» Smooth Globe «

It’s Monday morning. The weekend was glorious but has come to a sorry end. The alarm destroys my peaceful slumber with that wretched tone and I roll out of bed to begin yet another dull week of work. I shower, make myself presentable and head to the train station. Breakfast is optional.

I arrive on the platform in time for the 7:08 which will get me to work well in advance of the 8am teleconference for which I will ideally have 10 minutes to prepare. Just as I reach my “platform spot” an announcement blares out of the speaker above my head to let me know that my train of choice has been cancelled.

“Fucking Great”, is the first thing that comes to mind and swearing out load somehow helps to keep me from jumping onto the tracks. The woman next to me looks over and nods in agreement in a misguided attempt at building camaraderie. She’s reaching out to the wrong person. In my depressed, semi-psychotic state she’s the last person I want to connect with at this particular moment in my life. I want to say:

“Listen, I’m sure you get some solace in your pathetic lonely life by superficially interacting with fellow commuters and I’m even surer that a train delay will probably constitute the highlight of your day, but just mind your own business and DON’T LOOK AT ME!”

But I don’t. Instead, I shake my head in a “Can you believe this shyte manner” and continue feeling sorry for myself. I choose this course of action over abusing the woman because it is what civilised people do. Restraining ourselves from doing what we really want to do is what separates normal people from psychopaths like Barry Hall.

I try to amuse myself with my Blackberry for a while. Check Facebook, read The Age online, play a little Sudoku…

The next train arrives. It’s jammed like an ACDC mosh pit and I face the displeasure of having to share my personal space with a passenger from one of the “less hygienic” suburbs serviced by the Pakenham / Cranbourne line. I squeeze in and prepare for the worst.

There is a young guy with mirror sunglasses and headphones pummelling his ears at a volume just below the threshold which will cause brain explosion. I’m incensed. What gives people the impression that 40 other complete strangers want to experience their bullshit music first thing on a Monday morning?

I want to tell him what I think. I want SOMEONE to tell him what I think. But we all know that is unlikely to happen. It’s just another thing that people accept and put up with… most of the time. I have in fact experienced a confrontation when an elderly passenger instructed a youth to please turn down the music. The awkwardness of the situation was delicious. To my glee, the kid at first refused. When another disgruntled commuter chimed in and said, “I agree that it’s too loud and would prefer if you turned it off”, I almost exploded in my pants. The kid got off at the next stop. They… we …broke him.

A phone rings and shatters the silence of the carriage.

An overweight middle aged man pulls out a pink (pink?… for fucks sake) phone and proceeds to speak at what appears to be the top of his lungs.

The conversation is a mixture of business and pleasure. I learn about the important trip he needs to make to Sydney next week, what a great job he did with hiring the new office manager and also… I shit you not… the stunner of a girlfriend his son brought home last night, including a brief description of her “rack”. This guy was all class.

I want to stab him.

I don’t.

Mainly because I’m not Barry Hall but also because it was 7:23 on a Monday morning. Wednesday is usually my stabbing day… mainly after lunch. No point stabbing on an empty stomach.

We hit Richmond. Fat pervert is on his 3rd phone-call and telling someone about his neighboor’s hip replacement (second one!) and I’ve worked out that the music the other guy is listening to is Greenday. I love Greenday. This makes me happy.
The train swings into Parliament and the “Paris-end” office workers, me included, stream out onto the platform. I head for the exit humming Viva La Gloria from Greenday’s 21st Century Breakdown album. I re-live the concert and remember how great it was.

There’s a spring in my step.

Thanks loud music guy! Just what I was searching for!

It was with great interest that I read in today’s Age newspaper about tasers being trialled in Victoria.

It’s about bloody time we gave our police force something to help subdue the out of control, drunken knife-freaks of Melbourne’s streets.  I applaud the move.

You see, you can’t shoot somebody who is wielding a knife, that would be excessive force.  But you can sure as bloody well taser the little pricks.  A few good jolts of electricity should zap some sense into these morons.  If not, at the very least it will disarm them long enough for the cops to cuff them and throw them in the slammer.

I know, I know – there will always be your detractors.  Those naysayers that preach civil liberties and that another weapon in the police force’s arsenal will only lead to abuse of power and the risk of innocent people being hurt or even killed.  To those I say I’d rather be zapped than stabbed or shot.  If it turns out that I get zapped and I am innocent, fine when I recover I’ll sue the bastards.  If it turns out that I was way off chops and causing a public nuisance or worse – then I deserve a taser zapping, and it’s my own stupid fault for making myself a target.

Victoria doesn’t have a very good track record with police shootings.  Every time one occurs, the mainstream media jump on the same old bandwagon of how innocent or young or mentally unstable the victim was.  It will be interesting to see how the media react once the taser tally starts rising rapidly.  Will they be happy that the sword brandishing mental patient only got tasered rather than shot through the heart or will there be some other angle they will spin to drive the fear through the public?  Negative news sells.

Things are about to get a whole lot more interesting on our streets.  I welcome it.  I embrace it.  I look forward to watching a few public taserings per week on the nightly news.  Now that will make for great viewing, and hopefully safer streets for the good people of Melbourne.

When did the sex shop become a woman’s paradise? Have I been asleep for 10 years?

The other day, curiosity got the better of me and I thought I’d “drop in” to one of the many sex MegaStores which have appeared on highways around town.

Usual drill.

Drove in, parked the car (at the back of the parking lot, out of sight from the main road) and prepared myself to enter one of the sleaziest environments known to man. A true “guys” domain.

I expected blacked out windows, rows and rows of XXX porn. Magazines, videos, novels… I expected shelves full of weed smoking paraphernalia, bongs, pipes, cones etc… I expected an over-weight middle aged man with his hand too far into his pocket reading an anal porn rag as if it were The Times.

Granted, I should have also expected some change. It had, after-all, been many years since I had been in a sex shop. Perhaps a decade. I was thinking maybe GirlOnGirl Action on DVD instead of VHS and more of that disgusting toilet filth my friends send me from time to time. The continued bar-lowering of sexual depravity never ceases to amaze me.

But what I saw as I stepped through those doors almost knocked me over.

It was bright and spacious.

My feet didn’t stick to the carpet.

It was HUGE!

It had EFTPOS!

In the middle there was a checkout with no less than 3 (three) FEMALE attendants. Come to think of it, there were no men working there at all.

I continued into the bowels of this house of sin and took in the scenery. Passing before my eyes were all sorts of costumes, tools and lubricants. Hanging on a wall was a rubber arm with the hand clenched in a tight fist which got me thinking about the type of person who could accommodate such a thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no stranger to fisting vids. I’ve seen my fair share during my late-night research sessions. What I’m saying is that I have a new-found respect for those who take on the fisting challenge. Seeing an implement like the arm fisty thing puts that “art” into perspective.

Anyways, I made a bee-line for the DVDs. I thought it better to start with what I knew. Tucked in the safety of what was in effect just a smutty Blockbuster, I took some time to look around. But discretely mind… I didn’t want to get caught staring lovingly at the rubber fist by one of the sex-mart ladies.

Then it hit me. My god! Had the world gone mad?

There were a total of about 10 shoppers in the store at that time – and I was the only male. What’s more, I realised that over half of the store consisted of shelves full of dildos… vibrating or otherwise. There was even a “Top 10”display. I wish I could tell you that there were wide-eyed chicks browsing the plastic dicks with sultry abandon. But the truth of the matter was that they were matter-of-factly going about their business as if they bought a different latex phallus every week with their Weet-Bix.

I felt incredibly out of place. Perverted, overly-prudish… overly male.

At that point one of the attendants approached me and asked me if she could help. I turned into fucking mess.

“I err… was just looking at… err”

I looked down at the butt-plugs on the shelf next to me.

“Are you looking for a prostrate stimulator sir?”, she offered friendlily.

Now there’s question you don’t get asked often.

So what did all this mean? Is it a good thing? A million questions were rushing through my head to which I had no real answers.

There was one thing though of which I was sure… The modern chick was not going to lie idle waiting for a man to sweep her up in his arms and make her feel like a women. These days, she is more likely to lay back and make herself feel however she bloody well likes.

And guys, for those of you that still believe in the old “size doesn’t matter” fairytale… you should really feast your eyes on the rubber fist – it’s a doozy!

Recently on chapel street I spotted this fabulous pair of Lycra shorts or underpants. Cover up and let it all hang out simultaneously. Not since my scool days at swimming carnival have I seen such a dizzying display of budgie smuggling gone awry.