Eat Shit and Live

Mothers are so over-protective of their increasingly fat children nowadays. They stop their kids eating stuff that may or may not have been near a production line that may or may not have had some wheat dust on it, just in case their kid happens to be allergic to wheat. Of course these kids will have allergic reactions – they have been exposed only to disinfected rusks and sandwiches from birth. Early exposure to bad stuff boosts your defences and stops you developing these new-age allergies. When I was in the womb my Mam used to roll around outside in the uranium mine to make me tougher. And that never did me any harm. And my Siamese twin agrees. I eat cake that has been on the floor, salad that has had insects crawling all over it, and insects that have had salad on them, and I haven’t had a day off work in years. I haven’t done a proper day’s work in years but the point remains, I’m as fit as a fiddler. The ill people in society are the ones who wash their hands before eating, the ones who have never eaten spiders wrapped in birdshit for a bet. They are the ones who will be sitting around complaining of stomach upsets, not me. To make our kids stronger, caterpillar legs should be on school menus, deep-fried flies should be compulsory at tuck-shops, soil should appear as a condiment at chip-shops, and your best friend’s piss disguised as blackcurrant juice should be stacked in every vending machine across the Western world. It might even stop kids getting fat.

Shop Fish

It is difficult to type at the moment. I have that arm thing. You know, the arm thing caused by going to the gym for the first time in months. The thing where your muscles cease up and it’s impossible to put on a jacket. Well, I’ve been walking around with my arms outstretched, like an extra from Home & Away, knocking over vases in shops, trying to look normal.
And when shop assistants ask, “Can I help you?” and I ask for a massage, they always turn away. But that’s typical of so-called ‘customer service’ nowadays. I was in a supermarket yesterday and for the whole time the girl was serving me she was having a conversation with the boy on the neighbouring till. And while I was waiting for my change she interrupted our transaction to take a text message. To teach her a lesson I walked away without my change. She’ll think twice next time.
In Asia the attention from shop assistants is very different – they follow you around like goldfish poo. It’s considered good customer service. I find it disconcerting, like they think I’m a criminal. Often you will ask a shop-girl (always a girl in Asia) for something like a pair of black jeans and they will come back from the storeroom with a yellow scarf, and if you don’t try it on, they will take it as a snub. But I suppose they are just trying to sell, just doing their job. Australian shop assistants, on the other hand, seem to do everything they can to avoid selling you stuff. I was looking for a pair of grey shoes the other day and, rather than trying to convince that grey shoes were rubbish and that his green shoes were all the rage, the shop-guy advised me to go elsewhere, actually giving me the address of a rival shop, actively encouraging me to buy from his competitors. I almost bought the green shoes to him a lesson, but he probably would have wriggled out of it. Perhaps he had an important text message to send.

Souvenir Belly

I’ve been away for the last three weeks. I visited my parents and put on 5 kg in 5 days. My mam was secretly feeding me chocolate on a drip, perhaps hoping that I would be too fat to leave the house. Then I went to Vietnam and lost the 5 kg by drinking dodgy water – oh, the slimming benefits of poor sanitation!
There were no chocolate drips in Saigon. All the ladies around me were slim and elegant in their traditional silk Ao Dai. That is until I got to the airport for the flight back to Melbourne where a mob of Caucasians had gathered in the departure lounge, all dressed in tracky bottoms and spare tyres. Many of these fashion fatalities had on the unnecessary conical hats that they had haggled for in the Chinese markets, clearly trying to be streetwise. Those hats will no doubt come in useful when these people get back to working in the rice fields of Collins Street.
Souvenirs generally annoy me. Partly because the word is difficult to spell, but also because they take up too much space at the back of wardrobes. If all the unworn sombreros and fishermen’s pants from all the wardrobes of the world were gathered up, the space created would be big enough to make a giant incinerator theme park where tourists could burn the sarongs and batique clothing that they once thought they would actually wear.