List of Things That Get On My Nerves

List of Things That Get On My Nerves  

Unsalted food

People who refer to magazines as ‘books’

Grey Nomads

Grey Nomads who call their caravan arrangements ‘rigs’

People with food sensitivities

People who wax lyrical about Shantaram

Shantaram

Olive oil

People who use the terms ‘bucket list’, ‘me time’, ‘retail therapy’ and ‘flick me an email’

Police procedural TV shows

Police

Baz Luhrmann’s ultra-modern soundtracks

Baz Luhrmann movies

Coffee table books

Brunch

The self-help industry

The vitamin industry

South Australia

Women who fan their faces with their hands when crying/trying not to cry

Those inane configurations of ornamental letters people have in their homes spelling out words like Eat, Peace, Love, Family, etc

The words “I’m on a detox”

Rapid fire TV dialogue as popularised by Aaron Sorkin

Instagram food photos

Q&A audience questions, Q&A tweeters, politicians on Q&A, Q&A generally

Animated movies

People who still morally denounce Woody Allen’s choice of wife and use this as a reason for not watching his movies

People, pretty much

Seasons greetings and jingle bells. It’s been real.

Capital Punishment in Canberra.

Last night? ROUGH.

No point raking over the ashes and demanding retributive justice and probing independent inquiries. Been there done that BOUGHT THE FUCKING JERSEY.

No. The whole affair can be illustrated by two things. 1. The traumatised subtext of girl-J-bo’s text messages (I have selected just four but there were A LOT. Girl was in a lot of pain. Public pain.) And, 2. Laurie Daly’s shell-shocked post-commentary reaction.

1.

“I’m at the pub with a bunch of nth qld fans. I have ordered a BLT but I am not hungry anymore and at the very least it’s going to be embarrassing to eat juicy fatty pig while we loooooooose”

“I’m so not going to be able to eat that thing when it arrives. I’m dreading the beep of the bistro buzzer.”

“Well, I guess it’s fitting that I ended up with tomato sauce all over myself.”

“Waaaaaaah…Why oh why am I moving back there…….”

2.

By game’s end Laurie Daly was babbling and bereft. Soon after, when asked where to now for the Raiders or some such bullshit question he was rendered speechless and just… gaped into the camera with a pinched, wincing look. When he gathered himself pretty much all he could offer was the suggestion that Dave Furner enlist a psychologist. I’m with Laurie. The schizoid tendencies of the Raiders are completely out of control. Mental disintegration is afoot. Help is needed. Shit is dire. And that’s about all I’ve got to say about that.

Now. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me now, mid-season, I’m going overseas for five weeks, starting this Thursday. This means that I am taking the Raiders Cowboys game with me, into the fucking Himalayas, as my freshest rawest football memory, so help me God (or Buddha. Ganesh. Somebody! Anybody??) I’m taking my Raiders scarf, acrylic be damned. Maybe if the mood strikes me I’ll offer up some sort of high altitude agnostic prayer on their behalf. Yeh. And come home in May to find them riding high on the ladder and, like, completing sets and offloading and doing all that really fancy specialist shit. IMAGINE.

Christmas. With Bukowski & Bateman.

1.

"Christmas, ugh. People act on cue, doing it because it's there. They are afraid not to. I've had my greatest Xmases on the bum. Just locked the door of my room and didn't see anybody. It was glorious." - Buk.

2.

"I pause, stand up straight, run a hand over my face, breathe in and then lean back down. "Listen to me..." I breathe in again. "They've got midgets in there." I point with a thumb back at the brownstone. "Midgets who are about to sing 'O Tannenbaum'...." I look at him imploringly, begging for sympathy, at the same time looking appropriately frightened. 'Do you know how scary that is? Elves" - I gulp - "harmonising?" I pause, then quickly ask, "Think about it.""

3.

"-"Oh, stop scowling. You're such a Grinch."
- "And what does Mr. Grinch want for Christmas?" Evelyn asks in a baby's voice. "Has Mr. Grinchie been a good boy this year?"
- I sigh. "The Grinch wants a Burberry raincoat, a Ralph Lauren cashmere sweater, a new Rolex, a car stereo - "
- Evelyn stops sucking on the candy cane to interrupt. "But you don't have a car, honey."
- "I want one anyway." I sigh again. "The Grinch wants a car stereo anyway.""

I've been called a Grinch. By my brother. Although unconstructive, this is a not entirely unwarranted accusation. Last time I had Christmas at home with my whole family (all four of us, a few years ago) I made the announcement midway through the day* that I would not be engaging in such activity again, ever. I love them, but all of us together creates a situation where the hot tong nerves reach my throat and reduce me to a trembling twitchy-eyed wreck; a flogged spirit. Other people can do these things easily, it seems, without feeling like a frog on a dissection table. My machinery is not set that way but in the hell and hell and hell on and on I wish everyone many putrid limping returns and a sweetly-screaming Christmas all the same. Amen, and happy birthday baby Jesus.  


*I can't be sure it was the same year - with good reason -  but I think later on that same afternoon I leaned off the side of my bed partway through a siesta and threw up all over the floor of my teenage bedroom. My brother mixes a savagely strong drink, okay?

American Psycho

Q. When is the correct time to re-examine your emotional irregularities?

A. When two separate Kanye West songs cause you to burst into tears in the one day.

Whenever I am confronted with evidence indicating that I may be coming unglued I like to look to Patrick Bateman.

"I make my way to the other side of the bar, realising that I need a martini to fortify myself before discussing this with Carnes (It has been a very unstable week for me - I found myself sobbing during an episode of Alf on Monday)."

To me Patrick Bateman is the part of ourselves that we do not wish to recognise. His mindless preoccupations are my mindless preoccupations, his malfunctioning mind is my malfunctioning mind, his severely impaired capacity to feel certain things and hysterically over-the-top responses to other things (associate's business cards, caroling Christmas elves)... all of this is familiar to varying degrees.



The thing that is most striking about American Psycho is the way that Bret Easton Ellis crafts Patrick Bateman. His is a sociopathic mind in full-tilt meltdown and yet if you set aside the murdering and raping ad torturing - which he never confirms actually happens anyway - you just have a chronically off-kilter, maniacally funny and entirely human narrator unraveling spectacularly against the backdrop of New York City in the 80s. It's totally implausible, but it works and it's amazing.


I also love the fact that there are chapters with titles like 'Taking an Uzi to the Gym'.

Patrick Bateman is the 80s, the 90s and the now and his world is one that we all recognise. He's pursuing money, material goods and status in a society in which everyone is lining up for the fake dream in the worst of ways, and the recurring scenes in which people continuously call him by another person's name, or when he mistakes one person for another are laser-like in their depiction of our interchageability.

Ellis deliberately blurs the lines between reality and fantasy and makes it so that nobody pays Patrick Bateman any mind, even when he explicitly declares that he's an insane killer. He leaves open the terrible possibility that everyone else is too absorbed in their own pursuit of money and status and restaurant reservations to notice his patently sociopathic behaviour and it is this possibility - the "increasing randomness, vast chasms of misunderstanding" - that is more chilling than the violence the book is notorious for.

Ellis also said that the extended chapters of Patrick Bateman's enthusiastic and excrutiating analysis of Phil Collins and Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and the News were more exhausting and traumatic to write than the lively and graphic torture scenes. I think he was kidding but with a mind like his who could ever really know? Either way, I love him. Patrick Bateman too. Some seem not to understand this. Let's look to Kanye in Gold Digger:

"I don't care what none 'a y'all say I still love [him]"

The last word, though, needs to go to P.B.

"Life remained a blank canvas, a cliche, a soap opera. I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. This was the bone season for me and I needed a vacation. I needed to go to the Hamptons."