| Another 48 Hour Blog - Party real savage like, all weekend |
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| the Official Truth: |
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Sometimes life is boring. Run of the mill experiences, little challenging or exciting; white bread, milky tea and all that blah. It's not, contrary to pop philosophy or Tyler Durden, such a bad existence. In fact, a lot of the time you could do a lot worse. For example, you could be driving up to Christchurch with David Bottinga.
Now, it is not for me to say whether or not David is sparkling company. What I can say, however, is that hurtling up to Christchurch in the care of a driver who's holding a French stick in one hand and the block of Philadelphia cheese he's trying to consume in its entirety in one go in the other and who's steering us with his knees through a howling storm at 115kph and who chooses the crucial point of an iffy over-taking maneuver to say "Man, I can't see a thing through this rain" is, let's be charitable, a unique experience.
As for David himself, he got stomach cramps from all the cheese and eventually had to pull over and catch his breath. I have seldom felt so relieved.
When we got to Christchurch I got out and kissed the ground and swore I would never again be a passenger in any sort of vehicle. Then we helped to unload the tank onto somebody's front porch. This done, we embarked on a journey to find our billet, which was more interesting than it sounds. The two of us had copied down two different sets of contact details for some reason, though for some other reason one of them seemed more convincing. We ended up spending a good half-hour trolling up and down Gladson Avenue looking for an address that doesn't exist. Eventually we decided to look for the other address we had, but there was nobody home and, to add insult to injury, there was far too much fudge in David's fudge bar. We left a message on Robert's answering machine and cleared off to the party.
I shouldn't need to go over the precise arrangements that the doughty, charming and virile denizens of the YMCA had made for the party, but for those of you who weren't there ...
"I've had far too much to drink for this hour of the night", said Chris. Then he said "please don't quote me on that."
Shelly had, of course, marked me by rubbing her scent glands against me not long after I arrived, but it was only now that I managed to corner her and react with stark fücking horror to the stuff she was drinking.
"Oh my God", I believe I said, "what the fück is that?"
"Well", said Zara as she poured another capful, "It's cherry aadvocat, but I suppose you could just call it pink poster paint."
She was right. The stuff had the look, odor and (mumble) taste of that awful vicious stuff you used in art class in primary school, a kind of thick, sloppy, colour-not-found-in-nature gunk that, to this day, reminds me of Ms Robinson bitching about us using up all her stores of Magneta N°4. Certainly, Ms Robinson would be turning in her grave this evening if she could see what Shelley was doing with it, which is to say sticking it away with the kind of abandon I have not seen since ... since ... well, since the last big party I was at.
I'm sure everyone saw the strapping young lads of Naked Jedi Productions strutting their stuff on video at the party. And I'm sure everyone is very impressed. Certainly, there's nothing I can say that'll improve on it. In fact, given the sort of dross the Otago University student film-making competition, the Mothras, tend to attract these days, these guys could well have taken out the supreme prize in that competition several years running with just that single entry. Hell, it beats Auckland Awakening2.
I walked past Colin administering his second bout of corset first aid for the evening, but sadly got bumped sideways into Jeremy-James' room and had to be rescued by Glenn. Then I joined the one undeniable attraction of any really good KAOS party; the ever-popular toilet queue. Here I encountered a couple of young ladies having a fascinating conversation.
"Fiona", said one, "you are such a bitch."
"Would you mind if I quoted you on that?", I asked.
"Sure", said Fiona. I was about to ask exactly why Fiona was such a bitch when Liz joined the queue.
"Christ, Liz", said Fiona, "You're a midget." I was unconvinced of this and asked for elaboration.
"You don't need elaboration", said Liz. "I am a god-damn midget."
"Yeah", said Fiona. "You can write that down in your book. Write down "Liz is a god-damn midget."
So I did.
In the bunker, Russell had an idea.
"What I'd like to do", he said, "is set up a KAOS accelerator. We get two separate dancefloors, right, each playing completely different play-lists. Then what we do is switch the play-lists, and everybody will run towards the other room and bash into each other. Then they'll break and fly apart, and we'll have the fundamental particles of KAOS."
I lack the scientific background required to offer any thoughts on whether this would work, but I was pleased to see that, for the moment at least, my traditional exhortation that only sex, religion and particle physics should ever be discussed at a party was being adhered to (see heaven and hell party).
I moved on into the cloakroom, which is where all the cool people hang out3. As I arrived I almost bumped into John leaving. He was bearing a tray of little plastic glasses.
"Oh", I said, "are those jelly shots?"
"Yup", replied John. "This lot come in three flavours"; he pointed to the red, green and yellow jellies in turn, "hardcore, kryptonite and wee-wee." I didn't have any of these, but others pronounced them the most delectably dodgy things at the party that weren't wearing corsets. Natalia was enthusiastically pushing them on everyone she could find and ordering that they be consumed in the iffiest manner possible. She claims one young man had fled the party on seeing this. In the meantime, however, Charlene had entered the room behind me.
"How're things going?", asked someone else in there.
"Oh, okay", she said. "Footloose and fancy free."
"Can I quote you on that?", I asked.
"Darling", she said, "you can quote me saying anything you want."
Terrific. In honour of Charlene's generous offer, I took the liberty of designing
Each time you need a quote from Charlene, roll 1d6 on table 1 to determine the general nature of the passage. Then, each time a [random word] is required, roll 2d6 on table 2 and consult the indicated column to determine the word required for that space.
Table 1| 1d6 | Passage |
| 1-2 |
Bitchy:
[Subject's name] is such a [adjective] bitch. He/she/it is always [participle] other people's [noun (plural form)] without [participle] first. And you know what else? He/she/it [verb (perfect form)] my [adjective][noun] and then didn't [verb] it before [participle] it. I'm [participle] you, one day I'm just going to [verb] that [noun]. |
| 3-4 |
Dodgy:
You know, young man, I've always found you very [adjective]. I mean, you're a very [adjective] individual, and there have actually been times when I've laid [adjective] at night and longed to feel your [participle][noun] on my [adjective][adjective][noun]. Go on, [verb] me, [verb] me now. Woof! |
| 5-6 |
Expository:
The [noun] is a species of [noun] native to the jungles of southern Borneo. Chiefly aboreal, it survives on a diet of [noun (plural form)] and [noun (plural form)], which it catches by [participle] its [adjective][noun]. Noted for its [adjective] coat and [participle] mating call, it is thought by many naturalists to be [adjective]. I've got one chained up in the backyard. |
| 2d6 | Noun | Adjective | Verb | Participle |
| 2 | Elephant | Crabby | Grab | Dodging |
| 3 | One Ring | Intoxicated | Suffer | Lilting |
| 4 | Laptop | Celibate | Inhabit | Shaking |
| 5 | Lesser marsupial mouse | Great honkin' | Cough | Bellowing |
| 6 | Coronation Street figurine | Pert little | Celebrate | Sitting |
| 7 | Elbow | Dirigible | Coddle | Färting |
| 8 | Pancreas | Tight | Taste | Touching |
| 9 | Really cool flat | Insufferably cute | Car-jack | Rollicking |
| 10 | Swiss army knife | Airborne | Holler | Bouncing |
| 11 | Damsel-fly | Slimy | Antagonise | Generating |
| 12 | Dan | Restless | Circumnavigate | Prognosticating |
Fresh from my exertions in the bunker I went and sat by one of the heaters on the back lawn. Here I chatted with met a young lady who asked my name for the third time this morning.
"It's not a drunk thing", she said, apologising profusely, "I'm just no good with names."
"No", said someone else nearby, "Trust me on this one Joe, at this time of night, with Jenny, it's a drunk thing." Indeed, the evening had progressed to the point where alcohol was actually beginning to become a liability to a few of the members of the company. Such behaviour is to be expected of course, and is not entirely without value; it gives the sober people something to baby-sit, thus precipitating the warm inner glow of self-perceived decency that everyone enjoys wallowing in from time to time. And besides, none of these effects were as alarming as something demonstrated by an absence of alcohol; that is, the fact that someone had apparently walked off with Shelley's drink. This would seem to indicate that somebody else actually wanted to drink it, which frankly I find mildly distressing.
By about this stage the party was beginning to wind down for the morning. Only a few of the most dedicated dancers were still at it and most of the people in the bunker and on the lawn and piked on us. Consequently, finding people ready, willing and silly enough to talk to me was becoming increasingly difficult. I went and sat on the couch.
"Oh, by the way", said the young lady already sitting there, pointing to her knee, "how do you like my bandaid?" Foolishly, I asked how she'd got it. "I cut myself shaving", she replied.
The female leg is, as is well known, the opposite of peanut butter; that is, the smooth ones are nicer than the crunchy ones. As aesthetically pleasing as bald legs are, however, it's very easy for those of us who don't have them to forget how labour-intensive and potentially irksome the process of making them so can be, or indeed that any such process really takes place, and I very nearly made a fool of myself asking what she was doing waving a razor around down there. Fortunately, before I could do so, she piped up again.
"I'd show you the one on my heel", she said, "but that would involve unlacing my boots. That one bled like nothing else, and of course I was in the shower, so it wouldn't stop bleeding." I was about to say make the obvious Hitchcock comparison when she said "It didn't even stop when I actually said "fück, stop bleeding.' It was just like in Psycho." I recorded this anecdote carefully in my notebook — Zara's Shower Scene.
Then we got a taxi home.
I awoke with a start from an interesting dream which, as I remember it, involved me and the Dictator of Otago living in a very large anthill while the bees from the Honey Puffs ads planned genocide of some description in our spare room. The fire that was my responsibility to keep going had almost burned out, and when I tried to stoke it up again without waking David (still dead to the world on the couch behind me), I was rewarded with a scattering of hot cinders on the hearth and a recollection of something my old scoutmaster said about keeping fires going.
"Remember lads", he had said, "always . If you don't , it'll go out before you know it."
I quietly cursed my patrol leader for showing us his best (and only) copy of Penthouse in the tent the evening before that lesson. If he hadn't I might have been more focussed. Then I flopped back down on the mattress and wondered what various authority figures would think if they knew what I was blowing off the weekend for.
The logical thing to do would have been to start writing. The trouble is that my sleeping bag has no keyboard, and the notion of getting up was something I was not quite prepared for yet.
I finally hauled myself out of my färtsack and found my way to Robert's computer room, where he was rather less than happily disinfecting a virus that'd somehow beaten his protection programs. I did my best to pretend to understand a word of his explanation as he gave me a run-down of how this had happened.
Then I started writing. About midday the others began making appearances.
Robert's car has to have one of the most unusual, nifty set of controls I've ever seen in a motor vehicle.
"Right, off we go for some hot lesbian action!", roared Charlene as I arrived back at the Y. She and a couple of other young ladies were disappearing down the hallway as she did so. Untutored as I am to the dreamy pleasures of Sappho, I chose not to follow, but I trust they enjoyed themselves and used plenty of baby oil. And chocolate sauce. And would a goat be asking too much?
As those of us who turned up way too early continue our wait for the more sensible people, hilarious news reaches us concerning the current disposition of the Dictator of Otago and her Pet. It seems they somehow contrived a situation in which the Pet was locked out of the house (Phil's) while the Dictator was locked inside. Readers are hereby invited to conjure for themselves a picture of Colin pining through the window like a puppy and/or Maria trying to figure out how to use window latches.
I confess a general ignorance about comic book culture, not having purchased one in seventeen years or really actually read one since Dragon Magazine stopped printing The Twilight Empire. Consequently I am able to offer no meaningful discussion of the Lucifer comics people around me spent most of this hour ensconced in. This is, of course, one of the big problems with the hour-by-hour approach to doing these write-ups. Real life, even when you're divorced from it as much as a 25-year-old man on a party road trip, lacks even pacing and includes long boring bits that really hamstring its chances of ever being made into a movie. From what I gather, however, Naked Jedi Productions is actually making a movie of some description about the weekend, so maybe I should just shut up and get on with the rest of the article.
Just to show that God hates me and wants me to be miserable, Shelley's terrible, repulsive goo of doom has resurfaced. Furthermore, like many of the compellingly awful things in life; Ebola, Giger's Alien, American televangelism for example; it appears to have infected other vessels as a form of proliferation. Both Shelley and Zara are now toting bottles of cola filled with awful little specks of pink particulate matter like Barbie diarrhoea. Zara assures me this is actually quite nice, but I still decided I'd have to be a bit drunker than I was at the moment before I tried any of it. And what with playing Hunters And Gatherers with Robert and Phil, I forgot to get that way.
The 48-hour Party Quiz is a noble KAOS tradition4 that was quite justifiably advertised throughout the party. My team, given the entirely too-flattering name "the Media Hacks", won. The reason for this is quite simple: journalists are simply cooler than other people. And Phil seemed only too happy to carry the rest of us, particularly the hairy nitwit with the notebook. My share of the prize was three Mars Bars. I ate two and gave another to a young lady whose name I forget.
It might also be noted that the sport section of the quiz did not include any questions about the speculative KAOS Olympics a couple of us down in Dunedin spent an hour or so musing on a few weeks ago. This is a pity, as I'm sure very intelligent questions could be formulated about events such as squid wrestling, synchronised blogging, elder god summoning, the 5km pub crawl, the 25-page Java code debug, and the ever-popular breast stroke5. I made a mental note to forward the list, which is about fifty events long and gets kind of surreal, to the quiz-masters for next year.
With the supposed centerpiece of the evening's entertainment, the court-martial of Lieutenant-Colonel Rat-Bastard drawing near, thoughts turn to legal systems real and fictional. I was chatting with the Massey crowd on the couch and mentioned a fictional legal system I've come across in which, out of politeness the defendant is informed of the verdict shortly before their trial. This prompted a wonderful story:
"Robyn, an exchange student from Canada last semester, was guilty of treason", explained Ana. "She needed to be executed. However, before we could do it, she went back to Canada. Since we needed to punish somebody for the crime, and the most appropriate target was the KAOS agent living closest to her, since they naturally would have been involved. Near Robyn's flat was a KAOS flat, and the flat was oriented so that the room next to Robyn's flat was occupied by an agent named Michael Allen. I told his flatmate Richard, who's Q, to make sure that Michael turned up at uni on his execution day. He forgot to tell Michael. So there we were up at Massey with water balloons and rope and chains and no-one to execute. Someone else needed to be executed in Michael's place. The obvious choice was a person with the same name. This happened to be Michael Nixon, a first-year. So we tied him to a tree and water-ballooned him to death."
Isn't life wonderful?
"Tip for the future, Theuns", said Duncan. "They don't just vary in size. They're different shapes as well." I'm sure Duncan, as a man of the world, has a point. However, Carolyn's thoughts on Theuns' most recent chain-mail brassiere appeared to be more to the point. And so far as I could gather from halfway across the room; being as it is that paying particularly close attention to a bra fitting, however public, is somewhat ungentlemanly; she thought it was great. Indeed, about the only thing about the whole process that seemed remotely unpleasant to me was the fact that Theuns warmed it up for her by placing it in front of the heater. The consequences of over-doing that do not bear thinking about.
A bunch of us stood around on the dance-floor waiting for the party to start up properly. And as it did so, Slosh engaged in that most amusing form of theological debate; making fun of non-conformist Christian minorities.
"You know", he said, "I bet Mormon teenagers come home at all hours of the night stinking of coffee."
Things were getting desperate at this hour when it occurred to me that I didn't have anything to write about. Thankfully, however, the Palmy North crew once again came to my rescue.
I was chatting with them about how I'd got up to Christchurch and made some passing reference about how it was probably easier than getting down from the North Island; less inconvenient water in the way and such.
"Uh", said Russell, "actually, we flew."
"Gosh", said I, "that must have cost you a bit."
"Not really", he said. "We got a grant from our student union that covered half the fare."
"Really? How on earth did you manage that?"
"We just applied for the grant", said Ana, "and then we got it."
"Yes, of course", I said, "but how on earth did you justify it to them? I mean, what did you tell them?"
"Oh, I think we just called it a national club event or something. Not, of course, a 48-hour piss-up6."
Heh7.
The court martial of Lieutnant-Colonel Rat-Bastard, the focal point of the weekend as I understand it, was much as we might have expected it. The charges were read with an open-mindedness and fairness that characterises all legal proceedings in a dictatorship. Mr Rat-Bastard was fawning and pathetic in the dock, protesting his innocence and calling all the Monty Python And The Holy Grail quotes he could in his defence. His defence attorney was pithy and eloquent and, as one might expect, switched sides halfway through the speech. Public opinion took its usual merciful aspect. Tony got an excuse to get his machine-Nerfs out. And Rat-Bastard's badges of rank were handed out to a nice young lady who happened to be passing. He would have wanted it that way.
Simeon and Slosh have just placed me under strict instructions to consider Nicola lovely at all times. I don't know about you, but this is the sort of instruction one generally lacks the inclination to argue with.
"Nah", said Brett. "Don't worry, it won't break. I could probably pop it out of its socket, you know, dislocate it, but it's nowhere near breaking yet."
"Even so", I said, "you might want to think about letting go. It's twisted at a fairly impressive angle already, and while it'd make a cool photo for Phil's page, some of my elbow tendons are really beginning to protest."
"Yeah", said Brett, "but elbows don't generally come out. I'd have to twist it around to about here"; he indicated a spot a few inches below my arm; "before it came out. More likely your shoulder would go." At this point he seemed to become distracted. "Y'know", he said, "it's like that time a guy in town attacked me with a knife. Cut my shirt to pieces. It was a new shirt, too, a really nice one."
"That's horrible", I said. "It must really have hurt, kind of like my ar ... "
"No", said Brett, with the kind of grave, sing-song emphasis a certain type of drunk person gets when they're bent on explaining just how little they care about their own physical well-being these days, "I hardly even bled. It was losing the fücking shirt that annoyed me. Really nice one, it was."
I sighed. Brett had had my arm held through one and a half revolutions for about five minutes by this point and showed no sign of diminishing in his enthusiasm for slurring explanations about how he could really hurt me if he could be bothered. I wasn't sure how I'd got into this situation, but at the risk of sounding like a whiner, the novelty was beginning to wear off. It was time to call in the cavalry.
"Nicola", I said, "would you mind having a word to Brett about perhaps letting go of my arm?" She was good enough to do so, though it sent Brett off on another tangent.
"Can I wear your hat?", he asked.
"Um ... ", said Nicola.
"Oh, go on", he asked. "Tell you what, if you let me wear it, I'll sleep with Slosh's Mum."
For some reason this decided the matter, and Brett reached out with both hands to take hold of Nicola's hat. I flexed my wrist experimentally and went off to find my bag of peanuts.
I stood on the edge of the dance-floor watching a dozen black-clad bodies whirl and gyrate in the darkness, trying to think of something to say about it that might be amusing and perhaps raise a point about what we were doing with ourselves. And what eventually came to mind was, seriously, the content of my comparative mythology class from last week.
We'd been discussing the orebasia, one of the more puzzling rituals used to worship Iachos, one of the more puzzling Greek gods. Iachos-worship was a mysterious cult loathe to divulge any secrets to non-initiates, though it was based around stories involving the repeated death and re-birth of Iachos and his mates in the dim and distant past, and promised its devotees some sort of blessed resurrection. From what little can be gleaned from vase paintings and oblique literary references, the orebasia involved letting all the women out of the house, they'd get together all the musical instruments in town, climb to the top of a remote mountain, and proceed to make a fück-awful racket and dance their collective ärses off all night. The idea was, it seems, to whip yourselves up into a wholly irrational frenzy whereby Iachos would bodily possess you and you would see satyrs; allegorical personifications of the male libido; prancing around and joining in. Occasionally writers would contribute to public forums by making ribald jokes about what the girls must be getting up to up there.
Now, I know Cthulhu is the semi-official god of KAOS and that the Campus Crusade For Cthulhu (who doesn't exist) is, for want of a better term, the clergy. But if Iachos was watching us on Mount Olympus' KAOS-Cam, I'm sure he'd have been well pleased with the evening's activities.
It then occurred to me that numerous depictions of the orebasia show the revellers tearing small furry creatures to pieces. I picked up my drink and left the room.
Artaud wanted an explanation of my thesis. This is a party moment I always have veheremently mixed opinions about. As I completed the short version, however, something amusing happened.
Hamish walked in (and it's odd, isn't it, how that's such a great paragraph opening), held aloft a can of silver spray paint, and hollered "RIGHT! WHO WANTS THEIR BREST BLINGED?!" This was, I decided, too good an opportunity to pass up. Besides, a bunch of people ended up walking around the party with splotches of silver paint visible under their tee-shirts and peeking over the tops of their dresses, and I didn't want to look foolish.
There are times at KAOS parties where the most innocuous and convivial settings suddenly billow out into inexplicably ridiculous goings-on. This thought struck me as I sat on the floor in the hallway eating brie with Tony. There were two armchairs placed against the wall next to us and three people were in them and chatting and getting themselves and each other nicely lubricated. Then someone put down the bottle. Then, for no readily apparent, the two young gentlemen picked of the young lady between them, looped various of her limbs around their necks and proceeded to try and carry her off down the hallway while she shrieked with laughter.
It was not a particularly successful undertaking. These were large guys, too large to have much room to manoeuvre in so narrow a hallway at the best of times, and while the young lady wasn't noticeably unwieldy, she was cumbersome enough at neck height to make getting her down the hallway horizontally something like moving a small couch in through a party crowd. So they didn't get very far. However, they showed a tipsy determination to do so and kept trying to move her around the corner with such diligence I began to fear for her spine. All up she was probably airborne for about five minutes before one young man lost interest and wandered off. His mate, displaying the kind of enthusiasm for a situation that comes naturally when you've got a girl's knees hooked over your shoulders, continued to try to make headway against the crowd for about thirty more seconds before collapsing sideways onto the stairs. Somehow no joints were sprained as they hit the ground.
"Excuse me", I said, "but Phil's not around, and Glenn's picture-phone isn't working in this light, so I could be the only person who'll record this. You wouldn't mind offering a quote for posterity?"
The young lady in question was still convulsed with laughter. I turned and looked expectantly at Dan, who showed no real inclination to untangle her legs from around himself.
"Um", he said, "I can neither confirm nor deny that goat-boy picked this woman up and WORE HER LIKE A FEED-BAG!"
The original plan for this hour was to write about something funny that happened to me, though as it was the unconscionable act of someone beating up a spaz; made even worse by the fact that the spaz deserved it; it might be best not to discuss it. Perhaps instead I should pause here and clean out my notebook of notes I have forgotten the context for.
There are always a few of these in the notes I take at parties. Some I vaguely recall; "Claire sucking Hamish's candy" and "Dan asks Tony how to say 'R2-D2 with a toilet brush on his head' in French", for example. I can almost remember these, though in both cases it's probably funnier to just leave them out of context. Other references a more mysterious. For example, last night someone was discussing the "Couch Of Doom" in his flat last year. I wish I'd recorded the conversation with more than just those three words, as I can't remember the rest of the story and he was in no state to recall it later. Likewise, down here I've got someone saying "I'm filthy" and someone else noted as deliberately putting her jacket on backwards. Given that I've recorded the fact that Jacketgirl wouldn't let me use her name, there was probably a really funny, or at least amusingly dodgy story in that one. Here on page two I find I've got Tess quoted as saying "nothing's harder than Simeon" and an odd, unattributed quote saying "That's a man who wants potato salad down his pants, I'd say." What on earth can that mean? Why, for that matter, do my last two notes for the entire party read "Storm got a tip" and "Andrew's Having A Baby!"? I don't even recall meeting anyone named Andrew. One of these days I've got to get myself a dictaphone and do this properly.
Each one of these quotes represents, primarily, a wasted opportunity on my part. Taken as a whole, however, they indicate the extent to which the party succeeded. In my experience, one does not go to a party, especially a KAOS party, to talk (too noisy) or dance (there'd be fewer unflatting photos if you did that at home) or even get drunk*. One goes to a party in the hopes that something stupid will happen that you'll enjoy recalling, out loud or to yourself, in the future. A KAOS party flips the old Led Zeppelin/Guns & Roses/KISS maxim "what goes on tour, stays on tour" on its head. What goes on at a party is discussed and laughed about for days afterwards and, all being well, may become an item of personal or even KAOS mythology. This is, as I see it, the point of keeping Phil and I around. And each one of these orphaned quotes represents an example of something like that happening. Indeed, I think KAOS is, at its heart, a vector for such behaviour, and the fact that so much of it went on stands as evidence that the weekend was a roaring success as a KAOS event. We may have just been dicking around and wasting time8, but we did it well.
After nursing Shelley back into the land of the living, Colin had gone on a toot of his own. In fact, the occasional invasion of the YMCA boys videotaping JJ playing flat golf across the fairway that ran through the room not withstanding, the bunker appeared to have become the place where you went to sit down and talk while you waited for your liver to catch up. And there, as is regrettably so often the case when it's some ungodly hour of the morning and two thirds of the people in the room are two-thirds drunk and the girls beside you on the couch are carrying on like a millipede and a foot fetishist, the inevitable happened.
We started telling shitty jokes.
Man, did we tell some bad jokes. For example, we told this one ...
Q: What's more fun than nailing six babies to one tree?
A: Nailing one baby to six trees
... and ...
Q: What's better than sex with two eighteen-year-olds?
A: Sex with eighteen two-year-olds
... and even ...
Q: How many software engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: None, that's a hardware problem
At one stage during this toot, chanting was heard from the cloakroom ...
"Now drink, mother-fücker, drink, mother-fücker, drink, mother-fücker, drink, mother-fücker ... "
... to the tune of Frere Jacque. It was a pretty terrible hour or so, really, especially when someone started in on the long, long, looong version of the Polish-fisherman-and-the-Mongol-hordes joke, though at one stage it looked like things were taking a turn for the unforgivable when someone started talking politics.
Specifically, they started expressing his opinions on George Bush. Such discussion has its place. But it is not party talk. It is not, especially, the sort of conversation you want to engage in at 5am on a Sunday morning while you're three sheets to the wind and have a young lady in a vinyl miniskirt plonked in your lap. In situations like that, what you really want to hear about is what the vampire said to the lesbian. And this guy was interrupting the flow (so to speak) of such discussion with his loud political invective. Things were starting to look serious when Pearl stood up and said something that really needed to be said.
"Guys!", she said "Guys! We appreciate the situation! We know what's going on in the world! And we're really sick of hearing about it! Now could we please just get back to the jokes?!"
Well done that man.
For this hour I had originally planned to write up my conversation with Gold, but on second thoughts I decided to omit this in the name of good taste and decency. This, however, leaves me with nothing to write about for what was, to all intents and purposes, the end of the party for most of the Otago contingent.
Now, I could have gone on the moralistic-killjoy bent I usually adopt towards the end of things I write; you know, the bit where I get boring and talk about what the fück we think we're doing, but I kind of already did that for 4am. I could have found out how everyone was getting home and made jokes about it. I could have developed an interesting theory about this or that or made a comedic reference to one or another of the various things I tried not to look too closely at over the weekend because certain interested parties are trusting me to be here by myself. But in the end I just decided to compile a list of masturbation references tailored for a gothic audience. Enjoy.
David did not come home last night. Speculation invited.
I had promised myself that I'd jump out of bed and get to work more quickly today. But then I didn't. I don't know why. It's not like I can blame it on booze or drugs or poorly-considered bedmates or anything. Eventually I decided to lie around and try any figure out how to work my quote from Chris ("PORK IS A VERB!") into the article.
As I tap away on Robert's computer, I begin to idly wonder if anyone will ever see Shelley alive again. Miche has subsequently informed me of a conversation she had with our young tiger-in-residence the previous evening, which apparently ran something like this:
| Shelley | : | I'm as tall as you! |
| Miche | : | You're wearing three-inch platforms. |
| Shelley | : | I'm as tall as you now [falls over] |
It's an interesting point that whenever Hamish does anything everybody is warned to stand well back. This struck me as I was watching him tending the brunch barbecue back at the Y. A barbecue is a straightforward affair that humans have been undertaking since we came down from our trees9. And yet, as he did when he showed us the video yesterday morning and when doing foolish things with a spray-can this morning, he ordered everyone to stand well back as he began Extreme Egg Flipping.
Consequently it can be shown that Hamish requires people to stand back in two fields of human endeavour; partying and cookery. It would be interesting to speculate on what other activities Hamish requires swinging room for:
"I need this report done by the end of the week"
"Stand well back!"
"You've got mail"
"Thanks. Stand well back!"
"That was a lovely evening, dear... shall we go to bed now?
"Sure. Stand well back!"
What a life this guy must lead. You could sell tickets.
As the search for David continues, Simeon has taken to running around the backyard with scissors. It would have been fun to stay and watch him trip and cut his tail off, but instead I went into the bunker and looked at the camera in such a way that, I imagine, I'm going to look a right tit on the finished video.
It has occasionally been asserted that KAOS has a corrupting effect on people. This may or may not be generally true. One piece of supporting evidence, however, comes courtesy of David, who had finally resurfaced back at Robert's house after the better part of 16 hours AWOL. We brought him up here, and though it wasn't at the party, it was through KAOS that he met the person who gave him occasion to look thoughtfully at me and say "You know, I never realised how good manga was."
And if that is not some sort of personal corruption, I don't know what is.
David had scarpered again; something about taking someone out for afternoon tea that I decided not to pry too closely into; and Chris, Jonty and another young fellow whose name I didn't catch were roleplaying in the lounge. I decided to head back to the computer room and continue writing. And I would have done so, I really would, but Robert had a commendably comprehensive collection of Dragon Magazines dating back to the '70s, and a man must be made of sterner stuff than I to refuse the prospect of looking through a bunch of old episodes of Snarfquest. And if any of Robert's magazines are out of any order he set them up in, he should not hesitate to hold me entirely responsible.
David finally made a re-appearance and shook me out of my self-indulgent reverie. He was
full of references to climbing the port hills and watching sunsets, as agreeable an
ending to a weekend as it might be possible to imagine. But now came a sad time. It was
the time when I have to make something out of the anti-climax that inevitably closes all
road trips "and then we got in the car and went home." It's one of the tricky
parts, I can tell you. What I was hoping for was hoping for, however, I don't know.
Perhaps it was something a bit lively, perhaps something along the lines of
"Suddenly the volcano erupted! Ash shot kilometres into the sky! Firey tongues of lava
made their devastating way down the slopes! Lahars wiped out large villages in a single
horrible moment! It was Poseidon, god of the sea, natural disasters and untoward
relationships with cloven-hoofed animals of the field who would show final approval of
KAOS Otago being invited up to an enormously entertaining and uncommonly well-organised
weekend of meaningless frivolity and much-enjoyed hi-jinks! Oh no! Look out!
Arrrggghhh ... !"
No such luck.
1 It should be noted at this point that, while only one or two of the above were, in fact, present, the results of the evening were much the same as if they had all been there, and thus I feel justified mentioning them all here.
2 A hilarious exercise in missing the point, this "serious' Mothra was an astonishingly earnest documentary "discussing' the homeless problem in Auckland. It lost the supreme award to a rather more appropriate offering entitled Sex With Mister Collins, which features cameo appearances by Skeletor and Optimus Prime.
3 It occurs to me that this is something of a rash claim, but as evidence I offer the following list of people I found lurking in there over the course of the weekend: Glenn, Karl, Carl, Miche, Matthew, Matthew, Natalia, Nigel, JL, Jonty, Storm, Slosh, John, Artaurd, Charlene, Dan, Colin, Maria, Phil, Pip and Dillon. The prosecution rests.
4 It's been held two years in a row, it must be a tradition. — Ed.
5 Not forgetting its companion event, the silicon breast stroke.
6 Well, the 48 Hour Party is a kind of convention I suppose. People come form all over the country, get drunk, and "make friends" with people from other centers. Like a NZUSA conference. — Ed.
7 It should perhaps be noted that both conversations I had with Massey KAOS this evening were illegible in my notes and have been reconstructed from memory with the aid of clarifying e-mails from Palmerston North. Thus, while the precise wording of the conversation is only rough, the stories are apparently authentic. Cheers, Ana, and well done.
8 I'm joking, of course; it is absolutely incontestable that we were dicking around and wasting time.
9 For those who don't know, this happened about the time Phil joined KAOS.