We Are The Last of Our Kind

First of all, fuck you James Finlay.
I miss waking up with you in the same room staring creepily at me. That's the only way to start your morning off right.

I have decided (which is an unusual occurrence, since I'm pretty indecisive) that even though I don't have anyone to go with that I will be booking a tour before I leave Melbourne on February 10th to meet Melissa in Sydney that I will be going on a tour of Phillip Island (there's no photography permitted at the penguin parade, what the fuck!) and the Great Ocean Road. The latter being one of the things that I was most excited to see while in Australia, more so than the Great Barrier Reef. Everything in this country is great, apparently.
For the GOR, it's an $80 trip which includes "viewing the Twelve Apostles, Devonsire Tea at Torquay, Spectacular beaches including Apollo Bay, Bells Beach (featured in the movie Point Break), Quaint costal towns of Cape Patton, Anglesea, Lorne and Wye River, National Parks, Loch Ard gorge and London Bridge, and relax on my journey home with a DVD on Coach CAM TV (which is really just a PSP)", and for an additional $10, I can get lunch. OR for an additional $15, I can get all that, plus see koalas face to face, and experience Maits Rest Rainforest, but not on a coach bus and rather on a small little VW van. Definitely going with the second option.
For the Phillip Island tour, it's $85 and I get to experience "Warrock Cattle Farm to see sheep, cattle, Australian birds, and hand-fed kangaroos, enjoy Devonshire Tea, visit the Phillip Island chocolate factory, see the Koala Conservation Centre, Nobbies rock formations in Bass Strait, watch the famous little penguins performing their nightly ritual at Summerland Beach as they march up the sand to their nesting places (hell yes), and stop in the town of Cowes for dinner."

I'm pretty damn stoked on this, but I'm going to need a job desperately when I land in Brisbane.

My weekend was pretty insane, starting on Thursday. Thank you to Will Maxwell for a ridiculous night Saturday night, and I won't go too into detail about it because it's just the most ridiculous night I've definitely had in some time, and definitely since I've been in Melbourne. This Saturday promises to be more of the same, which I'm highly looking forward to. Also looking forward to meeting some new people at the La Dispute show on Thursday, and hanging out with some "old work" friends, booking my flight and hostel accommodation to Sydney and the aforementioned tours!

Thursday night:  I ended up at an indie club/venue type deal called Next, which is on the corner of King and Lonsdale, to hang out with Will since his friends band was playing (Check Your Smile, I believe?) and two other bands. The whole atmosphere was just generally a club like scene but for "indie/hipster/scene" type kids. I believe this is the first time I feel like I more so fit into a club scene, or at least knew and liked most of the music enough to not want to leave.

Friday night: Stayed home and watched a movie, Life During Wartime. I thought it was... pretty meh. Throughout the full film I couldn't get over how much of an annoying cunt the little kid was, how much of a yellow tint everything had, and how much the director Todd Solondz wanted to be like Jean-Pierre Jeunet with this one (director of Delicatessen, Amelie/Le Fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain, Micmacs a la tire-larigort, A Very Long Engagement/Un long dimanche de fiancailles, and The City of Lost Children/La Cite des Enfants Perdus).

Saturday night: I met up with David (future Brisbane roommate) and we went to a Japanese restaurant for dinner, then out to a rooftop bar on Bourke Street when Will called me to head down to Bang, which is very similar to Next. A lot of talking to random people, singing along to Brand New and New Found Glory, and all that. At around 2:30AM we head out to another bar to meet up with Will's friend Rachel, who then leaves almost immediately. While we're trying to decide what to do with our night, and Will refusing to give up without "showing me the full Melbourne experience", he commandeers a homeless guys guitar and plays one of the most ridiculous songs I've ever heard making the guy something like $20 in the span of two minutes. The next few times we walked past the homeless guy, it seemed as though he was too embarrassed to play anything afterward. We some how end up at Bang again and stay there until 4AM when Will and I decide to head back to my place and cook some pasta. As we're hailing a cab, a van/cab full of 5 girls pulls over and tells us we can share their cab with them. Without thinking, we get in and drive off. About 15 minutes into the cab ride, I realize that we're not headed in the direction of Brunswick and say "Hold on, where are you guys going?", with them responding "We're going to Sydneham", which is about an hour and a half or so train ride back to Brunswick. Without skipping a beat, Will says it's alright and we'll crash at his best friend Luke's place. We get there at 5AM, Luke isn't answering his phone, the front door is locked, so we have to climb onto Luke's roof to hop into his backyard, break into his house, only to find that there are no beds free because they had a party. We're sitting in the backyard playing with Luke's 4 dogs, one of which just constantly humped Will's leg (picture below) and at 5:30AM Luke's younger 15 year old brother Kain comes stumbling over the roof the same way we did, drunk as shit. He tells us that he and a bunch of his friends had just kicked the shit out of these two guys because one of which jumped Will a couple of months back and is a kick boxer, about how on his way back home he was approached by some 30 something year old guy in an alleyway asking for Kain's phone and everything else, grabs him by the shirt and throws him against the wall, prompting Kain to pull out one of the beer bottles he has in his pocket and smash it over this guys head. The guy falls to the ground and he just fucking legs it. There's so much more detail to this story, and it was hilarious. I ended up sleeping for about 20 minutes on a couch in Luke's garage before heading home to Brunswick. I have still not yet met Luke, but his brother is rad as shit.

Sunday: After getting home at 10AM and not having slept at all, I slept until 12PM, took a shower and went to the Australia v. England cricket match. Now, never having seen a cricket match, I didn't know much about it. I figured that it was pretty similar to baseball, but a little more exciting. WRONG. It is pretty similar to baseball with a lot of different rules as well, and I can tolerate going to a baseball game to watch the Jays lose, but what I can't tolerate is an EIGHT. HOUR. MATCH. I feel like I've seen more cricket in my lifetime than I have hockey now, shit. The only tolerable thing to me was watching the group of 6 or so guys in front of us get increasingly drunk throughout the night, taunting the English players, cops and security guards with chants and whistles. For some reason security and police confiscated their whistles even though almost half the crowd had whistles, which prompted the Rob Dyrdek look-a-like to yell "YOU CAN TAKE MY WHISTLE! BUT YOU CAN NEVER TAKE THE AIR FROM BETWEEN MY FINGERS, MOTHER FUCKER!" and using his fingers as whistles, hahaha. This got him and another guy he was with kicked out of the game. That didn't last long though. It was maybe half an hour before he snuck back into the stadium wearing different clothes, and with a moustache painted on his face. At around 9PM, he decided it'd be cool to start an ice cube fight with one of his friends, and then to throw ice at the on field security guard who was a total dick about everything. This security guard immediately called the cops, and Rob Dyrdek stealthily walked away. After the cops had left, he returned to his seat, only to find the cops surround him on all sides shortly thereafter. As he sees the cop come down to his right, he walks out to the left, sees a bigger cop and walks back into the seats. This cop tells him to come outside with him, and that he just wants to talk to him, Dyrdek complies and starts to walk toward the cop. As soon as the cop turns to walk, Dyrdek turns around and walks away from the cop. The cop turns around and tries to grab at his arm, but Dyrdek swings his arms away to avoid capture. He then sees this lady cop that everyone had started taking pictures with because of these two 10 year old boys. She's at the very top/back of the seats, and I guess he knows that he's about to get arrested, so he decides that it'd be a good idea to try and run over top of the seats to get to her. So he takes off over the seats, misses one seat, falls on his face, gets up and continues on determined. When he gets to her he gives her a hug, she grabs him and tries to slap cuffs on him as he's then surrounded by a swarm of cops but continues to resist arrest and wrestle with the cops, hahahaha. It took 10 cops to bring him to the ground and subdue a drunk, 5'8" Rob Dyrdek look-a-like. Good dude, backed hard. Great entertainment value. One of his taunts at an English player, Chris Tremlett (6'8") to be specific (pictured below), was "HEY TREMLETT! DO YOU BELIEVE IN AVATARS? BECAUSE IF YOU DO BELIEVE IN AVATARS, THEN YOU IN FACT ARE REAAAAALLLL!" Hahaha.

Oh yeah, Australia ended up winning the match 297-296.

Chris Tremlett, above.

The dog that is infatuated with Will, above.


On an all too personal note, I have yet to clog any Australian toilets. They are my Everest. I will get you, Australian toilet manufacturers, and I will feel accomplished in life. I will feel greater than Deryn.


Aussie Word of the Day: "Abo", meaning drunkard.






Not really. "Abo" is short for aboriginal, that was just a really crude and unnecessary joke.