Cruising on the Short Bus

Yin and Yang. Good and Bad. Right and Wrong. Shaved and au natural. These are all well-worn dichotomies, (and by well-worn I am referring to a tweed jacket so fucking munted it looks like a mixture of Hagrid’s beard and the congealed spunk of 100 howler monkeys), terms that highlight the bleak and impenetrable grey of the lives we lead.

The world is chockablock full of dichotomies to the extent that it’s enough to make one think that the English language is indeed on its way out and it is only the presence of words like ‘chockablock’ that convince me it hasn’t already left for greener pastures.

But that’s not what I am here to talk about. No, I will leave the state of the dear mother tongue for another day and instead contribute to the decay of language by adding my own ‘division of two parts’; a dichotomy for the modern age:

Good Public Transport Employees and Hellspawn.

I feel an explanation is warranted.

There I was standing in the pouring rain, colder than Han Solo’s Ton Ton, being assailed on all sides by a driving wind and water kicked up by soccer mums passing by in their black land rovers, waiting for a bus that would ferry me to safety.

As I contemplated calling it a day and retreating to the warmth of my man-cave, a beacon of glowing hope appeared on the horizon, the 194 bus. Despite being forced to fend off mini tidal waves with a small, bent umbrella I managed a rather graceful signal to indicate to the bus driver that, lest there be any confusion as to my intentions, (I was standing at a bus stop. On a highway. In the rain.), I would like to board.

Dutifully the bus driver indicated that he was pulling over and slowed down to pick me up but as he approached and my hulking dark frame came into better view he suddenly sped up and passed right on by, leaving me to fend for myself in the harsh suburban wilderness that is Sydney’s north shore.

To this day I can only assume that the bus driver didn’t like the cut of my jib hence the reason for his abandoning me; that or there was a giant Yabbi emerging from the underbrush behind me with blood in his matted fur and murder in his eyes.

That bus driver is what we shall now refer to as Hellspawn, but before you all go out and torch the nearest city bus for this great injustice, know that on that very same day I was witness to what is very likely Sydney’s nicest train conductor and he shall now be referred to as the Good Public Transport Employee.

Here was a guy cheerfully announcing the upcoming stations, warning passengers to ‘mind the gap’ and the ‘wet surface of the train concourse’. He was so friendly in his disposition that I was sure I had come across a pre recorded voice track but owing to his erratic sentence structure and overly excited tone that theory was quickly expunged.

After experiencing both sides of the rusty coin that is public transport my over active imagination began forming scenarios in both the Hellspawn’s day and the Good Public Transport Employee’s that would have lead the two to such divergent dispositions.

It was something like one of them adding 2% percent fat milk to his oats and the other being blessed with full cream.

When relaying this story to a friend he remarked that the train driver was probably just new and that his happy outlook would soon be replaced by one of doom and despair mixed with alcoholism and mild alopecia.

It made me realize something. The custodians of our public transport system don’t start out as the twisted remnants of a human being. No, they are made that way and it is us who are the ones to blame.

We turned the bus driver into an asshole through scratching our names on the windows, puking on the floor after a big night out, and leaving empty cartons of ‘up and go’ protein shakes on the backseat to putrefy under the unrelenting sun. We are to blame for the state of the world, well I wont be that deep, lets go with the state of Sydney’s public transport system.

It is a vicious cycle, but a cycle we have the power to end. So the next time you get on a bus, smile at the driver and ask them how their day is. If they grunt or ignore your greeting they have probably already ‘turned’ and in that case a stake through the heart usually does the trick.

Finally, to the driver of the 194 Bus, I forgive you. Just know that I will eat your first-born child.

And I wont clean up afterwards.

The Irreverent Man

You got a purty Mouth

In between sessions of following Willow Smith’s twitter updates and snorting crack cocaine out of a hookers ass last night I started to explore the desolate, coyote filled, tumbleweed-strewn wasteland that is online blogging and I couldn’t help but notice a few strange similarities between the blogging world and a post apocalyptic nightmare.

You see a good post apocalypse tale focuses on the strange characters one meets on the long road to redemption/safety/the last hustler magazine in existence. It is these characters that breathe life into the grey (and it is always grey), barren landscape.

It’s a world full of desperate singletons, a guy in a large black trench coat with a penchant for human spleens and taking your fucking shoes, that dude who got hit with a massive dose of radiation (when whatever weird apocalyptic shit went down) whose indiscernible grumbling sounds something worryingly like ‘purty’ and ‘mouth’ and douche bags who would steal your can of bake beans the minute you ducked out for a quick wank with the hustler magazine you worked so hard to get.

Indeed like the post apocalyptic world the blogging world is a place fraught with danger and poor grammar. It too has its fair share of wandering strangers and in the spirit of learning and helping my fellow man I thought I’d give a brief description of some of the different types of blogger I have encountered on my journey.

The Rage Quitter

Constantly trawling the Internet for anything that remotely offends them this spiteful individual asks the questions that need to be asked and fights the fights that need to be fought.

How to spot one: Addicted to cheez-its, they give off the faint smell of sour milk and shattered dreams.

The Fashionista

The Internet’s answer to the scavenger those who run fashion blogs make a living tearing the rotten flesh out of the limp form of creativity.

How to spot one: A picture can tell a thousands words and if a blog has a thousand pictures its most likely a fashion blog. Models and items of clothing are dead giveaways.

The Writer

These bastards love imagery. Artistic integrity is an afterthought and writing about anything other than old people sitting in the city square feeding pigeons and staring meaningfully into the ‘gargantuan abyss’ is so not cool.

How to spot one: Pretentious prose and douchey fonts.

So where do you fit in? What kind of blogger are you and if everything in the real world went to hell what kind of survivor would you be? (P.S. You’ve got a purty mouth!)

Hello World

You know those discussions you used to have about your earliest childhood memory? The kind of discussion you have when you’re teetering between brain numbing boredom and searching for lol-cat pictures on the richter scale of fuck my life.

Yeah, me neither. 

This will be my first tumblr memory, the beginning. My pseudo conception (it wasn’t immaculate) and birth all rolled into one meaty, rotten pile of afterbirth. There I was, chilling like a fiend, when to my surprise a message for me appeared:

bloggerbot asked:
WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?

Glossing over the fact that this was a computer generated message and therefore any internet rant on my part has no meaning: what the fuck is this?


Now, I understand that we all hate computer generated messages, (unless it was that MSN buddy program that would reply to anything you wrote; A true scholar and gentleman if there ever was one), but I feel this particular message needs to be singled out. 

You see I was new to blogging. Fresh faced. Innocent. I thought I would set up this blog and find a world where cakes could be made with rainbows and smiles. I saw new friends and places. 

This computer generated message was a wake up call, it showed me the cold and lonely world that is the internet. A world filled with hardcore porn, internet rants and stupid facebook groups. The kind of place that leaves your mouth with the sour taste of regret.

So now you, dear reader, can see what events/memories shaped me into the jaded misanthrope who would probably cut you if you looked at me funny.

And on that happy note: what’s your first blogging memory? 

Heck what is your first childhood memory? (In truth I don’t give a shit unless it has something to do with breastfeeding and Chupa Chups)

The Irreverent Man