Chapter 49: Apres le déluge, le "doghouse"

I WOULD LIKE TO OFFICIALLY DEDICATE THIS BLOG CHAPTER TO ALL MY FRIENDS LOST IN THE GREAT EMAIL/BLOG DISASTER OF FEBRUARY 2007:

PETER IN THE DOGHOUSE; MAY I COME OUT, PRETTY PLEASE?
Oh, I have duly impaled myself on my cyber-sword for the email nightmare I brought down on so many of you after my last blog entry! I have sent myself to the doghouse, and there I languish, as you can see. Once again, I am SORRY! It was an entirely unintended and unforeseen consequence of moving to an upgraded version of my blogging software with a new automatic forwarding protocol, and then a sequence of events (too boring/bizarre/technical/annoying to relate in any comprehensible way) that created a huge cascading growing loop of emails. The whole thing was highly traumatic for me, but also highly educational.

Special apologies to my one reader who sent me an amusing anecdote of a repulsive skin disease that he contracted while studying here in Australia. Basically, his skin erupted in open sores, and apparently the flies were so voracious that his colleagues had to banish him to a solitary sheep station because they couldn’t keep their dinners down. This reader specifically asked me not to publish his story, only to see it promptly circulated by the automated response mechanism to everyone in my address book, along with his name. I understand that he’s now moved to assume a false alias.

For all of you who were gracious under the email deluge, A Big Thank You. For those of you who sent kind words of support telling me not to mind the sour emails from certain others, and that you found the whole thing rather funny, again A Big Thank You. Your support really did help in the dark hours when I became so afraid to open my email inbox that I had to squeeze my eyes shut and hold my breath when I did it! And for those of you who went a step further and took it upon yourselves to personally reprimand “the grumpy ones”, well I appreciate your support too, though if there’s anything a feedback loop should teach us, it’s about the law of karma. Sometimes it’s better to just let small offenses go uncontested.

And for the very few of you who reacted like I’d tried to deliberately hack into your computers, insert a virus, steal your banking details and and bring down Western Civilization, well, honestly, I think you should just Get Over It. It was an honest mistake, and I am terribly sorry. I spent hours and hours and hours trying my very hardest to fix the problem - and eventually I did. No, I won’t name and shame you, as that pretty much already happened when you sent your ill-tempered messages through, which got automatically forwarded to everyone (note, please, the law of karma at work again). Thank you everyone else for your understanding.

HAVE YOU HAD A RAW PIGEON FACIAL TODAY?
Anyway, I think I’ve suffered enough. After one particularly heavy-duty morning, when I fielded about 30 highly irate emails – agony for someone as deeply insecure as me who despite years of utterly ineffective therapy just can’t STAND the idea that anybody is angry at me – I had leave the email battlefield and cycle to an appointment out in Bondi. I was so engrossed in mentally defending myself against the meanness of a few of my cyber detractors that I wasn’t paying attention and I rode over a freshly killed pigeon in the road – SQUELCH! - and bits of feather and gore clung to my wheel and then sprayed against my legs. My bare legs. I had to peel some of it off.

AND I BURNED MY BRIDGES WITH EDMUND WHITE!
And Edmund White (yes, the Edmund White, the only published author who received my blog) politely asked to be unsubscribed. Not that I think he ever read it, but even so, if he did, that bridge to literary stardom is now scuppered. Oh Edmund, it could have been so different between us! I mourn.

So, yes, I think I’ve suffered enough. Now may I please come out of the doghouse? Pretty please?

OH, THE MAGIC OF NATURE! OH, THE QUIRKINESS OF FRIENDS!
I went hiking in the Blue Mountains with my friend Yasir. We walked about 30 beautiful kilometers over 2 days (check out the pics). We saw many glorious cockatoos. One day we walked through a grove of tall gum trees where these tiny bell birds were calling to one another, each with its own unique sharp crystalline “ping”. It was like being inside a crystal xylophone. Oh, the total magic of nature! But I now can’t bend my knees, and I’m eating fistfulls of of glucosamine phosphate (C6H13NO5).

Oh, I adore Yasir, but he is a funny old duck, God luv 'im. Formidably intelligent, he's one of the least judgmental, yet most opinionated people I’ve ever come across. I have the nagging feeling that he often forms an opinion reflexively, just so as to be contrary. And then he gets perplexed at breakfast one morning when I simply refuse to discuss the subject of subsidiarity in the European Union with him, because I can see that we have different views, and while I’m quite knowledgeable on this particular subject, I find it just too boring to debate it with the tenacity that Yasir's shown in every other discussion over the previous day.

Yasir loathes nouvelle cuisine (“If I wanted art, I’d buy a painting. What I want is a plate with LOTS of food on it.”) and long trousers (wears shorts in the streets of London in the middle of December). And if you even mention the word “coriander” to him, he gets absolutely wigged-out hysterical. Honestly, the way he goes on and on in restaurants about it, you'd think it was a peanut allergy. But no, it's just that coriander is number one on what I can assure you is an exhaustively extensive list of “pet hates".

Of course, I hope you all understand that the ONLY reason I can write this is that he’s such a lovely man, and such a good friend, that I know he won’t hold it against me. Plus he can always post a comment. Or sue.

HOW YOU LADS CAN GROW BREASTS! AS SEEN ON TV!
Going back to the content (as opposed to the distribution) of my last blog, my, my, my, it's amazing what gets people chattering. My addiction to Palmolive Aromatherapy Anti-Stress (with pure essential oil of lavender, ylang ylang and patchouli) sparked lots of comment. Here are just a few pieces of feedback:

• B.M. said that on a Gay Scale of 1-10, I was a 12, and always have been. (Have I been insulted or flattered, do you think?)
• P.M. had a masculinity crisis, wondering if perhaps he too was Very Gay since he has been hooked on the same purple body wash for six months. His exact words to me “oh deary dear!”
  
• A.M. wrote to say that she must be a gay man trapped in a woman’s body because she loves the same body wash. (For AM I have words of comfort: Nope! You may feel like a gay man, but in fact you fit precisely Palmolive’s user target market, see below.)
• H.D. informed me that “the user profile of Palmolive Aromatherapy Anti-Stress with pure essential oil of lavender, ylang ylang and patchouli is surprisingly mass market. Mainly appealing to +35 BC1C2 women with kids.”
• RC. Rang me in a hysteria on the very night I published my blog to alert me to an important item on the 10 o’clock news: Apparently lavender and tea tree oil can make boys grow breasts! So, all you lads out there (but PM and SP in particular) beware! Still, you’ll be in good company. At the rate I go through the lavender body wash I’ll be a double D in a couple of months.

THE GIRL WITH THE ATTENTION SPAN OF A FERRET ON CRYSTAL METH
Finally, some of you wrote to say how unbearably misanthropic you found my comments about the Devil Spawn Child and her Senile Granny at the flamenco performance. You told me I was mean, unfair, a brute.

OH, BUT I THINK NOT.

I’m sorry, but you just had to be there. There was nothing ‘unfair’ about my characterization of Devil Spawn Child or Senile Granny at the flamenco performance. And for the record, in general, I have nothing against wee little ones or our Golden Agers.

What you need to know is that I simply wasn’t telling you everything the last time, around, because I didn’t want to make the whole blog about the curious coincidence of finding myself sitting next to the Anti-Christ during a Wednesday afternoon matinee flamenco performance, when in fact I had so many other interesting things to say. But since you asked…

First, Devil Spawn Child and Senile Granny arrived horribly late. Barely forgivable on its own, given that they’re seated in the middle of a long row but they show zero finesse in getting to their seats. As she lumbers past people’s knees, Granny shines a penlight to peer at ALL the seat numbers, and hits people in the face with the kind of brick-laden handbags that only Senile Grandmothers carry. Surely it should have been bleeding obvious to Senile Granny that the seats she was examining with her penlight, one by one and ever so slowly, were not in fact hers because there were already people sitting in them - people who had arrived on time! And surely it should also have been bleeding obvious that the two seats reserved specifically for the Anti-Christ Devil Spawn Child and Senile Granny were the only vacant ones, located right in the very middle of Row L, right next to me. But even so, it still took about 10 minutes for Senile Granny and Devil Spawn Child to make their brutally disruptive way across the row. It’s amazing how so often in life you can clearly watch your doom approaching, yet you can do nothing to avert it.

Second, the child honestly DID NOT STOP moving in her seat for one second, even when I asked her twice to shut up and also to please-for-the-love-of-god not hit me again. But nooooooooooooooooooooo. To think that dozens, nay hundreds, of gay men likely rent their expensive label clothing, gnashed their perfectly straight white expensive teeth, pulled their expensively coiffed and conditioned hair, because they couldn’t get a seat to this. And the ONLY time the child ever even looked at the stage was when the audience started to applaud, whereupon Devil Spawn clapped wildly in a spookily possessed sort of way (think, say, Linda Blair at a Beetles concert). I half expected her head to swivel 360 degrees towards me and then vomit a stream of nails, or blowflies at me.

Honestly, a ferret on crystal meth would have had more attention span. The whole thing so infuriated me that I wanted to grab Devil Spawn by her hair and HISS: “LISTEN YOU EVIL LITTLE MINX! There’s absolutely no point in clapping when you haven’t seen ANYTHING of the dance because you’ve been too busy scurrying around my feet on the floor collecting the Gummy Bears you dropped!”

But, I controlled myself, and in fact, with my anger was misplaced. In hindsight, I can’t blame the little girl. Doubtless it was Demented Granny who decided on the event and bought the tickets. What was the old bat thinking? Why would anyone bring a seven year old child to flamenco, which is about sex and passion and longing and loneliness – subjects way beyond the ken of any seven year old child. When Granny said “Shall we see flamenco?” I would imagine the little girl thought she was going to see a bunch of pink birds standing on one leg.

Really - [and, dear readers, this next part is not even remotely funny, it’s just my rant, you can ignore it if you want] - it was an act of absolute selfish egotism on Demented Granny’s part to bring the little girl. Either Demented Granny had no one else to go with, in which case she was just selfish, because the child could not have been more bored, or worse, Granny thought she would “cultivate” the child’s mind by imposing her own aesthetic tastes. What egotism! Next time Demented Granny should take Devil Spawn to the Disney Store instead. She’ll enjoy it more. It will be absolutely chock full of her own kind.

That's all for now!