Thursday, May 22, 2008

some things I remember

In the early 90s a woman I worked with told me that the man downstairs from her was having a sexual relationship with a soap star (who she named but I won't). This story was in part about how she could hear everything that was being said in the immediate vicinity of her home. So the soap star was at the house and the man told him about a friend who had no teeth, and the soap star said, 'Christ, how does the poor cunt eat?' We had a laugh about this story when she told it and she said the line many times over the next few days in imitation of the soap star's hoarse, coarse voice.

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For a few years I went out with a woman who was prone to chucking berkos at the drop of a hat. Once we were driving to Newcastle and I found that a cassette I had got off the front of a music magazine - you know, Select or Vox or something - was in the glovebox divested of its shrink wrap. I had no interest in the tape in question and would not have expected anyone else to have any interest in it, as it was just the usual major record company puff material that you would have expected on that kind of artefact; I would probably have never taken the shrinkwrap off it, myself. So I asked her if she had removed the plastic. She went ballistic at the accusation and the rant lasted well over an hour (while she continued to drive) - the worst I recall though I could probably think of others if I had to. I think this might have been the time she had to pull the car over to vomit, she was so angry at this accusation. A few weeks later she told me she had thought I had left the tape there for her as a present, and so she had taken the shrink wrap off. And I'm not kidding.

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Once I was walking along Lennox St, Newtown with a small amount of shopping including some Coco Pops. Two itinerants, man and woman, came up and insisted I give them some money, but I refused. The woman tried to grab my Coco Pops but could not wrest them from me. They moved on and I heard her say to him, 'I almost got his Coco Pops'.

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The song 'Reminiscing' by Little River Band (LRB) has been played on the radio over four million times. Not all the group wanted to record it at the time but later came to see it was actually a successful hit song.

********The Swedish Chef from the Muppets was in LRB, not many people realise this because in LRB he didn't wear his hat.

4 comments:

I went out with a guy for a couple of years with a terrible temper. The time I remember him most angry was when he was cooking and to help him I selected and peeled the garlic, then started cutting up into pieces — say one clove into ten pieces — and he went off his nut, suggesting that I should either left the garlic whole or minced it, but now it was difficult for him to mince it because the pieces were the wrong size. He screamed at me until I started crying, then he screamed at me for crying.

But at other times he was the charmingest man. Another garlic incident: I was helping him cook again, and when it was nearly done I saw some neatly minced garlic on the chopping board.

"You forgot the garlic!" I said.

"Oh no! It was an overlooktion!"

But our most famous fight was when we were riding a scooter in Asia in 1999, and I said, "Can you believe it is the dawn of a new century? It's incredible! We're about to live into another century!" He's never really been able to explain why it annoyed him so much, but he just immediately hated my guts, he kept saying that I was bullying him into feeling something he didn't feel. It went on for days, with me repeatedly saying, "I don't care what you think about the twenty-first century!" and him saying, "Stop bullying me!!" It was fricken weird.

We were going to get married, but we didn't. He was from Wales, and we've lived together in Asia, the UK and Australia. About a year after we broke up, he told me that he'd been seeing a therapist and had got over his anger. I was like, "Cool. Way to improve the life of your next girlfriend."

Having said all that, he's still one of my dearest friends. He's etched into my heart. And I still use the word "overlooktion".