Teretz Syndrome

Tuesday, May 27, 2003. 4:45PM

Last Tuesday me and my old mate Nicholas Patrick Campion Durbrige, went out on the town. It was a fairly placid evening, that came about on MSN, when said Durbridge complained about me never mentioning him in my logs, to which I retorted "well, we never do anything together anymore." In response to this, he pointed out an event which he and I had attended and I had mentioned without mentioning him. Either way, one thing led to another, and we went out to our regular haunt (the Hard Rock Cafe), and then wandered around our city's lonelier night streets for a few hours. I asked him, as I occasionally do, whether he would like me to use his real name in the log of the event, and he said that yes, yes he would, but only in the event we did something illegal. Well, being the raffish daredevils we are, we broke into a construction site, and wandered around through her somewhat water logged interior for a few minutes, before deciding that there really was nothing here and making a particularly ungraceful exit through a hole in the fence. Nonetheless, the law was broken.

As is the nature of these things, on Saturday I was invited to two birthday parties. I don't understand how one can go for months with no birthday parties, and then find two in one week, but inevitably, all my life, it happens. Next year with the 21sts it's going to be a million times worse. Anyway, after some deliberation, I decided to take my best girl out for dinner, and then head over to one of the parties. Everything was going to plan, and I was right on schedule for a two hour late arrival (I'm cool, you see). I got to where I was supposed to be, and finding the bar not immediately evident, we headed off into the surrounding streets to see what we could turn up. After a while, I ran into Marc Morris, who is unique in two ways. Firstly, he leads this bizarre parallel life to mine, where he has been introduced to me over the years by a lot of my friends, none of whom know each other, and second, I know a Marcus Morrison, a Marc Morrison, and Marc Morris. It's insane. Anyway, Marc had no clue what bar I was talking about, so we headed off in our direction. Back at the intersection we had started at, we were just about to head home when another bar revealed itself. Exactly where it was supposed to be. The right bar. We went in, drank rather a lot of cheap cocktails, had rather a few good laughs with my good friends (I got the impression that someone was trying to get me drunk - they succeeded fairly well). You may remember my tirade a month or so back demanding Mark pay me a debt. Well, to his credit, he paid it on Saturday, in full and in cash. After many fruitful hours, I walk Sandy home, and got about a third of the way back to my place before deeming the night to be too bloody cold, and hailing a cab. When I got home my sister had turned out the light on the verandah, and in the dark I couldn't find my key, so I was forced to go around the side of the house and climb in my bedroom window.

On Monday I opened the paper, as I do every morning, and was confronted by two startling revelations. Firstly, it appeared that the governor general had resigned. "Wo," said I. "Witness the terrible power of the mass media." The next revelation was equally shocking to my hard-core right wing stance - it appeared it was National Sorry Day. Now, I'll take a moment to explain to our overseas visitors exactly what National Sorry Day is. In Australia, where these tales are mostly set, we have a race of people we call 'The Aborigines.' They're a bunch of black people, basically, although they have quite distinctive features that set them apart from the badass African and African-American's like Samuel L. Jackson. When we first came to Australia, there was a hundred years or so of sort of genocide against these people - not real serious genocide mind, but just a sort of half assed attempt to stop them breeding and what not. We actually removed them entirely from Tasmania, a big ass island down the bottom of the country, but everywhere else there's still plenty. Anyway, in this politically correct age we live in, there's a sort of half ass attempt to get the government to acknowledge that they maybe killed a few Aborigines, and maybe even say sorry, which is basically what National Sorry Day is all about. Now, that'd be all well and good if it weren't for the fact that the aborigines are all dicks. Well, maybe dicks is a little harsh, their real problem stems from the fact that they're just not smart, and they're fundamentally lazy. Even their leader, king of the aborigines, the smartest one among them, Geoff Clark, is just a freaking idiot. This guy comes up on probably five or six criminal charges a year - everything from rape to inciting a riot (usually it's rape) - and every time he gets his day in court (the guy's not even really black if you ask me) he uses it to hang around smoking with his white QC lawyers, and then as soon as he gets the microphone he says a bunch of really really stupid crap about how the white man oppresses him, then the abos have a vote to see if they want to get rid of him, and every time they say no, we love this guy. Can't you see he's a freaking fool? No, evidently not, because, wait, you're all freaking fools, sitting around spending your god damn welfare money on petrol and spray paint. Well, anyway, on Monday, National Sorry Day, I'm walking through the city, when this aboriginal bum approaches me. I give her a "fuck off" look, but no, she keeps coming. She hits me with a black rose (plastic) and says "Can you help me out with a couple of bucks, buddy?" I look at her with my most comical expression and say "It's National Sorry Day!"

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