, but I’m positive that this is it. There is no other explanation, except the unacceptable option that I am simply a moron – something I shall steadfastly refuse to admit to the day I die.

Having been dragged around the state as a child with all preparations made for me has spoilt me for traveling. Admittedly, the only other alternative for my parents was to staple a train ticket to my clothes and pack me off somewhere to fend for myself – even in the liberal seventies that would have constituted some form of neglect. So instead we did as most other Australian families did – we piled into the family car, heavily laden with beach towels, surfboards and board games and set off north to find a beach that wasn’t crawling with other tourists, or sharks.

In order to paint a complete picture here, I should probably introduce my family. They’re completely different people now than they were twenty years ago, so I’m sure that they’ll forgive me the inevitable unkindnesses that follow. Although, I will preface the following remarks with a disclaimer – my family members are amongst the friendliest, most lovable people you could ever hope to meet, and I love them all dearly…

I’ll start with my father, a man that I have looked up to my entire life. As a father, a child could ask for no better. But as a traveling companion, he left a little to be desired. When I was a child, my father smoked incessantly. Nowhere was this more apparent than when we were cooped up in a car. Dad, in the nature of Dads everywhere, was of the ‘drive till you drop’ school of holiday-making, which meant that 12-hour stints were the norm and the occasional 14-hour gut-buster was always on the cards. When he wasn’t smoking, he was whistling. Or tapping the steering wheel with his fingers. Or making popping sounds in time with the music that Mum was playing on the stereo. Or any one of a number of equally infuriating things. Four hours in a car with my Dad would have been enough to have Job screaming ‘enough!’ at the Lord Almighty.

My mother was as good a traveling companion as a child could ask for. Readily equipped with all manner of diversions, she dealt with two terminally bored, carsick children with the aplomb one would expect of a career nurse. She provided everything from a running commentary on our surroundings – not a kilometre went by without Mum excitedly remarking “Look at that, kids!” – to oversized Lifesaver lollipops that could be sucked for approximately sixty seconds before they irreversibly adhered to the upholstery, rendering them inedible.

Invariably, I would be too late to see the source of Mum’s excitement as she saw something cool out the window. I was generally either fighting severe nausea or sucking enthusiastically on the toxic markers I had been provided with to do my colouring in. Thinking back on it now, I realise that the two occurrences were probably linked in some fashion – but the marker ink had such an alluring chemical taste.

It was during this time that I was introduced to The Beatles – the perennial car audiotape that we only ever heard Mum play while we were on holidays. It was generally played at a volume sufficient to drown out Dad’s tuneless whistling, saving my sister from an early coronary. My mother was the diplomat at all times, defusing Dad when I vomited in the car and making sure that if I did eventually fall asleep, my sister didn’t quietly place her half-sucked lollipops in my hair.

My sister was, bless her, an ogre to travel with. She suffered from a very short attention span and an even shorter temperamental fuse. The slightest indiscretion from me would be enough to cause a tantrum of near biblical proportions. These tantrums were fierce and unpredictable. It was a running battle between her and Dad, whenever Dad lit a cigarette. Stage coughing would ensue from the rear seat, and was always rewarded by a whitening of Dad’s knuckles as he gripped the steering wheel harder, accelerating gently to have the speed of the vehicle match his mood. My sister is now happily married and living in the United States. I don’t travel anywhere with her anymore.

One episode I remember vividly was the time my family and I were exploring the northwestern regions of New South Wales. We were somewhere near Lightning Ridge, when my sister uttered the phrase that I will never forget.

“I can hear you blinking. Stop it.”

Over the din of the Beatles on the stereo, Dad whistling like a randy Warbler in springtime and the roar of the retreads beneath the car, my sister could hear me blinking.

I tried for about seven or eight minutes not to blink, resorting to actually holding my eyes open with my fingers so that the offending noise wouldn’t set her off. It had been a good three hours since the last violent outburst from her and I could feel it in my bones that the next one was going to be the highlight of the trip. Like an earthquake prone region, the longer she went without turning feral only made the eventual transformation from toothy child to werewolf all the more drastic.

Eventually, for fear of going blind, I blinked. Once. I’m not sure how, but my sister knew and that was it. In a flurry of obscenities (remarkably similar to those heard whenever Dad was cut off in traffic), the tantrum began. Dad was piloting the family car down an arrow-straight section of Outback highway, sitting comfortably on about 130kph, and attempting to hose down the violence in the back seat as only a speeding father knows how. Right hand on the wheel, left hand flailing blindly behind him as he sought to make some sort of physical contact with the pint-sized combatants in the back seat, swearing mightily and promising a swift and grisly death for all involved if it didn’t stop right now.

After a couple of minutes, Dad snapped. With a screech of tyres, he braked suddenly and pulled to the side of the road.

“Get out! Both of you! Out of the car! We’re leaving you here,” he roared.

My sister and I stopped belting each other for a couple of seconds, but we came to the simultaneous realisation that dad was bluffing, and the fists began to fly again. My sister was nine years old, and I was six. She had both a weight and reach advantage over me and wasn’t afraid to use it. I was genuinely fearing for my life until dad got out of the car, opened the door next to me, and dragged my sister and me bodily from the vehicle. Quick as a flash he was back behind the wheel and the car was speeding off in a could of dust.

I stood by the side of what I now know is the Castlereagh Highway, somewhere to the north of Gulargambone. My infantile jaw was sitting heavily on my chest in disbelief and perversely I don’t think I could have blinked if I’d tried, I was so shocked. My sister’s only remark before the waterworks started was simple enough.

“You shouldn’t have blinked.”

My relationship with my sister is excellent now. She lives in the United States with her gun-slinging husband and two kids. It’s far enough away that my little quirks don’t bother her and it means that I’m safe. For the moment, at least.

I hope one day to get better at traveling, but like the old dog faced with the challenge of several new tricks, I’m pretty sure that I will forever be destined to lose my passport, get lost on the way to the airport and discover that the ATMs are all in a foreign language when I arrive at my destination. It could be worse, though. I could still hate my parents for leaving me at the side of a long, dusty highway in Outback New South Wales.

This was first published at http://rumandmonkey.com/articles/172 some time back in the mists.

The Right and Noble Thing – an update

07 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Emmjay, Gregor Stronach, Politics in the Pig's Arms

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Muammar Gaddafi, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam

Story by Gregor Stronach – updated by Mike Jones

Gregor wrote this when Saddam Hussain was tried and executed- 20 December 2006, but with a bit of tinkering, it works well for Osama Bin Laden and it will still work when Muammar Gaddafi takes the big step into the unknown.

“To Hell with you!”, he screamed.

I, personally, would have gone with something more along the lines of “To hell with this!”, as I scarpered out the front door of the court / compound. Yes, he was shackled, and yes, he was wearing a 90 pound beard (seriously – that beard is a masterwork, and will probably go down in history as one of the Greatest Beards of All Time). But that shouldn’t have stopped him from making a break for it. It would have been a more dignified death than being hanged / drilled by US Navy Seals / bazooka’d into the next world by Libyan rebels / freedom fighters / detergents.

I speak, of course, about Saddam Hussein / Osama Bin Laden / Muammar Gaddafi, horrible tyrant, brutal dictator and any one of the hundreds of two-word epithets he’s been assigned by the world’s media. He’s the world’s biggest bad guy, the troll under the bridge of Freedom and Democracy, the bogeyman America uses to make sure the rest of the world eats its veggies and goes to bed by 10pm. And he’s been condemned to death. Many believe that this is perhaps the most prosaic ending for the man responsible for the untimely demise of millions of people. He was killing his own people, along with the countless thousands of men, women and children who died as a direct result of his paranoid ravings and rash decisions. Make no mistake – the man was a ~~cunt~~ nasty piece of work.

However, the judgement handed down by Abdel Rahman has prompted a range of different responses from around the world, and – as horrified as I am to say this – I actually agree with Europe’s two surrender monkey nations in their wet outlook on the penalty. Both France and Italy have come out simpering, calling for the execution of Saddam not to go ahead. It can easily be argued that they are merely taking the moral high ground (as I like to do whenever I can…) – after all, they have little to lose by calling for a reprieve from the noose for Saddam. Were they spokespeople for the United States, such a statement would be tantamount to strapping an explosive vest to their political careers and wandering into an opposition convention.

I have been extremely concerned by the reactions of Australia’s Prime Ministers, John Howard / Kevin Rudd /Julia Gillard. You can see the delight at the verdict writ large across the sizeable chunk of vacant real estate around his/her forehead region. But… and here’s the rub… (s)he speaks of this verdict out both sides of the mouth. On the one hand, (s)he’s vehemently opposed to the death sentence. Look at the hand-wringing and crocodile tears at the impending fate of the Bali Nine – a group of Australian twenty-somethings that have found themselves on the wrong end of the death penalty for smuggling heroin out off Indonesia. But on the other hand, when it suits our PM, (s)he’s all for it. Whether it be Saddam Hussein or Amrozi (one of the Bali bombing masterminds, for those of you playing at home), if it suits the political ends, our PM doesn’t mind if people are put to the drop, or in front of a firing squad. At least Tony Blair had the nuts to stand up and say he was against the death penalty… he won’t do anything about it, but he’s against it. So… erm… go Tony. I guess… but he didn’t have the nuts to say no to Rupert Murdoch and Wendy Deng when they asked him to be godfather to their daughter……

Further afield, the reactions are predictable at best. The United States has wriggled into an orgy of high-fiving, as the judgement became common knowledge amongst a populace due in the polling booth just a couple of days later. The timing of the death penalty decision and the assassinations – a major talking point – will forever be criticised by many as a transparent attempt to boost votes for an ailing administration. But dead dictators win votes, and GWB and BO’B have had this little apple land right in their laps. Down in the polls and steadfastly refusing to withdraw from an increasingly unpopular war, Bush has claimed the verdict as vindication of his decision to invade Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and for B O’B it was to swat Bin Laden … or rather SEAL his fate. Or get rid of Muammar Gaddafi. Or free the Libyan people. Or whatever reason it is this week – I’ve honestly lost track.

But the main places that the verdicts will have effect is in Iraq / Afghanistan / Libya. And it doesn’t take a geopolitical genius to see that Iraq / Afghanistan / Libya / Syria / Yemen / Egypt / etc’s are in desperate trouble at the moment, and that things will only get worse when Saddam et al do meet their makers at the gallows or in their own bedrooms. The already fractured Islamic world will have yet more massive wedges driven between the sparring factions. The Sunni loyalists are even still lining up behind their deceased leader’s party. Fighting between them and the Shia, who now have control of the legislative process in Iraq, continues to escalate. And the Taliban against everyone else in Afghanistan and the pro and anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya and the pro- and anti-Assad people in Syria ….. And stuck in the mix are western troops.

I fear for the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Southern Sudan ……. Yes, they’re getting themselves a “Democracy™”, but they’re each just another government born of violence and baptised in the blood of their former leaders. The sectarian violence doesn’t need another excuse to continue – but the bloodthirsty shouts of the elected leaders of the western world won’t go unnoticed.

George Bush was smiling when he announced that Saddam Hussein will be executed. He was glad that a man is going to die. Obama was less overt with the assassination of Osama Bin Laden…… but who in the West will not quietly cheer the demise of Gaddafi and Assad ? The message sent is painfully clear… You are bad men, Saddam, Bin Laden, Assad, Gaddafi. You killed people, and killing people is Very Wrong. Ergo, we will show you the error of your ways by killing you. And we’ll be thrilled at the prospect of seeing you die.

No matter which way this debacle falls, the people of of these middle-eastern countries are in some deep, deep shit. Their world will be one of violence for many, many years to come and there’s not a damn thing 99 percent of them can do about it. If Saddam or Bin Laden or Gaddafi had copped a reprieve, the outcry would have been heard for all eternity. And with their deaths will come fires in the Middle East so huge that they will turn the desert sands to glass, stained red with the blood of the many that have died at the hands of the powerful few.

But that red glass will offer the world one thing – the perfect material to fashion the rose-coloured glasses the western world will need to wear when we look back on these events in 20 years, and try to convince ourselves that we did the Right and Noble Thing.

Digital Age

20 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 9 Comments

By Gregor Stronach

I am constantly being gleefully informed that we live in the digital age. Things aren’t what they used to be, and it’s the advent of digital technology that has changed the urban landscape in which we all live.

I can remember the great leaps forward in technology that have occurred in my lifetime – calculators that played games, Nintendo Game and Watch machines (hopelessly impractical for telling the time, by the way, as battery life was severely limited by playing the games), and digital watches that played games (which, much like the Nintendo games, were just crappy). And then TV Tennis came along, and shook the globe to its core.

Homes around the world reverberated to the sounds of ultra-competitive fathers proving mastery of hand-eye co-ordination over their infant children. There were screams as spouses began to beat seven shades of shit out of each other, following allegations of cheating, reprogramming and – shock-horror – handset tampering.

Tampering with the handsets to ensure victory was no easy feat. Early attempts included the addition of substances such as boiling water and even gin to adversely effect the operation of the controllers, sending TV Tennis combatants sailing to the top of the screen, never to return after each serve took place. I personally was stabbed with a butter knife by an angry sibling following one episode of tampering. Thankfully, the knife struck a rib, and the world was spared another premature funeral.

As the world has become a more technologically savvy place, it seems odd that the great leaps and bounds in software and hardware technology have been poured into two places first – billion dollar defence systems and multi-billion dollar gaming console empires.

Sony, once famous for bad transistor radios and hellishly good cocaine parties at its record label headquarters, has emerged as the force to be reckoned with. Even the world’s richest man, with a personal army of socially dysfunctional four-eyed nerds, can’t produce a better gaming system than the lovely, lovely people at Sony.

Why am I being so nice to Sony? Have I sold out to the big dollar corporation? Or am I just trying as hard as I can to get a free Playstation 2?

No…it’s fear that’s driving me today. I know that Sony has secretly been spending billions and trillions on getting some of the ideas from its computer games off our TV screens, and into our defence budgets. It’s a natural progression from Sony Corp to Sony Corps.

I can see it now. If the technology isn’t frightening enough, then picture this: The battle has been fought and won by the world’s computers. The Microsoft X-Box has been body-slammed from the top rope by Playstation, with Nintendo relegated to waterboy for the event.

But when the real war starts – the ground war to mop up the stragglers – the future is very real and very scary. Hoards of teenagers with wide eyes, astonishing reflexes, hand-eye co-ordination and over-developed thumbs will take to the streets in a orgy of looting, shooting and driving fast cars.

And I’ll be there, in the front line, my Lamborghini Diablo idling effortlessly at the lights, waiting to prove that it is me, and only me, who can be the true champion of the world. I will, of course, be armed with the latest in high-powered miniaturised assault weaponry, most of it mounted somewhere on the vehicle. Add to this a thumping soundtrack of my own creation, and the world is thus destined to be my oyster. Join me, my gaming-mad brothers and sisters.

This revolution will not be televised. This revolution has been live.

First published at Rum and Monkey – if you can believe this, in 2002 !

A Lesson from Life, for our friend Waz

23 Thursday Jun 2011

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 13 Comments

Another Banksy piece of brilliance

By Gregor Stronach

It was such a horrible cliché of a day: I was travelling cross country – it doesn’t really matter from where – with the arse out of my trousers and barely two pennies to rub together, when I fell short of luck.

I was stranded at a cross roads, and to be honest, I had no idea where I was. I rummaged through my pockets and discovered a neatly folded $20 note – the last of any currency, I was sure, that I would see for some time.

I’ll spare you the preamble – the back-story is as long and tedious for you as it would be hellishly painful for me to recount. But, in the interests of understanding, let me say this:

I have never felt as mournful, and as alone, as I did on that night. Devoid of spirit, bereft and broken of heart. Poor in health and material wealth, I had all but given up entirely. Bad news had piled on bad news. Broken bones and broken homes. I’d had everything I wanted, and I’d let it all burn.

But I digress. You don’t need to know all about that. I’ve something more important to pull on your coat about. Because something happened. After months of tears and questions and bemoaning a horrible fate that I felt no control over at all, something happened.

On that darkening evening, stomach growling, I decided to spend my last paltry dollars on food, to satiate the gnawing beast that was singing praises to the demigods from just above my beltline.

It was a cheap, nasty and difficult place – one of those commercial crossroads that sprout like concrete mushrooms wherever major highways converge, where families and travellers stop to pee for the twelfth time that day, and the truckies can pull in for a bite to eat and some small comforts from the lot lizards who ply their sexual trade among the parked-up semis in the yard.

I had a choice of eatery – the slick, hard-tack of fast food, whose golden arches soared above a parking lot full of Subarus and Volvos, or the promise of something greasier and easier from the smaller, danker diner surrounded by Macks and Kenworths.

I chose the latter – selfishly, to be honest. I was far more likely to find a ride to where I was going from within the ranks of the professional drivers than I was with a family, racing home so Dad can get back to work on time in the morning and the 2.4 kids in the back can take a break from their in-car DVDs just long enough to stop being carsick.

I pushed through the door, slouched past the ready mob of occupants, and took a seat at a booth in the corner, away from the window. I’d had enough of watching the road over the past three weeks. I was making my way vaguely northwest, away from my hometown and out into the interior, with an eye to heading further west if the stories I’d heard of a mining boom were true. I had nowhere to be.

Nowhere to be.

The waitress stopped by, took my order and gave me a once-over with a well-practiced eye.

“You’ll be waiting here a while for a ride, champ,” she sniffed, and motioned around the diner. “Most of these guys will be tucking in and bedding down for the night. Which way are you headed?”

I told her.

“Yeah… you’ll catch a ride in the morning. You can stay in here as long as you need to, but you can’t sleep here. It’s a diner. Not a motel. Understand?”

I nodded, wearily, confused that the mere mention of sleep had made me instantaneously tired. I ordered my food – one burger, some chips, and a coffee to warm me up. She didn’t even bother writing it down – she just scooted off in the direction of the kitchen, deftly avoiding a pinch on the bottom from one of the truckies at a seat three booths over.

My food arrived four or five uneventful minutes later, and it was just as I’d expected. The chips were limp, but plentiful. The burger, magnificent. And the coffee strong enough to take on Tyson and go 12 rounds … but not strong enough to win. I was halfway through my meal when she wandered by again.

“How’s the food?” she asked, not really caring.

“Fine. Rather good, actually,” I replied, not really caring that she didn’t really care.

“Great. Wanna refill on the coffee?”

I started to rifle through the shrapnel in my pocket, when she touched me on the arm and pointed to a sign on the counter. Handwritten, rather hurriedly, it hadn’t been there when I’d looked up a few moments before.

“Free refils on coffee just ask your waitres,” it read.

I nodded. She smiled. The coffee was refilled. I settled in to wait out the long, dark hours of the night.

…

It was probably around 2am that I noticed things had gotten pretty quiet. The diner was a 24-hour affair, but even places like this have that magical witching hour, when everything shuts down slowly and even the cockroaches take time off from their scurrying to nap quietly among the crumbs of the diner’s detritus.

Which is why I was so surprised when the opposite bench seat of my booth was suddenly occupied by a man, all dressed in black, with a glint in his eye so wicked that I was sure I was about to become the unwitting star in an apocryphal crossroads urban tale.

“…help you?” I managed, before the stranger beamed a smile.

“You can see me now. That’s great! I’ve been waiting ages…” he said. His voice was deep, confident without being loud. But I could hear him like he was shouting, and I doubted he could be heard more than a metre away.

“Who are you?” I asked. I’d heard stories that started like this before – where a lonely traveller meets a dark, fearsome stranger in a truck stop who turns out to be a murderer. Or the Devil Himself.

“Oh… I’m not the Devil, my friend. Nor am I Death,” he said, reading my thoughts. Very quietly, I began to feel fear. There’s no way this could end well…

“It will end well, my friend. It’s okay. I’m not Death,” he smiled. “I am Life.”

I slumped. A Christian. Here… in the middle of fucking nowhere, and I was about to receive a two-in-the-morning proselytising from a grinning weirdo with no hope of escape.

“Relax… I’m not here to preach. I just want to talk.”

I looked him up and down once more.

“Well… more accurately, I’m here to show you a few things. Here…” he grabbed at my hands.

This made very little sense, and I became convinced that I was, perhaps, asleep – against the very wishes of the helpful young waitress and her hastily hand-lettered sign.

“You’re not asleep. At least, not yet… but you will be soon. I need you to sleep, because the things I need to tell you – well, your mind won’t cope with them while you’re awake.

“Look,” he said, reaching across the table once more. “It’s probably best I just show. Close your eyes. Relax… relax… relax…”

“Ummm… are you touching my leg?” I asked.

“Yesss… just a bit…” he whispered. “Just relax… it’s okay…”

“Yeah, no. It’s not okay. Really,” I said.

“Sure. Sure… no problem,” he said, looking a little bit disappointed. He brought his left hand up above the table once more, clasped my hand again and began to breathe. Small tendrils of smoke whisped from his nostrils on the exhale, only to disappear once more when he inhaled.

“This… this is what I need you to see…”

And it began:

It was an accident scene. Gruesome and appalling, the road was wet with oil, water and gore. Two cars were engaged in a brutal, violent head-on waltz – clinched like roman wrestlers, motionless as twisted metal gargoyles, watching silently over the corpses of their occupants.

I was stunned. He was grinning.

He motioned to the rear seat of the furthest car.

“Go,” he smiled. “Look.”

Without sensing any movement, I was at once at the window, peering in like a hideous voyeur. In the back seat was a baby capsule. In the capsule, a small, wounded child.

His eyes, bright blue, were staring straight through me – I clearly couldn’t be seen. In that instant, I realised that there was absolutely nothing I could do to help. I was merely a spectator – not forced to watch, not strong enough to look away.

“Is he okay?” I asked Life.

He shrugged, and smiled.

“Probably not – but I’ll do you a deal. Understand the lesson, and I’ll do what I can.”

“Lesson? What lesson…”

He said nothing. I looked in through the window once again, and the same sight greeted me. His tiny mop of blonde hair was matted with blood. I would have expected he would be crying his little lungs out by now.

“He’s in shock,” Life explained from just next to my left ear. “That’s why he’s so quiet. But he’ll start wailing soon.”

I paused.

“But no one will hear him…” I whispered.

“Except us,” Life smiled.

I looked once more into the toddler’s bright eyes, then turned my head to follow his gaze. Across two lanes of empty blacktop, upon a tilting star picket holding up a rusting three-strand wire fence, stood a crow.

The black bird’s piercing gaze had met that of the child. There was not even a skerrick of understanding between them, but I knew what was happening.

The child, without knowing it in the slightest, was fighting for its life. The bird, unemotional, was waiting for its dinner. The universe would sort this out. I couldn’t help myself.

I started to cry.

“Oh, come now,” Life beamed. “Your money’s no good here… and your tears aren’t for him. They’re for you.”

He touched my arm…

And we were gone.

We were standing in a darkened living room, in a suburban house in northwestern Sydney. A large buffet, bulging with knick-knacks stood along one wall – and pride of place on top, in the centre, was a tiny aluminium-framed fish tank.

Surrounding the fish tank was a not-inconsiderable quantity of water. It dripped quietly from the edge of the buffet, landing with a series of soft woollen ‘plops’ on the tight-weave carpet between the bare feet of a young boy. He was about three.

He stood next to a chair, dragged from the dining room and placed strategically by the buffet, so as to allow him access to the fish tank. In his cupped hands – a single goldfish. It looked dead, the boy distraught.

“Oh, man…” I moaned.

“It’s even worse than it looks… watch…” Life smiled.

There was a movement, and the boy’s mother arrived at the door. She took in the scene with one glance, as mothers are universally able to do, and sighed.

“What’s happened, little man?” she asked.

The boy sobbed. Once. Very quietly.

“I think he died,” he said, proffering the fish to his mother. “I took him for a walk and now I think he’s dead.”

The mother leaned in, looked closely.

“I think he might be,” she said quietly. “I don’t think he’s okay…”

“Are you sure?” the boy asked, before brightening suddenly. “Can I put him back in? See if he’s okay?”

The mother pulled the young boy into an embrace. Whispered that everything would be okay. And even without seeing his face, I could see that for a split second, that little boy honestly believed her… and that everything would be okay.

But in my heart, I knew that it wouldn’t be.

And we moved

To a bar, where an elderly man looked around the pub with rheumy eyes, before asking if someone could please drive him home.

“What’s wrong, Harry?” asked the woman behind the bar.

“It’s me wife… I think she’s dying, and I need to get home”

And we moved

To a park, where a young man was watching his girlfriend die, her asthmatic lungs too weak to work, and the wail of an ambulance barely audible in the distance.

And we moved

To a public toilet where, with the last vestiges of consciousness, a junkie realised that the fix he’d just piped directly to his heart would probably be the last thing he ever did.

And we moved

To a stark, featureless emptiness. I felt a sudden ghastly vertigo, and Life was instantly at my side, grasping my elbow with one hand and smiling like a carnival clown.

“Why?” I asked, shuddering. “Why show me these things?”

“You needed to see them. Therein lies the lesson…”

He smiled. We waited.

I turned the scenes over and over in my mind, but with each passing minute, my confusion overrode my ability to think. There was no lesson here. I sobbed in frustration, the sobs giving way to long, wailing howls of anger and remorse.

…

I don’t know how long I shouted for. But eventually, I simply ran out of steam.

But I knew. There was no lesson here.

“Are you okay?” Life asked, smiling politely.

“I hope so,” I said.

“Now there’s a word…” he grinned. “Hope.”

I arched an eyebrow by way of a question. After all I’d seen on this dark and horrible night, I could barely muster a word.

“If I were to ask you, ‘what have you seen tonight?’ what would you answer?”

I pondered for a moment.

“Death. You say you are Life, yet all you’ve shown me is death… and despair,” I murmured. My strength returned.

“You’re not a blessing. You’re a fiend,” I spat. “Every scene tonight has been a hopeless, horrifying experience. Innocence at the cusp of ending forever. Vitality oozing toward oblivion. Tears. Blood. Pain. Unimaginable utterings from the mind of the kind of beast that haunts the boundaries of my dreams…”

He smiled throughout.

“And…?”

I stopped.

He waggled his eyebrows.

“Hope?” I asked.

His eyes twinkled.

“Hope?”

His eyes brightened even further.

“Yes!”, he exclaimed. “YES!”

He danced a Snoopy-like dance of joy.

“Beyond all of the fear, above all of the pain, through all of the blood and surpassing even death itself, is hope,” he shouted, falling quiet so suddenly, I thought I’d been deafened. He rushed toward me, and grabbed my face between his hands, squeezing my cheeks with his palms.

“Let me help you… Think back…”

And I did.

The toddler’s eyes were vacant, devoid of expression – but at their very heart burned a flicker of hope with every tiny sound he heard.

Each drip… “Is that my mother?”

Each creak of the car… “Is that my mother?”

And on we moved

The young boy’s hands were trembling, and with each gentle shake, the fish seemed to quiver.

“He’s moving!” the boy exclaimed.

But the mother knew. She knew the truth.

And on we moved

To the front door of Harry’s house, where he let himself in with as much pace as he could muster. He heard a sound in the living room, and his heart seemed to leap. Could she still be alive?

And again, we moved

To the park, where the ambulance seemed to be getting louder, and the woman’s breathing more laboured and coarse.

And once more, we moved

To the toilet, to the junkie, whose panicked flailings had embedded the needle deeper into his arm, providing just enough pain to provide a point of focus – possibly just enough to stop him from closing his eyes, forever.

With a sound like a furious rushing wind, I was back with him once again.

“Hope…” I whispered.

“Hope,” he agreed. “It’s the single greatest gift that a man can have. You live your lives on the basis that one day, you all will die. And for most of you, that day is always considered so far away, that you barely give it a moment’s thought.

“If you did, it would paralyse you. Fight or flight is the primal response to fear with which you’ve been hard-coded. And the vast majority of people are so de-tuned to it all, that even that has been dulled to the point where you don’t consider death, even for a moment, most days of your life.

“And the people who aren’t desensitised are the ones you say are “mad” – the ones who fight the world around them with every drawn breath. The ones who rage to the skies – torture, bind and kill others…”

He paused.

“And then there are those who are, on an otherwise unremarkable day, confronted with the reality of their own mortality. Some buckle, and weep. Others grow defiant, and angry. Others simply retreat into their own special darkness.

“But every single one of them harbours a hope. And it’s the ones who lose hope, who are the ones who don’t survive…”

I barely had time to register my thoughts, before once more we were on the move.

Back

To the child in the car. Life leaned in the window, wiped the blood from the toddler’s face, stepped back and scared away the crow. He touched the lifeless hand of the young woman in the front seat, which twitched.

The movement caught the youngster’s eye, dragging his gaze from the receding image of the huge black crow flying away to find sustenance elsewhere. He barked out a short, coughing cry.

“Honey?” the woman said, and the boy – recognising his mother’s voice – howled.

“Sshh…” she whispered, fumbling at the seatbelt that she was sure had saved her life. “Mummy’s coming… Sshhh…”

Back

To the dining room, where a mother guided her young son’s hands, with their precious cargo of rapidly stiffening goldfish back towards the fishbowl in the hope that she was wrong.

As the fish touched the water, Life touched the fish. With a flick, it was away, the solemn silence broken by the delighted peals of joyous laughter. The smile on the young boy’s face was only matched in its intensity by the look of surprise on his mother’s.

Back

To Harry’s house, where he called from the front door.

“Ivy! Ivy, my love!”

Silence, punctuated by a slight rustling.

Urged on, Harry moved into the living room. There, on the floor, clutching a cross to her chest, which rose and fell slowly like a gentle tide, was Ivy. Kneeling beside her, smiling, was Life.

Back

To the park, where Life himself was breathing tenderly into the young woman’s tortured lungs. And where the sudden arrival of a stranger with Ventolin had changed the course of two young people’s lives.

Back

To the park toilet, where Life was squeezing the arm of the junkie, extruding the morphine from his vein like a river of white death.

And I was back at the diner.

Alone.

…

Postscript: Mike let me know that Waz could do with some cheering up. So I sat down to write something funny, and short. But this came out instead. It’s easily the longest thing I’ve written in about ten years. And I’ve no fucking idea where it came from.

At the heart of it, it’s just a story. And there’s a ham fisted attempt to tell impart some form of wisdom in there. Fuck… I dunno. It’s just a story. Make of it what you will.

But I’d like to underscore the take-home message here.

Without hope, we are nothing.

An Open Letter to the Management and Patrons of the Pigs Arms

06 Friday May 2011

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Gregor Stronach, humour

A little something Gregor dug up.....

By Gregor Stronach

Dear Mike et al,

I don’t write for fun anymore.

I know, I know… What an appalling statement to put on paper. Or type on screen. Or even think at all. For someone whose burning desire for the bulk of their adult life was to bring mirth to the millions (or at least chuckles to the occasional Internet Random) through inadequately researched satire, the admission that I’ve not told a joke in anger in years is horrible.

I’ve become everything I despised: grown-up, middle-aged, mortgage-paying “Dad” – complete with questionable fashion sense and a secret desire to donkey-punch young, single men in the back of the head whenever I see them having fun and not being responsible for anything other than themselves.

Not that I’m bitter. No. I’m fine. Just… tired. Hence, cranky. Ergo, quite likely to punch anyone who still plays video games past the age of 30. You know… those guys.

Still, I shouldn’t complain. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s not like my life is over or anything.

I should, at this point, definitely clarify that having a family is one of the single most joy-inducing things I’ve ever done. Having a mortgage, sadly, is not. So the combination of the two means that, with the world’s (and my) finances being what they are, I still write.

But only for money. And never for fun.

At least, that’s how it’s been for the past two years – which, coincidentally as it turns out, is the exact period of time that the Pigs Arms has been open.

Now, if I were Andrew Bolt or Miranda Devine, I could simply make the logical leap that it’s because of the Pigs Arms that I don’t write for fun anymore. Think about it. There’s no such thing as coincidence. You’re open for business, and my mind has snapped shut like a mouse trap on Mickey.

I’ve been paralysed from the cortex, down. I’m the Christopher Reeve of writing.

However, if I really were Andrew Bolt or Miranda Devine, I’d be too busy pandering to my audience of half-brained skull-fucks in tinfoil hats to make an actual point. And, having neatly avoided doing so, I shall deftly change tack.

No one will notice.

See?

I shouldn’t be focussing on me. I should be focussing on the achievement of somebody, somewhere, flicking a virtual switch and hanging this site’s shingle out for the world to see. Creating a haven for those of us who were burned once, twice or three times too many by the Bad Man from Aunty.

I mean, seriously – I know that the god-fearing, tax-paying slack-jaws of Penrith and beyond probably don’t necessarily like the idea that their 33c a day might end up lining the pockets of some left-wing “satirist”, whose every article was – in current internet parlance – trolling, and nothing more.

(I secretly think that, just perhaps, they caught on. Which is why I’m not welcome there anymore. I hope so – surely no editor could be so transparently and terminally stupid. Can they?)

I shouldn’t complain, really. They published every single thing I ever offered them, regardless of how mean-spirited it was. But, at last count, my ‘renegotiated-in-my-absence-and-no-longer-open-for-discussion’ fee of $100 for a 1200 word article is highway robbery. So they can go fuck themselves.

I refuse to write for free. But I take even greater umbrage at being offered such a paltry sum.

I’ve done my time. I’ve worked for nothing as I learnt my craft. For years, I was underpaid for my contributions to more outlets than I care to name. I never, ever expected it from the ABC.

*big breath in*

*slow exhale*

Okay. Sorry. Tangents again.

Anyway. I’m actually writing to say Happy Birthday to the Pigs Arms. I’m writing, because you can’t sing happy birthday to a website. You just can’t.

Try it. You’ll get about three lines into the song, and then be suddenly overwhelmed by the same feeling you get when you realise that you’re acting like a dickhead at the zoo in the off chance an animal will do something equally as dumb, for your amusement.

Or, worse still, you’ll get a sudden sinking feeling of ego-destroying self-realisation, similar to the sensation you get when you realise your dog is watching you masturbate. And wagging its tail.

But I digress. Again. Mea Culpa. I’ll behave. Promise.

As far as outposts go, this little corner of the internet’s not bad. It’s kind of like Norfolk Island – sparsely populated, but housing quality inhabitants who are far less likely to kill each other than the general population of the mainland.

Of course, there’s no Colleen McCollough hanging around, writing novels and generally making everyone else feel helplessly inadequate. No – instead there’s a sense of camaraderie. A coming together of like-minded men and women, who share a passion for the written word, a wicked pun or simply want somewhere to empty the strange box of tricks that they keep at the back of their mind.

You know the box I’m talking about. It’s the one that smells a bit musty when you open it up, and you can pretend in polite company to be a bit shocked at what’s inside, but really… you’re only fooling yourself.

Tangent again goddammitsomuch!

Anyway. Happy Birthday, Pigs Arms. Congratulations to everyone involved, from the casual blow-ins to the regulars, implementers, facilitators and, dare I say it, enablers amongst us all.

Oh – and Mike – By asking me to contribute, you’ve got me writing for fun again.

So this one’s on the house.

Your friend,

Gregor

The Saints

29 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

humour, Saints

by Gregor Stronach

Like all dutiful and doting boyfriends, I got hosed on February 14th. Why? Because someone, somewhere decided that the feast day for the Patron Saint of Lovers, St Valentine, should turn from a celebration of love into a veritable orgy of spending.

What would St Valentine have thought about this rampant, crass commercialism? He would have spewed – violently and often, is my guess. Here’s a man who was made a saint because of his ability to endure being beaten with a club and then beheaded by the Romans for his beliefs. Today we honour him by handing out chocolates, greeting cards and overpriced floral arrangements.

It got me thinking about the idea of Saints – and, as I am wont to do, I went looking to see what I could find out. What surfaced startled me – there are millions of the bastards. There’s the big saints we all know about, like St Peter, St Michael, St John and, of course, St Patrick. But there is an enormous database of little-known saints that I’m guessing the bulk of humanity has never even heard of.

We’re getting pretty close to having a Saint from our lifetime too – Mother Theresa will soon be canonised by the Catholic Church. They’re just trying to find another miracle she performed, and she’ll be part of the ‘in-crowd’. I’ll save the Catholic church some time and effort right here, if they want. I think it’s a miracle the sanctimonious old tart didn’t get sprung accepting blood money from third-rate dictators of tinpot little nations like Haiti. Had the rest of the world known about her shady dealings trying to wash clean the souls of murderers and thieves, she’d be about as popular as Nixon.

But I digress.

The best of the Saints are to be found in the Patron Saints list. Nearly every calamity and malady known to humankind has a saint to look after it. What a job for the afterlife! To be made a saint, a person would have had to spend an awful lot of their life being pious and rigid, and then perform a couple of miracles (which aren’t nearly as easy as Jesus made them look). So, for all their hard work in this world, the poor buggers get to spend eternity pondering the fate of us mere mortals as we complain about broken limbs, gassiness and the fact that we can’t find our car keys on Monday mornings.

Some of their appointments make sense, in a cutesy, folksy sort of way; St Joseph, for instance, who famously trudged around Bethlehem trying to find a room during peak tourist season for his wife to give birth in, looks after house hunting. But others make little or no sense at all.

Take St Joseph of Cupertino. He died in 1663, and is currently the patron saint of astronauts. How in god’s name is he supposed to know what he’s doing? It’s little wonder Columbia went bang… the patron saint in charge clearly has no idea what an astronaut is, let alone how to protect them.

The Patron Saint for Fear of the Lord is the Holy Ghost – which is kind of like handling a funnel-web to cure your fear of spiders. Sure… I’ll take advice on my fear of God from an entity, which, if my rudimentary understanding of the Bible is correct, is really God when he’s not feeling particularly substantial.

St Eloi looks after Numismatists (look it up – I had to). St Fiacre looks after haemorrhoids, while St Bibiana takes care of the hangovers. They’ve got John the Baptist looking after highways, freeways and spas. (Seriously – John the Baptist looks after all the hot tubs on the planet.) St John Nepomucene looks after discretion – which is apt, because I’ve never heard of him before. St George, who once famously killed a dragon, now gets to look after syphilis.

It’s lunacy. There’s a saint for everything these days, and there’s more on the way. Even countries and cities and states have patron saints. New York, New Zealand and Australia are all looked after by Our Lady Help of Christians. One can only assume that she was on the Gold Coast working on her tan when the whole 9/11 thing went down.

It’s easy to tell when the church is really, really worried about something as well. They’ll assign multiple saints to look after it. Sexual temptation is guarded by no less then eight saints and, tellingly, victims of abuse get ten saints – guilty conscience, anyone?

But back to St Valentine, and the day in his honour. I admit that I eventually caved and bought my girlfriend the lot – flowers, chocolates and a card. However, I did so not for fear of ending up under the guidance of Saints Aldegundis, Andrew Avellino, Barbara and Christopher – the patron saints of sudden death – but because I love her a lot.

First published by Rum & Monkey yonks ago.

Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle

~ The Home Pub of the Famous Pink Drinks and Trotter's Ale

Category Archives: Gregor Stronach

A Twisted Tale of Woe and Coincidence.

On Life, Crime and Parenthood

Advertising

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Gregor’s Vintage Fanmail

Staying Home

The Right and Noble Thing – an update

Digital Age

A Lesson from Life, for our friend Waz

An Open Letter to the Management and Patrons of the Pigs Arms

The Saints

The Saints from 1976…..