Shit on my hands

BB

I was the last person in my class at school to own a Hypercolour tee shirt, and by the time I started needling my Mum for purple checked Stussy shorts, all the other girls had ditched the surf gear and decided they wanted to look like strung out donkeys in fuck me boots after watching Pretty Woman. Which is to say, I never see trends coming. By the time I spot them, they’ve generally already been featured in Who Magazine or touted as the next big thing by Molly Meldrum. So it took repeated, feverish, howling protests of disgust from my friend Khass to alert me to this most noxious of new trends: the My Family bumper sticker. Because  beatific mums and dads are lacking for ways to advertise to the world that WE HAVE CHILDREN AND YOU DON’T! BOY, ARE YOU MISSING OUT! YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS!, aren’t they? As if pushing a bugaboo bee, being moneyed, attractive, having a wardrobe heaving with gently wacky multicoloured clogs and a favourite table at Pope Joan wasn’t enough of a fucking signpost. Oh no. That’s not enough. There’s only one way to make it absolutely clear that you have healthy ovaries/testicles, and that’s by slapping a great big bumper sticker on the back of your car that breaks down the precise make-up of your little DNA -sharing crew. ‘MY FAMILY!’ crows the sticker, rendered in cutesy childish scrawl, followed by a conga line of stick figures representing each family member. And it’s never the silent mousy people, the ragged messy ones, or the modestly contented who have these odious things on their cars. It’s always the beaming, gratingly prolific reproducers. There’s no stick figure depicting a hollowed out fag-end of a mother holding the hand of a single child and saying ‘yep, this is my family. Her and I. Does anyone have five bucks for the bus fare to Orbost? There’s a really good tarot reader there. Things are gonna turn around for me soon, I just know it!’ Or of a Mum and a Dad holding the hand of their six year old son and saying ‘This is it. One. No more. Just the one. Never again. Never. Ever. Again’

Now look, I don’t begrudge anyone their happiness, despite there being plenty of evidence on this very blog to suggest I am indeed irretrievably misanthropic and bitter. While there’s some truth to that, and while I would probably be slightly less inclined toward using pain relief meds for kicks and drinking cocktails with names like ‘Skull Crusher’ were I happily shacked up and residing in a modernist pile in Kew, I also know myself well enough to know that there’s a very strong chance that that sort of life would bore the bejesus out of me and eventually induce a psychic meltdown, the kind where people begin to communicate through a beaver puppet (what the fuck was that film? Did anyone see it? I get the premise- but a BEAVER? Really? A mouse or rabbit weren’t up to the job?)

But, geez, must the virtues of your lovely little life be made so public? I don’t walk into these peoples houses on Saturday nights dressed to the 9’s, declaring ‘I’m going to dinner at Mamasita, then to a Tiki bar in Fitzroy, and after that..who knows! The night is my oyster. AND I bagged a whole bunch of free condoms at Readings while leisurely browsing the Bargain Table, sans toddler! Wheeee! Enjoy your fish and chips!’ No, I don’t, because that would be an extravagantly annoying and uppity thing to do.  So let’s all be grateful for what we have,  whatever that may be, grin happily to ourselves about how sweet it all is, and Shut.The.Fuck.Up.