There’s something unique about seeing a quantity of something that used to be inside you come gushing out at high velocity.
Take the average person - if you ask, they would probably describe themselves as a complex organism involving many systems actively reacting with one another to sustain themselves.
But really, they’re just a very large bag of blood. You too by the way. The blood is there, waiting, under the surface, for any opportunity to explode outwards! Kablooey! Blood everywhere!
I learned about this today. Thank you Dr. Blood Tester man. What will tomorrow bring?
I dunno, I feel like I finally accomplished something this weeked.
I’ve been going through my daunting list of things to do slowly but surely, and yes - I’ve been getting things done, but the big elephant in the room was the simple fact that I had no way to carry things on my trip. I mean, I could have shown up in Australia with all my shit in a garbage bag, but I hear that the sanitation department is pretty good over there, and I don’t want to turn my back for a second and have a couple of surley Australians throw my shit in the back of their truck.
SO: I got a cool little bag!
But that’s not all. I’m bringing sexy back.
My 100% Canadian-made Tilley hat is hella-sweet, AND its made of hemp. What’s your hat made of? Oh, that’s right - you don’t even wear a hat! You don’t think its cool.. you think hats should be relegated to people from the 1920’s who had nothing better to do with their heads than put them in silly protective covers. Well, maybe I don’t have anything better to do with mine either. Plus its comfy and blocks out the sun. Which I hear they have in Australia. In fact I hear they have several, or at least it feels that way most of the time. I’ll find out soon myself… in style.
A day starting out with roasted potatoes has got to be a good one.
Heading out after a predrink-laced Irish Breakfast chez ami one, we hit the parade and ami two promptly got hit on by two girl cops. He wasn’t having any of it though - all they got out of it was his happy green beer bottle. But, we had discussed earlier how beer bottles had some phallic symbolism going on, so whatever - if you want to read into it its right there.
Of more importance, since it happened to me, is the following: Now we all know that advertisers love to walk around during the parade and hand shit out. Well they should probably take into account that most of the people that they hire to do this are fucking lazy in the first place and would rather be drinking with the rest of the crowd. That’s where I came in. Some lazy dude extends his hand to me, and being polite, I extend mine. I feel something heavy hit and look down… I was now the proud owner of about a hundred Irish Springs body wash coupons.
Feeling entrepreneurial, I started tossing coupons up in the air, letting them fall on the crowd. However, being hard cardboard stock with sharp corners, the crowd wasn’t very happy about it. Either was one of the girl cops that got hit. No evidence, no foul though.
Instead I turned to windshields and did my Irish duty spreading the message of clean smelling bodies everywhere. So if your car was around cresent street sometime today, the douchebag that tagged your wiper was me. You’ll thank me when you’re smelling like a flowing river of water, I’m sure.
I still have about 40 left of them. Still need to decide on a project that requires at the very most 40 cards with a perforated segment. Something will come. And in the meantime, I can educate myself with the wisdom contained upon them:
Lesson 1: At the end of the day, who decides if you’re charming or not?
Answer: GIRLS
Or, barring that, at the very least one might have a fully-fledged map of the country on the kitchen wall.
I don’t actually have a map as nice as the one I saw at the house party I went to last night, but it was really great to visualize the path I’m going to be taking in about a month down under!
Hell yes - Australia here I come! Leaving for about a month to see lots and lots of red dirt, and maybe a little (a lot) of the coastline. But I’m not done… this post ALSO marks the first true return I’ve done to this blog in over three years. In that time much has happened… and was promptly forgotten. Honestly, who remembers these things?
I’m very interested, once again, in keeping some sort of travel blog going while I’m there. The first time I tried this, while absolutely amazing fun, was a masochistic exercise in how much frustration with:
- Slow internet cafés!
- Expensive internet cafés!
- Crappy french keyboards that make no sense in internet cafés!
- Horrible blog software!
- Terrible picture formatting!
- Dismal blog site speed!
…I could take before killing my travelling partner just to vent.
Well, the plan this time is supposed to work better.. but the greater plans of greater men have fallen short before. It is an attempt to recreate something I’ve always loved to do when going on a trip - share it with everyone that I know!
We shall see :). And in the meantime, holy fucking shit! Australia!
