| The 48 Hour Blog - Because Nothing Exceeds Like Excess! |
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| the Official Truth: |
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The Latin test had been a toughie. It would have been less so had I gotten a proper night's sleep the previous evening. Sadly, I was awoken just after midnight to the sound of my Victorian mansion wriggling and squeaking around me, and took a while to get back to bed. Frankly, that pissed me off. I specifically told the Lackey when she moved into the bed-sit next door that she and her significant other could do whatever they wanted as long as they didn't make the earth move.
Thankfully I had an entire weekend of R-rated fun and relaxation planned. I was picked up from outside Otago University's remarkable Commerce building by a certain young Dictator of my acquaintance, and we departed therefore. Actually, that's not quite true. First we had to blither around town for an hour - to Daniel's to get the silly boy packed, to the chemist and the optometrist for various oddments, and then to the supermarket where Streak said "Let me find three parks together - then I'll be able to squeeze into one of them". Then, after swinging past my parent's place for a sleeping bag, we headed on up State Highway 1 to the irritating but appropriate strains of Pink's Get The Party Started.
| The KAOS Cruising tape has to be the first mix tape in history to feature Pink, Jethro Tull, the original Rocky Horror Picture Show cast and Warren Zevon. It didn't turn out all that badly, I suppose. Blue Monday only goes for half as long as Minstrel In The Gallery. And the breathy little goth song at the end of side one redeemed itself by prompting the remark "It's like a soundtrack to a goth porn movie, isn't it?", and the riposte from Daniel "Two words that should never be used together!" Indeed, what would you put in a goth porn movie? Edible Morticia dresses? Guys with whiteface on both heads? Chicks wearing nothing but flirty little grimaces? Please do send any suggestions to the mailing list. |
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Stopping for coffee in Oamaru, we were accosted by an Alf, who emerged from the Clarendon in a highly advanced state of peeve.
"Mister Young!", he exclaimed, "our ride has abandoned us here in this hostelry, with nothing to do but drink, and now you show up in Canadian uniform! What do you have to say for yourself!" Indeed, it was a fair cop, and I had no option but to beat a hasty retreat into a nearby Demente Gallery and hide among the faces until he went back to his tankard, the pathetic old soak.
Streak was upset about quality of NZ roads.
"Stupid fucking hick country!", she squealed. "Stupid fucking hick roads! Stupid fucking hick car! Stupid fucking hick country!" It was bluffing, of course. Within an hour she would prove herself wrong. But never mind. We hit Timaru and stopped for lunch. As we rolled out of town some speculation was indulged in as to precisely where Streak's liason with Megan at the last party would have ended up had she not been swept off her feet by a gentleman. This speculation concluded with Daniel offering to hold the video camera steady if Streak ever took up with Megan again.
"Hello", said the constable. "you were doing about 113kph back there. Any particular reason you were going that fast?"
"Um, straight road?", Streak replied. It didn't work. She took her booking with considerable goodwill, broken only by a moment of frustration that led her to take us on an impromptu tiki tour of Ashburton.
We'd been alternating who got shotgun every time we stopped since Dunedin, and eventually it was Daniel's turn in front. As we began to encounter outlying outposts of Christchurch he began to complain of a numb, then dead, then gangrenous bum. Hence, we had to swing by a clinic and have surgeons give him an emergency bumectomy. Which is why we were late. Sorry.
We hit town and spent a bit of time feeling guilt by association because of the Dictator's difficulty in finding her way around Christchurch. We eventually made it to the "Y", where we were greeted by the sight of Simeon and Laura quite sensibly fleeing our presence.
Once inside I took to shifting around the fridge magnets in an attempt to preserve the modesty of the nice young lady who had kindly allowed the occupants of the flat to hang her picture on their fridge.
"Crow won't mind as long as you leave the naked woman exposed", stated a young woman who'd materialised at my shoulder. So I gave up my involvement with the League For Community Standards and collared Hamish and got him to find me a computer to write on. He found me one with a nice view of Tatiana Grigorieva, whoever she is.
"We're gonna need some big strong boys to move some furniture", said Trond. "Actually, in a pinch, the guys who live here'll do". I was frantically trying to get the blog up to date, and party-organisation people were swirling about me. Hamish sampled the punch and, after something someone had described to me as the secret ingredient had been added, pronounced it "surprisingly not bad". Meanwhile Simeon circulated, trying to find someone to help him clear the beer backlog from the last party. He couldn't find any takers, so he stuck the two bottles under the bar in the bunker, and if anyone feels like a cold one, they're probably still there now.
James sat at my elbow playing Rise Of
Nations.
"Hey, cool", he exclaimed. "I get machine guns!"
"Machine guns are cool", proffered Trond.
"And flamethrowers!", continued James.
"Machine guns are cool", said Trond.
"Fuck machine guns, I've just developed flamethrowers",
countered James.
"Machine guns are cool"
"Well you still can't have one, darling", said the young
lady fiddling with the punch keg.
"What if he promises to only point it at people?", I
asked.
"Certain people", she said. "Germans and Russians and so
on."
"Machine guns are cool", said Trond
Having talked for a while to the guys in the kitchen, I went looking for fresh meat. I found some in Simeon's room, where Laura was beavering away on an essay.
"Um, sorry", said Simeon, "you can't come in here. Didn't you see the sign?" He indicated the sign on the door stating COME IN IF YOU'RE GOOD-LOOKING. As Simeon went off to do something, I gave the matter some thought, then took some measures to make myself more good-looking.
"How about this?", I asked.
"God, Joe", replied Laura, "you're like, divinity in
motion."
"Really", I said. I sat down on the bed. "That
impressive?"
"Yes indeed", she replied, and God knows what might have
happened had Simeon not reappeared and taken his pants
off.
"I can't help noticing", I said as he donned replacement pants, "that you can be counted along with my parents as one of the three people in the world who still use a waterbed."
"Heavens, yes", he replied. "You see, in my capacity as The Doctor Of Love, there are certain accouchements I must maintain". Thus The Doctor is well-equipped to cater to patients with an early-80s kitch fetish. Then he disappeared off for a while and Laura and I tried to work out if his Phillishave had a vibrate mode1.
Matt had arrived. I talked to Matt for a while, discussing a flat he'd had a few years ago which had seemed breezy and sophisticated and European in summer. By June they all had bronchitis and were sitting together on the couch bickering over who was going to make the tea. This exposes the basic flaw in traditional flat-hunting methods. Never go for the nice-looking flat. Find the grottiest, awfulest, terriblest flat you can possibly imagine. That way not only will you never be disillusioned, but you'll have more bullshit about your terrific flatting days to bore your kids with at 45.
Then Streak made a reappearance, again dressed as Trinity from The Matrix and wearing her scrotum-slashing boots, with which she had grievously injured me only four days earlier2. Upon learning that Jarrod was having a nap in the bunker, she went to wake him up. Finding him awake, she distracted him by adjusting her dress.
"Streak!", snapped Naomi, "Stop annoying Jarrod by
playing with your breasts!"
"Oh", replied Streak. "Would you rather I played with
somebody else's?"
"Well", contributed the Dictator's Floozy, "I've got
plenty, so it seems a shame not to share".
I had to rush away and write at this point. Jarrod was pink enough for the both of us.
For comic relief there was the inaugural Cleavage Magarita Consumption Competition. For those of you wanting to replicate this competition at home, you'll need a mate (arms optional), twelve breasts, two quarters of lime, a smidge of salt, and two shots of tequila. Need I elaborate on where this is going? In any case, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, especially Chris and Dan. Congratulations, Chris, incidentally.
It is my proud duty to report the first inter-species communication. No longer will the human race be condemned to sit around at parties with nothing but other people to talk to. No! For now, it has been firmly established, we can communicate with ducks.
I myself played an important part in this breakthrough with the following interview with a duck I happened to meet only a few minutes ago:
TJ: Good evening, Mister Duck.
Duck: Quack.
TJ: Tell me, Mister Duck, what is it
that your species really wants from existence?
Duck: Quack.
TJ: I see. And in your pursuit of this,
do you plan to roar "There's nothing pretentious about
drinking beer from a frosted magarita glass!" at the top
of your voice like Hamish just did?
Duck: Quack quack.
TJ: Well said. Now, Mister Duck, the
burning question the human race has been dying to ask
your kind since first we encountered each other - what do
you call a duck's-arse haircut?
Duck: Quack. Quack quack quack.
Quack quack.
TJ: A cogent and informative answer,
Mister Duck. Now I apologise, but I do have to ask you
this - there have been rumours that you are not a duck at
all, but rather a human being named Alasdair Muckart, and
that this entire `duck communication' lark is simply an
elaborate scam to attract women. Would you care to
respond to these detractions?
Duck: Quack.
TJ: I see.
"Back!", roared Hamish, "Back! Now that I am stupidly drunk, I plan to wash and dry all the really big sharp knives in the flat!" One thing I've learned in three years making jokes about people is that one should never try to reason with a large man with blonde pigtails who's just spent five minutes tracing out a Play School storyboard in the fog on the kitchen window and is now armed with an enormous carving knife. I booked and went out to the back porch, where people were torturing a piniata. When I got to the bunker, Jarrod looked up.
"Naomi's looking for you", he said. Odd. The only times Naomi's ever looked for me before have been find out where she should be pointing the crucifix. I found her in the tent.
"Come with me", she squealed. "[CENSORED] is looking for you! She wants you to do drugs with her!" I went along to humour them and found her in the company of a one-man walking J-Day of our mutual acquaintance. Then I booked again. No disrespect to alternative lifestyle choices, you understand, but I always felt that narcotics are the last refuge of the seriously bored.
So I ended up back in the bunker, talking to a young lady who, I couldn't help noticing, had a big muddy patch on the knee of her tights. I pointed this out.
"Good heavens", she said, "If a girl can't get muddy getting down on one knee to fondle the genitals of a gay man, what's the world coming to?" I only wish I knew.
Notice the Floozy is absent. Find her in the de facto hospital tent, doing a Florence Nightengale turn for a semi-conscious Pet. Get them a heater and hang around lending moral support.
Continue lending moral support. Begin to feel like proverbial tits on a bull in doing so3. A glance out the tent flap suggests that there are certain women in certain outfits who should not be bending over at the waist to hug a seated colleague goodbye.
I just had a conversation with a young man who is deeply ashamed that his flat receives The Rugby Channel. He is also upset that his flat is full of men with evident bowel problems, and relates a story of how his flatmate passed a motion at what he figures must have been the speed of continental drift. Then I got into a conversation with someone who wanted the short answer to the question "So what's your thesis about?". Those people are always so funny.
Party most assuredly beginning to wind down. Not everybody appears to have been informed of this fact. Dancers/music still going hammer and tongs. Pass a productive hour or so standing around with Cameron wishing this would stop so that we could unroll our fart-sacks and get a couple of hour's sleep before getting up to watch the Alfs on parade at 10:30.
I was asleep.
I was still asleep.
I was the first to be evidently awake. The former dance floor was alive with the wurfles, snortles and snuffles that come from several people asleep. Morbid in particular looked disarmingly cute in repose. I got up and sorted myself out, then realised I had two hours to kill before Streak was coming to get me to see the Alfs.
As the two-hour wait drags on, I find myself contemplating past past misdeeds. For one thing, when I autographed all those naked female backs last night, I really shouldn't have used a vivid.
Other people finally make an appearance. I do my bit by clearing the back porch of cans which, pathetic a contribution though it may be, is a damn sight more of a clean-up effort than I managed last time I was here. Then I scuttle backwards and forwards between the bunker and the sleeping chamber, trying to e-mail myself a copy of the write-up that I can work on at home while at the same time not missing my ride with Streak.
Streak made her appearance and she, Jarrod and I departed to pick up the Dictator and go and see the Alfs on parade. Coming up to a complicated intersection, Streak spotted what she figured was a short cut. She turned into it and found herself in a carpark that only exited into a one-way street going the wrong way. After managing to extricate herself and us from this predicament, she got back to the original intersection, spotted a short cut, and ended up in the same carpark. Finally, she managed to drive back around to the intersection, resist the temptation of a seeming short cut, and drove on towards the house where the Dictator was billeted. The journey was interrupted, however, by clanging bells and lowering barrier arms.
"Oh, for fuck's sake!", she exclaimed, "a train?". It was pushing twelve when we finally managed to pick up the Dictator.
Having hemorrhaged Jarrod near Comics Compulsion, Streak, the Dictator and I arrived at Cathedral Square in the middle of the Alf parade. And let me tell you, forty of Her Majesty's Finest in full kit constituted a pretty impressive sight. I don't know about you, but Alfing has always struck me as a great idea for a hobby - a bunch of guys dressing up in silly costumes, making tits of themselves in public, and flirting with women. There was quite a bit of speechification from both Queenie and The Wizard, mostly dealing with Alf achievements in general terms. This was all very well and good - all very logical, as the special regiment parading nearest our vantage point would have suggested - but it overlooked the single most impressive thing about Alfs - thirty years after what could have been a one-off stunt, they could fill forty uniforms.
Re-joining Jarrod and his newly acquired big bag o' roleplaying stuff, the four of us repaired to a nearby food court for lunch, something I took fairly seriously after having foolishly eaten nothing but a monomolecular sliver of pizza in the last 22 hours. Then we went to Wyrd, which I was told was Christchurch's leading source of gothery.
"Now Joe", said the Dictator as we mounted the staircase, "we know your opinion of goths, and we've forgiven you for it, but these people don't, so watch yourself." Actually, I have nothing against goths, although I do get very skeptical very quickly as soon as anyone starts trying to suggest their hobby has any higher meaning or social import. And Wyrd was pretty cool. In the fifteen minutes or so we spent browsing through the place, the only really silly things I saw were the Che Guevara tee-shirts.
One of the less remarkable things about the battle was the fact that the rain soaked my notebook, precluding me from putting together a write-up that really does justice to the quite astonishing level of participation, activity, humor, co-ordination and organisation that went into the afternoon. I wish it were otherwise, but in place of a narrative description of what went on I think I'm going to have to resort to constructing
TAILGUNNER JOE'S TOP 10 BATTLE MOMENTS FROM THE CHRISTCHURCH 48
Operation Wire-Brush Page (and Photos)
Having returned to 48 Central from the battle, Cameron and I decamped to the nearby shopping centre to forage for dinner. This expedition will chiefly be noted for the discovery of a sign, partly obscured by another poster, in the window of the newsagent's. The sign offered us the chance to WIN A WHOLE ...
... NEMA. There aren't a lot of words in the English language that end with nema, but the one that sprang to our minds was enema. Now, I don't wish to suggest that I came from any sort of really underprivileged background, but when I was growing up, we would often go for weeks on end without enemae, and even when we had them, my whole family of six would have to share one or, at the most, two. Never did I dare dream of such a luxury as having a whole enema all to myself. I would have gone into the shop and entered the competition, but it was closed. Life is so crushingly unfair sometimes.
"God", I said as something small and mammalian skittered across in front of JL and disappeared down the hall, "What on earth was that?"
"I don't know", said Cameron, finishing his pizza, "but it was orange, purple and black". It turned out in the end to have been Heather, but JL's quiz occupied my limited reasoning power to the extent that it was some time before I realised this. JL is, as I'm sure you're all aware, a consummate clever bastard, and the questions he posed us were wonderfully well-poised between the obvious and the tricky. Certainly, they were a great deal better than any I could have come up with (there's a slim but crucial difference between a clever bastard and a clever dick). Hamish, Al and Naomi could have won, but they made the mistake of inviting me to join their team.
We stood on the dance floor, waiting for enough people to turn up to begin the evening's festivities proper. The conversation turned eventually to that silliest and most dire of reality programs, Fear Factor. I posited that the program had just about run its course. Characteristically, however, John had a solution.
"Beer Factor", he said. "Before each stunt you have to chug a six-pack. The first stunt is walking in a straight line and they go from there." I don't know about you, but I think the idea has merit.
In the bunker we were roused from a fascinating discussion of incest ("The game the whole family can play!") by an ear-splitting squeal of laughter from the crowd around Trond's computer.
They turned out to be watching a short film by cartoonist Don Hertzfeld, which a huge group of people watched and enjoyed immensely. I always find something heartwarming about the idea of small fluffy creatures dying as a result of massive spontaneous rectal bleeding, don't you? After the film was over the conversation turned to Japanese anime.
"Ah", I said, "you know what they say about guys who're
into anime, don't you?"
"What?", asked the young lady I was speaking with.
"They say - `look at him, he's not getting any'"
"Ha ha!", laughed the young lady, who I won't name here
because she probably won't want it said that she agreed
with me6,
"that's absolutely right!"
There are a lot of people who find being tickled by those articulated silver claws you sometimes see goths wearing as exciting. I recently discovered that I am not one of them. Chloe and Streak were most enthusiastic in helping me reach this conclusion.
You know how Mars got really close to Earth a week or two ago? I have a theory about this. My guess is that Mars actually stayed exactly where it was. It was Earth that moved. I base this on the belly-dancing display I just witnessed, which I figure generated sufficient centrifugal force to knock Earth off its orbit and cause it to float free in space. So when we collide with Saturn some time in the next month or so, I plan to hold Becca and the Ferret responsible. Not that it was a bad way of causing the extinction of life on Earth, of course, but it'll still be their fault.
Theuns looked a spectacle in a white shirt under the black-light.
"Get your hand back on my leg!", squealed the woman. Not my hand, you understand. I'd already - and, for the record, accidentally - copped a handful of her last night.
"Um, why?", asked the fellow whose lap she'd draped
herself across.
"Because it's fucking warm, that's why!", she replied.
It was at this point that a new recruiting slogan for
KAOS occurred to me - "KAOS - for computer geeks who get
some".
I tried to move that same woman's legs to sit down on the couch and found myself, mystifyingly, trapped between them. She wouldn't let go. I thought this sort of thing only happened in James Bond movies. In any case, I very quickly became desperate, and even drafted a message in a bottle (Trapped between legs - HELP!) and handed it to a passing Dictator. She handed it to someone else and I never saw it again. I spent most of the hour being subjected to knee-squeezes before she got up to go for a pee or something and I could flee into the bunker. There I managed to eavesdrop on a guy explaining a new drink to a mate.
"It's liquid ook", he said.
"What?"
"Half uzo, half coke. Liquid ook", he explained. I'm not
sure if that quite works, but if it does I'm sure it will
become the tipple of choice for orang-utans the world
over.
The KAOS Cleavage Olympiad continued with one young lady putting in a particularly strong showing in the Stunt-With-Yer-Front event. You know that little blue light Al has? Guess where she put it. And okay, you're saying, there's nothing unusual about that. There was a woman who did that at the perversion party, you're saying. And you'd be right. It was the way could make it blink on and off that I thought was noteworthy. With all the lights off in the bunker they managed to create a sort of glow-worm-luring-prey effect that was really quite impressive, not to say convincing. So if anyone's wondering why they haven't seen their boyfriend since the party, he probably got eaten.
I've talked a fair bit so far about the silly behaviour of others in this write-up, and think that's justified. I must confess, however, that the silliest behaviour of the weekend came courtesy of myself and another young man I suspect it would be best to leave anonymous.
At about 4:30, when we were sure none of the other drunks around us would remember and fatigue had blunted our manners to a sufficient extent, the two of us invented a game so pathetic and grubby I think it would be a let-down not to mention it - Cleavage Battletech.
We sat opposite the door and, whenever someone walked in, classified their chests in terms of Battletech. In the space of about half an hour we came across a Jagermech (impressive but silly-looking), a Commando (small but powerful), a Firestarter (sure to cause trouble, though probably for the pilot), a Warhammer IIC (obviously artificially enhanced), an Awesome (very much in your face), an Atlas (BOOM!) and an Overlord (sorry, but with enterprises like this there comes a time when you have to see how far you can push things). My personal favourite, however, was the young lady who, on learning she had been rated a Catapult, rounded on us and demanded to be upgraded to the Catapult variant with jump jets.
I don't offer any defence for this behaviour, in large part because I don't think there are any. It was puerile and juvenile and infantile and various other words ending in -ile. But given that the entire weekend, between furry bras, belly-dancing and corsets being re-laced in the middle of the back lawn, could have been filmed as a Cleavage For Africa '03 Telethon, I thought I'd better include it in the write-up.
After another night of getting to bed about the time I usually get up, I hauled myself upright and spent another couple of hours ruminating, as one can only do in a situation to which The Eagles' Tequila Sunrise would be an appropriate soundtrack, about what the fuck we were doing.
It's an odd business, really, a party. Especially one of this magnitude. You get a lot of grief making sure everybody has a car seat up and a billet and a sober ride there after the fact, get all squiffly with excitement and spend large sums of money at supermarkets and grease spots. Then you spend six to eight hours waving various limbs in the air, squealing, watching people's mouths move because there are far too many people talking to hear what they're saying, watching various portions of the female anatomy wiggle and wobble, babysitting drunks, writing on inappropriate people and turning down offers of substances of varying potency and legality. Then you wake up at eight, climb out of your sleeping bag, and think thoughts along the lines of "Eventually and unavoidably there will come a time when stuff like last night won't seem like much fun." Then Caroline walks in and starts scrunching cans into rubbish bags and you realise that 24 is far too young to be thinking such things and fulfill one of your few responsibilities in life by helping her clean up.
Good heavens! Such moralising! We're supposed to be having fun here. And Sunday morning was fun, in a more relaxed, sober kind of way. I gave up on trying to blog this as it happened and take it home with me to work on there. I went to the supermarket and purchased four chocolate waffles and ate them and felt as ill as I have in a while. I sat and watched Naomi give a sweet root to a guy, then give him another sweet root for good measure, then give him another sweet root, because three is a lucky number. I showed off a recently-acquired bruise and acquired a couple of new ones by talking in my Gollum-with-laryngitis voice, which nobody likes. We gravely considered the fate of a KAOS prospect who wasn't working out all that well with the kind of gravity and intensity you can only achieve when everyone present agrees entirely on what should be done, cleared some of Theuns' chocolate backlog (the illness was fading) and kind of disappointed Simeon by never really getting around to the one-hour killing round. We partook of Caroline's Brunch Of Doom (a hash brown sandwich has rarely tasted so good) and made complicated arrangements for the return to our own good city. Then we made our thanks and cleared off.
The drive home was also fun, though everyone was too tired to do as much talking as they had on the way up. We got to have another little look around central Ashburton, insofar as there's enough of it to look around. We got to witness a skirmish in the ongoing and horrific Timaru Pizza Wars and get a run-down of the state of play therein from the woman behind the counter. In Oamaru Streak pulled over, announced she could go no further, and got Jarrod to take over driving. I was pretty tired myself at that point, and gave up trying to write anything more before Monday.
I wish I could end this with some great and catastrophic joke that provides a narrative and comedic catharsis to the whole thing, but sadly none presents itself. Real life, even loudly exaggerated and leavened with excessive cleavage jokes, lacks the sort of narrative structure and tension that keeps fiction going. Also, as always, I flagged. They dropped me off first, and I suppose that after that they might have gone somewhere and engaged in a great hysterical hootenanny of some kind. But I doubt it. Doing so three nights in a row would have left them depleted for the Otago 48 in a fortnight's time.
See you there.
1. No
2. The worst part being that she offered to kiss it better.
3. Tits are a recurring literary theme in this blog.
4. Being able to get ten of you into a Rhino APC an exercise similar to the clowns-in-the-tiny-car gag, for those of you not familiar with Warhammer 40,000 is also a plus. For seventeen years now WH40K players have been debating as to whether this is possible, and at the weekend a daring new theory was posed arguing that is might work. The theory was not tested, but it was so tacky and tasteless that it simply must be repeated:
How do you get ten Marines into a Rhino?
Mount it.
5. There were people picnicing on that lawn a week later, so it wasn't quite that bad, in case any University Facilities Management people are reading...
6. Naomi