Sunny Breaks

Been down in the country lifting things, a little whipper-snippering and teaching big ears to print digital images, which I can safely say would be more exhausting than a whole day of chainsawing. Man there’s a lot of throat-clearing goes on in that household. At one stage we were in the laundry fixing a washing machine. Bigs was under it, grunting away with a spanner, I was leaning against it, keeping it tilted over and just absent-mindedly glancing around the room. I got to gazing at a bunch of bras on top of a washing-basket pile and thinking something like how it’d been a long time since I’d seen bras lying around like that.
Sometimes the women in that family seem so odd to what I know that it’s like they’re from another planet. They’re so girly-girl-girl, but at the same time, in a way that’s hard to knock. Maybe it’s just a country thing — women do women-things and men do men-things.

There’s three girls who I mostly knew as little angel-haired kids – 12 or 15 years ago. Now they’re grown/growing up, as tall as me, still all-blonde and really attractive but all straight as straight can be. Not a rebellious bone amongst ‘em. It’s like their parents are sweden: not Cuba but still fairly progressive and so, there’s never gonna be an uprising of the working-class in sweeden, and those girls ain’t never gonna get into [insert stuff that’s offensive to the older generation].

Hey how’s this for a nice troll. I didn’t even realise I was doing it, I just spouted off this email to one of the free community papers: “Less Flouride, More Apples — Page 8, (News, October 13) tooth decay in Geelong kids, page 10, kid eating fatty, sugar-filled doughnut. Join the dots. We don’t need flouride, we need to be encouraging kids to eat apples, not doughnuts. If the Make-a-Wish foundation had any conscience regarding kids’ health, they wouldn’t be accepting public relations-driven donations from American franchises like Doughnut King. Do we want our kids to be as fat as American kids?”

I didn’t bother to look to see if it’d been printed, I thought it was too crazy. But one of the dance-gang members said they saw it. I don’t know how I managed to fit in trashing so many with so few words: flouride, DK, americans, fat kids, fat american kids, franchises and the make-a-wish foundation. Go me. I even squeezed in my own ‘Eat More Apples’ agenda. Although it comes off as sounding like flouride actually does help teeth, when it doesn’t. It’s rat poison.
I think there’s some potential there to get up on the board, become a raconteur/marching-mob leader surfing a wave of discontent — the answer to everything being the scapegoating of fat people.