Jump to content
Registering As A Forum User? Read This Important Message!
Help Keep AwesomeDude Online! Donate Here.

DesDownunder

AD Author
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    6,081

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

 Content Type 

Blog Entries posted by DesDownunder

  1. DesDownunder
    I make no apology for the following links, but I will warn you, many of the images are disturbing.
    For those who wish to get the full effect of my New Year message, please click on the underlined links as you read them, watch the video link in its entirety, and then return to this page to continue the journey.(21 minutes)
    Merry, merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. (more than what you think).
    Loving is not a problem because we are love, all we have to do is let our love exist, to let it be.
    Our time is short and all we see is the time in which we live,
    Modified by what we are told to believe,
    But what if we discovered life was more,
    Than shopping at the store,
    That we live by more than what others have in store for us,
    That living is not to have, but is being in love, not lust,
    Giving us the hope that defeats strife,
    As living is the only meaning of life,
    And Love is the only sane reason for its existence.
    The need to love is all you need to be able to love.
    Thus all reality is already present in every hope and dream you can imagine.
    So go to work and everyday without fear,
    Help create a Happy New Year all year, every year.
    So did you expect something else from a libertine, agnostic, peacenik, hippie orangutan?
    HAPPY NEW YEAR to all
  2. DesDownunder
    I found a site that I am worried about called When I Came Out.
    This site is a place inviting people to submit their story, in five sentences or less, which describes their coming out.
    Sounds good? Don't get excited. The site conditions state that they reserve the right to refuse posting a story. Okay that's fair enough.
    However they also state they will edit the story for length or grammar. It's only five sentences, how short do they want it to be?
    What really annoys me is that they claim that the stories will become their property. DAMN that, it's the story of MY coming out and if anyone is going to gain from its publication, it will be me, not them. So I am posting my five sentences in my blog, here at AwesomeDude:
    My Coming Out © 2012 by Desmond Rutherford
    When I came out, it 1960, I was 16, and the only people I came out to were my sexual partners. You see, homosexual acts were a criminal offence subject to the often imposed penalty of 2 years hard labour. We lived under threat of blackmail and discrimination in housing, and employment. I lived as two people, one for my sexuality, and one as whoever I needed to be in order to survive. Decriminalised here, in Adelaide in 1973, it still took us a lot of protesting until, in the 1980s, we were protected enough by anti-discrimination laws to come out publicly, and now there are people who (needlessly) fear, homosexuality will be made compulsory, as we head towards recognising freedom of sexual expression for everyone.
  3. DesDownunder
    Where have I been?
    Friends, despite rumours to the contrary, I haven't been ill, dead, or ignoring you all.
    Our video store has been in decline for several months and that has left us with many troubles which have demanded most of my time.
    We finally closed the store at the end of February. Renting DVDs has become too difficult in a small town like ours, especially when you consider that 70% of discs are returned with scratches, dried pizza and greasy etchings from fingers. I suspect some people have used the shiny silver platters to serve the Hors d'?uvres. So we have stopped renting DVDs and decided to go online to only sell DVDs. Our website should be up and running shortly.
    The local cinema (run by friends of ours) has also given us an area where we sell new and ex-rental stock. That has been doing quite well too.
    At present we are trying to keep our heads above financial poverty with other projects, and hopefully we will realise some rewards which will permit some free time to write some stories again. I managed to sell my old car for more than it was worth, and got $180 for it. we eat this week.
    Of course I would like to blame our dire state of affairs on the right wing politicians, but it seems the left is almost equally to blame. Thankfully we didn't vote for either of them. We voted for the Australian sex Party. And no, I am not joking, they actually exist. LOL
    So just as soon as I get some free moments I will attempt to write a story or three, but it may take a little longer before I am able to do so.
    Cheers.

  4. DesDownunder
    I don't get the local newspaper anymore, I stopped its delivery 14 years ago, (1995). The milkman used to deliver the milk, from his horse-drawn milk-van, but he stopped ages ago. The horse would move down the street and stop at the customer's houses without any direction from the milkman.
    The bread used to be delivered daily when I was a kid, and a big truck used to stop outside our house on Thursdays, selling fruit and vegetables. I can even remember the ice man delivering blocks of ice for the ice-chest before we bought our first fridge.
    Grandma had a washboard which she used to scrub the dirty clothes, and a big copper pot with a built in wood-fired furnace to boil water. She would boil the sheets and towels in it. She also used it to scald the chickens after she had decapitated them with an axe. The scalding made the feathers easier to pluck.
    She also had the luxury of a hand operated wringer consisting of two rubber rollers through which you passed the washed clothes to squeeze out some of the water.
    The wood stove in the kitchen wasn't made from wood, but from heavy cast metal with hotplates just above the cavity where you burned the wood for heating the pans on the hotplates.
    Carpets had to be taken outside the house and hit with a handheld beater to beat the dust out of them. You would have to shower off the dust on yourself afterwards.
    Doctors made house-calls, but you had to walk to the chemist shop to get the prescription filled, if you lived long enough to get there.
    There was no telephone in our house, but there was a public phone-booth down the street and calls cost 2 pennies. Taxis were quite expensive and cost about 40 cents for the first mile.
    Hospitals smelt of ether and disinfectant, either of which encouraged people to throw up, and you would be lucky to come out still breathing, which was something patients did almost under protest.
    There was no hand basin in our bathroom at home. You had to lean over the bathtub and use the bath tap to wash your hands and clean your teeth.
    The old gas heater to warm the water for a shower or bath, exploded into life with a flame that was half the height of a man. More than once I heard reports of someone being blown up while taking a shower.
    Luckily we had a mirror (tarnished) in a splintered wooden frame, to allow us to see that we had combed our hair with enough oil or grease to lube the car that nobody on our street could afford.
    In winter we warmed ourselves with an open fire in the built-in fire place in the living room and rubber hot water bottles in our beds. In summer we sweated in front of an electric fan. The rich folk on the other side of town perspired in front of bigger fans.
    The toilet was out the back of the house and had no light except the candle you took with you. You pulled a chain hanging from the water cistern above your head to flush the toilet. Spiders built there cobwebs in every corner of the toilet. Sometimes it was like going into an Indiana Jone's Tomb of Terror just to have a pee.
    We had the luxury of electric lights -one per room, which we had to remember to turn on and off, when we entered or left the room to save money.
    I walked a mile to school every week day, and on Saturdays, I walked a mile in the other direction to go to the special kids matinee screening of a movie at the local 'picture theatre'. We usually got a B grade movie, cartoons, a serial, and a main movie after an intermission when we bought lots of candy and ice cream, no popcorn in those days. There were prizes for competitions and boys and girls who were in the birthday club. The movies cost the equivalent of 15 cents. (One shilling and threepence.) The candy was about 1o cents a box.
    You could buy your lunch at school from the canteen which was run by the ladies' auxiliary. 30 cents would see you with a cholesterol packed lunch of meat pie, pasty, a cream bun and a drink. Sauce (ketchup) was a penny extra for the pie or pasty. A cordial drink was sixpence (5 cents).
    The radio was the main source of entertainment in the home and at night after the evening meal of meat and three vegetables, the family would sit around listening to radio plays, quiz shows and serialised stories. It was much like free to air television without the pictures and a whole lot less hype. I still think the radio plays served to inspire images that today's movies provide without much effort on our part other than to convince ourselves that the digital effects are real.
    After school, the neighbourhood kids would play ball games in the street, only stopping for the occasional car or horse riders to go past, and that was a main road.
    Saturday nights my family would take the bus or tram to go out dancing to any of the various hotels or clubs. No gambling, no striptease, just good big band music for dancing waltzes and foxtrots, etc., with alcoholic beverages. We kids would play hide and seek behind the club. (Not that kind of hide and seek, you dirty minded people. We were not yet even 11 years old.)
    Speaking of dirty minded people, policemen would arrest men they discovered, (often by entrapment) in public toilets and parks, for 'acts of gross indecency' and the penalty for the guilty could be jail for up to 2 years with hard labour. These cases were listed in the "Cause List" in the local newspaper and were eagerly, even if with dread, read by gay men to see if any of their friends had been arrested.
    Then came rock n' roll, and by 1960 everything changed, forever...but that is another era, to be followed by yet others.
  5. DesDownunder

    Aussie xmas greeting

    By DesDownunder,

    ɹǝpunuʍopsǝp ɯoɹɟ
    sɐɯʇsıɹɥɔ ʎɹɹǝɯ
    You can all thank Trab for finally being able to read what I write without standing on your heads.
    This week the car's water-pump decided to spring a leak.
    The car has proven to be a source of great amusement.
    If you hear a story of an Aussie man who took an axe to his car and chopped it up into environmentally friendly pieces, that would be me.
    Oh and the tail light fell off too.
    I think I'll get the chainsaw out.
    And please checkout Graeme's Aussie Christmas message at http://www.awesomedude.com/adboard/index.php?showtopic=2758

  6. DesDownunder

    Stupidity

    By DesDownunder,

    Hello, hello, is this thing working? I don't know what is wrong but the date for the blog entries are stuck in 2009, there is no 2010. How stupid is that?
    It was the same with my last entry, but I set it for the December 31 2009 and it posted as January 1 2010. How crazy mixed up is that? I wonder what will happen this time?
    I've had a great idea for writing a story. I will write the first paragraph and post it as being December 31 2009. Then when it changes to January 1 2010, I will find that the story has finished itself. Easy.

    Does anyone else have a problem with the way things are proceeding this year? I have a theory that the aliens have let loose with a stupid virus and it is affecting everyone except members of AwesomeDude. So if you want to avoid being stupid, join AwesomeDude Forums right now!
    It also seems that just writing to any of our authors and letting them know you read their stories will also protect you from this dreaded virus. Of course it will, writing to an author is never stupid.
    Speaking of stupid, I have to buy a new DVD polisher/scratch repair machine for the video store, the old one finally stopped working. Chewing gum and rubber bands are no longer sufficient to keep it running.
    I looked at all the machines that are available in OZ, including a locally distributed model from the US. Guess what? The Us one has a timer on the polish fluid tank, so you have to change the polishing fluid when they want you to, and not when you decide it needs changing, just like on some computer printers which force you to change the ink cartridge even when there is plenty of ink still in the tank. Stupid!
    I found another machine, almost identical, slightly cheaper, made in Oz (so it will come with its own supply of rubber bands) and it doesn't time out. Hooray for Oz.
    We are about to enter our annual stupid season here in Adelaide. Between now and March we will have a plethora of Festivals, car and horse races (separate events -we're not that stupid...yet), as well as an election for our state government, when we will be able to elect...(yes you guessed it)... stupid people...to govern us for the next 4 years. I'm not hopeful of anything but a disastrously stupid result.
    Our politicians are no better than anywhere else, all are intent on passing draconian the barbarian type laws to protect us from being stupid, (politicians excepted, no one can cure politicians' stupidity, which explains why they think that passing laws against people being stupid will actually work.)
    It would be far better to pass a law which made stupidity compulsory, then no one would want to do it, (except politicians and middle management types.) Senior executives on the other hand are not stupid you know, they are just wallowing in their ill-gotten gains which the poor people were stupid enough to give them.
    We are already seeing a record number of people standing as candidates for the election. The electorate where I live will almost certain re-elect the sitting religious-extremist left winger. An oxymoron, do I hear you say? No, not really, he is just stupid, dangerously stupid, unfortunately.
    Our left wing party is now more right wing on social issues than the right wing party is. On other issues they haven't a clue, but then neither does the opposition who are just plain, very plainly, stupid, and ugly.
    I think both parties will try their hand at Obama type rhetoric with an Aussie accent, which will be not only stupid, but excruciating to say the least.
    The GLTB will mount a campaign to find out which politicians support gay marriage. That is interesting but a little stupid as the state government cannot override the Ozzie federal marriage law which does not permit same sex marriage even though it grants us the same benefits, and if that sounds stupid to you, you re right, but their Christian beliefs stop them from passing gay marriage laws.
    I conclude with a quote I saw on the Net. Don't these people realise that "Jesus had two dads?"
    I am so glad I am member of AwesomeDude.
    Avoid the stupidity join AwesomeDude Forums, today.
  7. DesDownunder
    I can't believe I have done it again. No not that, you dirty minded boys!
    You may remember, or not, that sometime ago I fell up some marble stairs and broke some front ribs.
    This time I fell backwards in the bath tub and did the back ribs in, (just so I would even things up.)
    My feet slipped out from under me and I was aware I was doing a horizontal levitation before crashing my right ribs into the side of the bath. Actually I was unlucky as I am so light I would have floated down except for the force of the shower water hitting me and speeding up my fall.
    As I was descending, I realised I was wondering if this was "it." Would I strike my head and and crack my skull open and watch my braincell being swept down the drain, swirling in a mass of blood and gooey bits? Would I paralyse myself and just drown in the hot water, my time of death being concealed by the heat of the water?
    I could imagine the b/f coming home and finding my remains all wrinkled by the running water and telling me I had aged quite noticeably since this morning.
    Staggering quickly to my feet, I deduced I had done the ribs in, but wasn't in too bad a shape otherwise.
    I cancelled the fun I had planned for the shower and dried myself with the warm fluffy towel.
    Ice pack to the ribs helped diminish the bruising and the pain.
    But the soreness cut in by morning. So I will just have to grin and bare it for a few weeks while it heals.
    Fortunately, for me, it doesn't hurt to type, so I will be able to report to you all.
    When the next door neighbour heard about me falling in the tub, she announced that perhaps I should think about a nursing home.
    Over my dead body, that's going to happen.
    Perhaps I should get some strong muscly young man to help me shower? Yeah that sounds like a plan.
  8. DesDownunder
    I don't understand it. I am snowed under with work galore.
    I have a dozen things to do all by tomorrow or next Thursday.
    I have just made a snack and sit down at the computer to read and eat,
    when without warning a phrase goes pop, into my head.
    I have to write that down.
    Fifteen minutes later I have a poem.
    A wretched silly poem!
    I also have a cold bowl of rice with hot-sauce,
    and none of my work even started.
    An hour later I am happy with the tweaking of said poem,
    but realise that some people are not going to cope with it at all.
    Why me? Why did the muse attack me at this time?
    Why was I selected to bring this vision to fruition?
    Did everyone else turn it down?
    That must be it.
    I got the left-overs.
    Everyone else had the good sense to not get involved in such a poetic travesty.
    Not me though, oh no.
    I had to go and let myself be used by the dark side to write and post the poem.
    I should have signed it as Darth Downunder. No too obvious.
    A poem for bedtime...
    "Safe As Houses" now at Codey's World

  9. DesDownunder

    Rewards of Despair

    By DesDownunder,

    Okay there are several threads where I might post this op-ed with some degree of being relevant and not off topic, but Ive decided that here might be as good as anywhere. Just be warned I'm in a philosophical mood. As always, feel free to comment.
    Rewards of Despair
    © 2011
    by Desmond Rutherford
    The circumstances of one's life are often overlooked as being a significant contributing factor for creative work, and yet adverse conditions might be used to dismiss the opportunity to create. Trying to write, compose, or even live, whilst constrained by one catastrophe after another is, obviously, challenging. The uncertainty of not knowing if the bed you got out of this morning will still be yours tonight is not something that provides the most stable environment conducive to creativity. It seems that we can recognise the emptiness of our own personal apocalypse, simply through our life's circumstances.
    Sometimes it seems that no matter what we do, life goes from bad to worse, to virtually impossible. Anxiety, fear, and terror may be the consequence of real dangers or they may be anticipations, the sequels of irrational conjecture, but the effect is the same. Sadly, they give rise to anxiety that we know will lead too many people into seeking a solution that is tragic for all of us. But there is also a less desolate aspect to threatening situations, that can permit us to learn from the experience, even though it nearly incapacitates us. Suffering does give us an insight into the human condition, with all its foibles and its hopes. And it does take courage and bravery to live through anxieties, and we are brave and courageous if we dare to look horror in the eye and scream, "I want to live," as loudly as we can. Just screaming that you aren't going to take it anymore, is not enough; you must demand to live. I know it can seem impossible...I've felt despair too. I've seen the horrors in the faces of others, reflected in and lurking behind their eyes, in the dungeons of their minds. And I am humbled when I have little, and they have nothing...but their determination to go on living.
    Despair can lead to depression, and depression is restrictive, immobilising to paralysis, and yet courage can be born of desperation, inspiring us to find its truth, reality, depth and recognise that horror does not last forever, even though we may be affected for the rest of our lives, from having experienced the despair and depression. If we have ever asked why life is so full of such experiences, then we are on the brink of realising that life is those experiences, and it is our place to observe them, embrace them, use them, and make an art form of them, one that is as unique as we are; each of us.
    To live through horror, persecution and deprivation is not unknown to many peoples; indeed, LGBTQ people seem to be rather adept at learning how to survive in a hostile world. And it's not merely a matter of what we survive making us stronger, it's a matter of daring to live and love in the face of adversity; daring to shout, “Yes!” to life and living it. And then, with that innate human desire to express ourselves artistically, we feel impelled to take our discoveries, our thoughts and stories, and scratch them into the face of the Earth, so others may see them, share them, feel comforted, informed, inspired, entertained, or just so someone else knows that wonder exists, and that we can tell each other about it.
    Compassion comes in many guises, but it must be true at its core, real truth without superstitions, and the truth of reality is not always easy to handle, but is its own reward, because it demands we live life fully, in the here and now, searching for the only sane and satisfactory reason for existence...Love.
    "The job of the artist is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” - Gertrude Stein from the 2011 movie, Midnight in Paris.
  10. DesDownunder
    69 is not my age , I ain't that old ...yet!
    Well here we are at the 69th blog entry. 69 I guess it will have to be a double entry ey?
    ?ʎǝ ʎɹʇuǝ ǝlqnop ɐ ǝq oʇ ǝʌɐɥ llıʍ ʇı ssǝnƃ I 96 ˙ʎɹʇuǝ ƃolq ɥʇ96 ǝɥʇ ʇɐ ǝɹɐ ǝʍ ǝɹǝɥ llǝʍ
    I can hardly believe how cold it has become. A month ago I was sitting here naked in oppressive heat and now my extremities are frozen. Oh and that is with clothes in case you are wondering. which I hope you were and no doubt weren't.
    Soixante-neuf Warning XXX.
    Of course if you are 69-ing you can get hot for a while. On the other-hand, which takes some working out when you 69, whose hand is that? Am I upside down or am I downunder? If I wasn't in Australia would I be downunder or up-over. 69-ing is so confusing. I don't know what has come over me, oh wait a minute, yes I do.
    And then you are cold again, and wet. I wonder if the hot water is working I could have a spa. Can you 69 in the spa bath? Will the bubbles get up my nose? Will the jets of water bubble up and drown me in a sea of foaming water? Should I get a snorkel? You have one? Built in you say? Kewl!
    Wanna play submarines? Torpedoes away. Firing number 2, loading number 3.
    Will I see men in the reflection on the bathroom mirrors, or will they be fogged up?
    Something will get fogged up I suppose. I should get a fog-horn. What flavour soap is this? It is quite tasty.
    Now for the warm fluffy towels and the cosy wrap of the muscly arms. The breath of love and the damn alarm, just as I was about to dream of
    You
    ǝɯ
    sigh,
  11. DesDownunder

    Hopeless

    By DesDownunder,

    Pecman posed a (perhaps rhetorical) question in the News and Views Forum on the loss of two young people through suicide.
    I have no argument with Pecman's post, but I did not want to make the following statement in the News and Views Forum because it might be taken that I was chastising Pecman, which I certainly am not. What I do have to say is somewhat a personal statement, but one I would like to share with you from the relative safety of posting it as an opinion in my blog. Of course you may wish to respond, and consider yourself invited to do so. Personal flames will be deleted. Be warned this is not going to be everyone's opinion.
    Pecman's original post is here, and well worth reading. My heart goes out to him for his concern.
    Quote Pecman:
    It is so easy to say, "yes it is," but it is not just the bullying of the young that invites such a response.
    At any moment of our existence, we are in a state of confusion, torn between serving our desire to live loving lives, and fulfilling the social roles imposed on us by our various cultures. Enlightenment can be defined as overcoming one's culture, but that in itself is probably a lifetime occupation.
    Blinded by the pressures to conform, we so often do not see that those demands are challenged by our natural desire for peace and love.
    We allow ourselves to be swayed by all kinds of doctrine to believe that aggression and avarice are the natural states of human existence.
    Those young people, who are exposed to such doctrine, often see no alternative other than to side-step adopting it as their own, by opting out.
    They are not yet able to accept that life is a battle, a quest to affirm goodness; they do not yet have the capacity to withstand the onslaught of those who have been persuaded to preach that love and goodness are illusions and that life is about cruelly taking whatever you want for yourself at the expense of others. They are overcome by the feeling that they cannot and will not participate in the hopelessness, in the horror they perceive around them. This is particularly so in the young people (11 years old in the article.)
    These sensitive souls are the very ones we cannot afford to lose. They are but a few moments of living away from being able to say. "I love life; I will do all that I can to live fully and completely without harming others. I will do all that I can to fulfil my humanity, I say yes to life!"
    But they are deterred from developing this inner-strength of human love, of recognising the power of the goodness of life in themselves, because they have been subjected to, attacked and bullied by, those who have submitted to the doctrines of hate, negativity, guilt and fear.
    These young people are denied their natural inclination to access the discovery of truth and beauty, all in the name of subservience to their culture's rules and beliefs in some kind of external salvation.
    Love is within, it resides within us. It is not given to us, it is what we are, unless it is taken from us; and too often love is forcibly removed from us, by denouncing it as wicked and that it somehow makes us unworthy, immoral and all sorts of other imperfections. We are made to feel guilty for being creatures of love, when in fact we should be rejoicing the goodness of our love and its expression.
    Too often do those, who have submitted to being negative about life, try to force their negativity on others. Too often, love is discriminated against by the forces of fear and guilt. And too often is love strangled in the hands of the bully, just so he feels justified in his denial of accepting his capacity to love. He does not understand it is his own love that he kills.
    But a young person just coming to terms with puberty, mystified by developing emotions, discovering the potential for his own capacity to love, will come to think that in the face of all the hypocrisy which abounds in his culture, of all the tragedy which seems to surround life, in the face of his time and time again being denied his own human existence, that it is just easier to escape from a world in which he feels alienated, which is just too much to bear on his own.
    Sometimes he will find someone his own age to assist their common survival, sometimes lovingly, sometimes not.
    I have at times been asked what a young person gets from a relationship with an older person, because as far as can be seen it seems that only the older person gets something from such a relationship. That may seem true, but only if we consider it in terms of sexual gratification. Certainly there is that horrifying molestation of the young that must rightfully be condemned, but it should not be confused with the transmission of the lust for life that an older person can give a younger.
    Such a relationship can give the younger a model of hope, of what love really is, as opposed to just sexual urges. The love of an older for a younger person recognises the glamour of life (as Oscar Wilde called it) in the younger person, it encourages the celebration of life and it shows love as being the reason for sexual expression, rather than the way far too many people think of it today, as sex being the motivation for love.
    And no this last statement is not an attempt to justify paedophilia. Sexual relationships before puberty is completed, is definitely not part of this argument. Paedophilia is the negative, the abusive aspect of sexual expression between an older and a younger person.
    However, just as destructive is the doctrine of hate which teaches the young and often the very young, to live in fear, with guilt and to deny love by denying the inherent goodness in humanity.
    A loving relationship between an older and a younger person can reverse this hate, this denial of life and replace it with loving goodness and therefore lead the young person to exclaim, yes to life.
    To quote Oscar Wilde from the dock during his first criminal trial:
    [?]It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
    It is important to understand that many people have imposed a non-sexual interpretation on this speech that any student of Greek Love would patently deny. Wilde was quite clearly defending his love of youth as being worthy, both in the intellectual and physical senses.
    Of course, the parallel argument for heterosexual love between a younger person and an older person of opposite sex also holds true, but in practice this has been an instruction in heterosexual sex rather than the noble-minded values described by Wilde. Still I have no doubt the argument is valid regardless of gender. (I also have no doubt that humanity is sexually omnifarious, eventually succumbing to availability and habit, even if influenced by genetic propensity or cultural expectations, which of course cause further problems.)
    Rites of passage through loving relationships of differently aged lovers, is part of the human experience, and I would maintain a necessary one if the young are not to find life as hopeless as it sometimes seems.
    In historic cultures, both civilised and primitive, and in classical literature such relationships were understood and revered. Then came the puritan dark ages which still influence us today and we wonder why we feel hopeless.
  13. DesDownunder
    It's Friday afternoon and I am picking up an old friend's ancient computer for which he no longer has any use. I will give it to a deserving family I know.
    At least I would if he was home. He is late. Twenty minutes late. So I am sitting in my car waiting, when I hear a door slam in the house next door.
    "Sorreeee," says a voice that I just know does not belong to an Australian outback construction worker.
    Sure enough, a young man in his early twenties appears wearing a shirt and shorts designed to show his decorator muscles he must have got for Christmas. At least I have something to look at whilst I wait.
    I immediately think that his name is probably Twinky-boy as he walks gently around the car parked in the driveway. As he turns around to get in the car I decide his name is probably Hot-bot.
    Anyway he started the car, one of those nice little 4-cylinder cars from the Far-east. Then he gets out of the car and walks up to the garage door which is one of those full-width roll-up type doors in a lovely shade of suburban beige. I watch Hot-bot as he reaches up to a ledge and takes down what is obviously a remote control.
    Now I have never had the money for such luxuries, but I am pretty sure this must be a remote control for the roll-up door. It wouldn't make a lot of sense for it to be the TV remote unless the door was particularly slow in rolling up. Then again it didn't make a lot of sense to keep the garage door remote outside where anyone could find it.
    Our hero gets back into the car and waves the remote at the door, which sure enough slowly, but not that slowly, begins its ascent into the garage ceiling space.
    When the door is half-way up, I watch as the car slowly moves forward towards the door. The bonnet of the car goes under the rising door and just when you would expect the young man to exert those delightful thigh muscles and apply the brakes, the car sped up and rammed the upper half of the now bent and stationary garage door.
    It was about now that I realised I was privileged to watch an actual urban legend occurring before my very eyes. Would I see a Darwin Award?
    The young man sat in the car with his mouth open. He seemed genuinely surprised that the door had been by hit the car. Possibly he was wondering why the car had been hit by the door.
    Slowly he backed the car away from the door, but the now hanging bottom bar of the door was caught on the front of the car just where the windscreen ends and the bonnet starts. He continued backing the car away and somehow managed to pull the roller door so it was bent in the other direction.
    The door tried to return to its previous instruction to roll up, but gave up after a another few feet, looking quite the worse for the ordeal. It looked a little like the Sydney Opera House sails would have looked if they had been made from roofing iron.
    The car bonnet seemed okay.
    Again I heard the door from inside the house slam and there suddenly appeared another young man of the tender twenty-something years wearing torn off jeans and a tight fitting T-shirt adorning his own decorator muscles. They must have bought a matching set, although this one might have paid extra for the super thighs version with golden tan.
    Twinky got out of the car and rushed up to the damaged door, touching it, caressing it as one would an injured animal. "Oh No!" he exclaimed.
    "How did that happen?" asked the other set of muscles.
    "I don't know. One moment the door was going up the next minute the door stopped as I was driving towards it," and with that he burst into tears.
    The other young man tenderly put his arms around his friend and patted his shoulder, "It's okay love, we will sort it out, come on."
    They reached up and grabbed the bottom of the bent door that was now about five feet off the ground.
    I watched as they twisted and pulled at the door. I tossed up whether I should try to help, but decided that as neither of them knew I was there and that I had forgotten to put on my own set of muscles before I left home, it was probably best for me to remain hidden in my car. Less embarrassing for us all, I thought.
    Then they gave me an insight in to their bedroom antics as they topped their previous contortions by grabbing the bottom of the door lifting their knees towards their chests and swung furiously like a pair of delicate chimpanzees.
    I placed my hands over my mouth and eyes, lest I should betray my presence with an audible sound from deep in my throat. Looking between my fingers I saw the miracle of the door slowly start to descend till it nearly reached the ground.
    "Stand back," said the torn off jeans clad super thighed one of the two, and with that he performed a flying Kung Fu leap that meant he probably worked as a stunt man. His foot landed in the middle of the dent in the door.
    He bounced off the now straightened door and fell to the ground. His friend rushed to his side, "Are you alright?"
    He knelt down and placed his friend's head in the folds of his lap, right on his very thin shorts.
    I was about to reach for my cell phone to ring emergency. Damn, I should have recorded this.
    His friend stirred and lifted his arm to pull his friends head down to him and they kissed in the drive-way.
    No, I am NOT making this up.
    For some reason I was almost expecting them to burst into song.
    "There's a place for us,
    A time and place for us...
    Somewhere..." *
    Slowly they picked themselves up off the ground and helped each other into their house. The door slammed behind them.
    A short time later my straight friend turned up. I asked if he knew the next door neighbours.
    He told me he thought they might be gay and that they were accident prone.
    "No shit!" said I.
    "Yes," he said, "they've only been there a week and last Tuesday one of them drove over the rubbish bin. I don't expect them to last the month out."
    "I don't know about that," I said, "They seem quite resourceful and very much in love."
    * Yes I know its West Side Story...again, but it did happen in an Adelaide Western Suburb.
    Edit: Tidying up the writing.
  14. DesDownunder
    So Australia has an election today (Saturday 21st August 2010) and our senate has 42 candidates.
    Our electoral system is a preferential system, so if no candidate gets 50% the vote is allocated to the next person in line on your ballot paper, or something like that. (Hey, I'm Australian and it's our patriotic duty to be apathetic.
    So I have spent all night looking up the policies of each main group of candidates and just to make sure everyone knows I am a left wing anarchist with progressive libertarian tendencies and don't like religion in my politics, I have decided to vote as follows:
    1. The Australian Sex Party.
    2. The Secular Party of Australia
    3. The Socialist Alliance
    4. The Greens.
    The other candidates won't get a shoe-in after that, but just to make sure, I have arranged all the homophobic and Christian influenced parties at the very bottom of my list, with the other right wingnut candidates.
    Of course, most probably tomorrow will bring either a Labor (=US Democrats) or a Liberal (=US Republicans) government, but as both appear to me to beholden to some religious influence and neither will have a thing to do with gay marriage, I am not too worried that my vote is wasted on encouraging the intelligent side of the force.
    If the Borg had put up a candidate we might have been better off by voting them into power, at least they "add the biological and technological distinctiveness of other species to their own" in pursuit of perfection. (-Wiki). I'm sure the Borg would appreciate a fabulously perfect gay techno party or two.
    As it is we will have to tolerate being tortured by the new Inquisition, like the rest of the planet.
    I am so looking forward to being put to the question -not!
    Next election I think I will start an Australian Cynics Party, if I haven't been burned at the stake.
  15. DesDownunder
    My dysfunctional family would have been difficult to come out to. They all died before the modern era of liberation, but the real problem would have been, when to tell them. Let's say I chose a celebration like Christmas dinner. (We don't have thanksgiving here in Australia, but we have 'turkeys' in every family)
    Anyway getting back to when to tell my family. First I would have to wait until I could get them altogether. Dad would have had to be in town which wasn't all that often, so step-father would have to substitute, if he could stop looking at himself in the mirror.
    Grandmother, mother and her sister with her second husband would all have to be in the same room which would be in the kitchen, pouring the Christmas wine.
    The big decision would be whether to tell them before they got drunk, during the meal, or before they passed out after the meal which they didn't eat because they were too busy drinking, shouting and swearing.
    At least I wouldn't have to wait until someone said grace. Maybe I could have done it after they all wished each other, "Merry Christmas."
    I'm sure they would have accepted me until they sobered up the next day. It probably wouldn't have mattered, they would never have remembered I told them.
  16. DesDownunder
    Are ratings overrated?
    Do they mean anything.
    I sit here looking at the little blog rating stars and wonder why our resident blog geniuses (genii for those of you who think Latin is your native tongue) only rate somewhere between 3.9 and 4.8. (Come to think of it, a native Latin is something we might like to get our tongues around.)
    I mean why do some people get more votes than others?
    And why does the lowest rating have more voters than the highest?
    Was this an act of retaliation against being highly rated, or simply a popular vote to rate someone who deserved some rating while others are overlooked altogether.
    Surely someone deserves 5 out of 5.
    Why do some blogs have no votes?
    You'd think that if people were going to vote for one blog they would at least vote for them all.
    Where is the equity in that?
    I can't help but wonder what the criteria is for rating someone's blog.
    I'm pretty certain it has nothing to do with sexual prowess.
    (Now that is a word I wondered about as a kid. I thought a prowess was a female prowler.)
    No one has been around to my house to judge my prowess, that I know about anyway. Perhaps I have been prowled without knowing it.
    Now there is a scary thought. Look out your window and see if you can catch site of the dozens of strange looking men lurking in the bushes trying to rate your prowess so they choose how many stars they give your blog. Do they talk to each other? Do they hold town meetings to discuss your blog ratings? Is there an international conspiracy of blog raters?
    It is always possible of course that people just accidentally hit the wrong number of stars when they rated a blog. It's easy to do. Fortunately all you have to do is rate the blog again with the correct number of 5 stars. The system allows you to change your rating, especially if it was too low last time you rated. (Hint hint.)
    I am perplexed about how readers decide on the number of stars they think a blog should get. Is it comparative? What if the last blog rated is better than the blog you rated at 5 earlier? Do you go around and demote your previous ratings? That isn't nice.
    Then of course I think a blog rating can be in recognition of an outstanding revelation of insight into human thought.
    Deep and meaningful clich?s on the state of our individual thoughts can only make the readers' minds bloggle.
    We blog, therefore we live. Avoid the rush rate our blogs now!
    Subliminal message => 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5,
    Even better, start your own blog.
  17. DesDownunder
    It's been an awkward year for me and I hadn't been able to get to the local poetry reading group for about 8 months (I think.)
    Anyway, the stars aligned with Jupiter and the moon was in the seventh house, etc., and I had the night free to attend the local poets reading their poems. Most of them of course read descriptions of 'things' as if they were shopping lists delivered like a telegram, but hey, people were attempting to be creative, so who cares?
    The first shock was that the admission had risen to $5, but the nice girl at the money taking table knocked off a dollar because I looked so old and decrepit.
    I picked up the handout for the evening and was shocked into the middle of next weekend. The group was going to reduce the allotted time for reading from 4 minutes to 3, for each reader, with a promise of looking to go to 2 minutes!
    Okay so they were going to trial 3 minutes in April and May. Well I can tell you there is no may about it, I won't be there. I mean what can you read in 3 minutes? the dinner menu?
    This irked me somewhat, in case you haven't gathered. In one fell swoop they would wipe out reading any of the classic works by Tennyson, Coleridge, Rimbaud (hi Jason), let alone my own unworthy efforts.
    When I complained, I was told I could just read an excerpt. A what? Are these people insane or is their brain missing in action?
    So I sat down and waited my turn to read. I managed to talk to few people during the break, and discovered that the bohemian element had decided to rename Adelaide as 'delayed, because we were always behind what was happening anywhere else in the world. The fact that it has taken so long to think of this is proof that they are right.
    So I questioned people about the proposed reduction in reading time, and was told that people didn't want to stay out till 11pm as it was too late. Too what? Late? Do these people even know that 11 pm is the starting hour for the local gay bar?
    Come to think of it I don't think they have heard about being gay yet, despite my gay poems and a couple of very nice young men skirting around the subject in their poems.
    I watched as people revealed their total lack of knowledge on microphone technique, one man trying to lick it as if it was a black aniseed ice cream, while another woman decided it was in her view of her text and so pushed the microphone away until it fell off its stand. We all got feedback for her effort.
    I finally got to read my Reflections and my All I can Be, poems. I was pleased with very enthusiastic applause, so they are not too bad a bunch of people after all.
    Then I remembered I was in Adelaide and probably the applause was for the previous poet, his applause being delayed.
    I've now had some time to think this over, and I have come to the conclusion that the Church controlled conservative government has decided to use its influence to eradicate the left-wing poets by limiting their reading time at poetry meetings because it won't fund someone to lock up the hall so late at night. The volunteers want to get home early.
    This will mean that there is an opening for a really good poetry group to spring up but as it will take sometime I guess that will be 'delayed too.
    Foo on the lot of them. If they want decent poetry, they will just have to come to AwesomeDude and Codey's World.
  18. DesDownunder
    I don't understand all this fuss about a financial crisis. I've been in a financial crisis for over ten years. Every time we use up the limit on the credit we just get the bank to extend the limit. Sexual deficiency is the only real crisis worth worrying about. So far I reckon we have another 12 months before we run out of money again, but wait, I will soon have the pension money coming in and that will have to help.
    So I reckon the banks should extend everyone's credit limit and then we wouldn't have a crisis.
    The girl at our bank thinks the balance on our account is what we have deposited in the bank. She doesn't realise it is what we owe. She smiles at me and says we are doing quite well. (She's not talking about my sex life.) I think she should be put in charge of the International Monetary Fund.
    My health is better lately, but I still have a sleeping problem -he snores.
    So I have to sit up until 5 or 6am when I become tired enough to sleep through the sound of the gale force wind coming from my beloved's nostrils. I'm always surprised that he can grow hair up in those things. His nose hair sways like the palm trees in a tornado.
    Have you ever watched anyone sleep? Fascinating. Definitely an R rated activity after 30. Before 30 of course, it is an X rated biological process. After 40 it becomes more wishful thinking than an activity. And once you get to 50, you can't wait to sleep so you can dream about what it was like when you were under 20. At 60...what was the question again?
    Oh, yes the financial crisis. I wonder if the bank will give me enough credit for the Chinese aphrodisiac herb that lets me think I am 20 while I am awake? It's a great herb. I just wish it affected more than my brain. If you take too much of it it makes you feel like a real dickhead.
    Of course when it comes to one's sexual apparatus, it is true that you must keep using it or you will lose it, what they don't tell you is that after 60 when you use it, you pass out on the bed afterwards. Oh well at least I look like I am sleeping.
    Wake me up when the crisis is over.
  19. DesDownunder
    It's still hot, so is the weather.
    I am devoting my time to my new forthcoming story which I just know is not going to be everyone's cup of tea or coffee or soda. I suppose I could have included beer and wine, but would anyone read my stories while drunk? Would anyone read one of my stories while sober, is probably more to the point.
    But hey, someone has to write this stuff, right?
    I have long tried to avoid writing an "Aussie" story, being more interested in the universal subjects that affects our romantic lives, or ideas of living romantically.
    Yet out of the Australian azure blue sky came a vision to allow me to explore, contemplate, attempt, both, and strike me lucky, perhaps even more.
    Anyway you can all stop brushing up your Shakespeare and start you lessons in Aussie customs and our local cultures, which we try to treat with antibiotics and sterilisation.
    You have plenty of time, as I suspect it will be a few weeks before I complete it and get it edited.
    Of course, I might finish one of the other stories I am working on first. Isn't writing fun?

  21. DesDownunder
    I thought I would quote some of my replies I post to newspaper sites and blogs, and stuff.
    Hopefully they will make sense without referencing the article, which I won't do because I do not mean this to be a reference report, just a place to list my comments that perhaps might have a general relevance to other communities or situations. A kind of pin the quote -tail, on the (blindfolded) asinine news of the day, and let it fall where it may in the readers' realm.
    .
  22. DesDownunder
    Announcing: New category in my blog: Deeper thoughts of an Orangutan.
    I am thinking I might like to write some thoughts, essays or viewpoints on various subjects that are perhaps a little abstract, maybe nonsensical or even politically incorrect. I might even write an address to the people of Earth, once I am certain the mother-ship is on the way to pick me and take me home.
    Anyway I have created a category in my blog for subjects that are somewhat more outsopken. If I can ever get time, I may even video them and put them on youtube.
    I also want to see how the Categories system works in the blogs. So we may never get more than this post if I cannot find it again.
    In the mean time think on this:
    If I have a thought today, that affects what I will think tomorrow, why didn't yesterday's thought, about today, have any affect at all?

  23. DesDownunder
    Hi everyone,
    I finished this story a few weeks ago. Blue has since edited it for me and posted it in my hosted pages at Codey's World. It was supposed to be a contribution to the "Back to School" collection at Codey's World, but the computer crashed and had to be replaced, thus holding up the story's completion.
    With Codey being in such ill health I forgot I promised him I would put a notice here to let you all know about it.
    So I will rectify that now, here is the link:
    The Best Memories Of Their Lives
    My heart is not really in this story at the moment, but I thought it might take my mind off things if I prattle on a bit.
    This is a bit of a different story for me. It is not so much a comedy but has a kind of black humour about it.
    I have drawn from my real life experiences for many of the "memories" and then crazily mixed up the fiction with the real so that the incidents themselves are not as autobiographical as you might think, and yet some of them are.
    Perhaps you would like to guess:
    1. Which of these incidents in the story are not based on an actual experience?
    2. Which characters are pure fiction?
    If there is sufficient interest I will reveal all, some time down the track.

    All comments welcome (flames will be loved with much laughter).
    Come to think of it why do I never get flamed? I must try harder.
  24. DesDownunder
    So there I was sitting quietly minding my own business when the phone squawked.
    It didn't ring, it squawked like a duck with the flu. Which flu? How the hell do I know? There are so many hideous diseases getting around and I'm only a poor hypochondriac, not a doctor.
    Speaking of the doctor, I showed him my leg last Tuesday. He said he wasn't impressed.
    "No, no," I told him, "look there," and I pointed at the scaly red mark just below my knee.
    "Is it skin cancer?"
    "Tell me," asked the doctor, "When was the last time your knee was bathed in sunlight?"
    "Hmm that would have been in 1979 at the beach just before sunset."
    "Doesn't count."
    "I was trying to look seductive for the guy in the tight cut off jeans."
    "I don't want to know," said the doc.
    "So it isn't cancer, what about that awful flesh eating disease, or leprosy?" I asked in my most serious whiny voice.
    "It's a slight case of eczema, nothing to worry about. Put this cream on it." He handed me a small sample tube of ointment.
    "This is the same stuff you gave me when I had a chafed dick," I told him.
    "There is nothing wrong with your memory. Yes, it is the same white cream; the one you told me that when you rubbed it into your dick, it came straight out again." He chuckled. "I don't expect you will have that problem with your knee."
    "I do hope not," I said and thanked him as I left.
    **************
    The phone squawked again, bringing me back to the present.
    "Hello?" I answered not really certain whether anyone was actually calling me.
    "Do you want a job?" asked a male voice.
    "A head job?" I inquired.
    "Yeah, right. At least I know I dialled the right number. We need someone to do a shift tonight."
    I was so excited. Someone had taken ill and they needed me to fill in at the cinema where I used to work, and the money would be more than welcome.
    Thirty-six hours later, I am in agony. Every muscle in my body is revolting. Well that isn't really new, my muscles have never been my best feature. I don't remember work being this exhausting. I looked up the operator's handbook I got when I was born and sure enough there on page 547 is the warning about not going back to work after you retire, it will deplete what little energy you have left.
    I laid on the bed breathing...after a fashion. I'd go to the doctor if I felt better.
    If I live long enough I will type this up for my blog as a warning to others.
    As for the phone, it doesn't squawk any more, I unplugged it.

  25. DesDownunder

    58 Hello?

    By DesDownunder,

    So I have three days where I have to get up early...at 9am
    Okay so for most people that is not all that early, but after a lifetime of going to bed as the sun comes,
    9 am for me, is like the middle of everyone else's night.
    I am tired, very tired. It is 3.35 pm and I have just got home. I look longingly at the reason for existence
    but decide to leave the computer off and go to bed for some sleep.
    4.14 pm. Ring-ring, ring-ring. ring-ring, ring-ring, ring-ring, I pick up the phone,
    Me: "Yo!"
    silence...
    Oh No...
    Just as I am about to hang-up a voice says: How are you doing?
    Me: How am I doing, what?
    Voice: pardon?
    Me: You asked me how I am doing, but you didn't say what it was you wanted to know I was doing.
    Voice: Doing?
    Me: You must say what the doing is. I can't guess. Do you want to know how well I am doing the gardening?
    Or do you want to know how well I do the dishes?
    Or how well I do the naughty. I can tell you, I don't get too many complaints.
    I don't do the garden, by the way.
    Voice: I being polite.
    Me: Hello Polite, I being Des.
    Polite: No I am Shiram, being polite:
    Me: How nice. I am Des being annoyed.
    Polite now being Shiram: I knowing English.
    Me: Who told you that?
    Shiram: I did learning at school. I speak English. How are you doing?
    Me: How am I doing, what?
    Shiram: I don't understand.
    Me: Admitting you don't understand is the first step to wisdom.
    Shiram: This is not going right.
    Me: No I suppose it isn't.
    Shiram: I am having speech to say.
    Me: Why is someone getting married?
    Shiram: I am not married.
    Me: you're not? Then who is getting married?
    Shiram: Why is anyone marrying?
    Me: That's what I say too. See I told you, you would get wisdom, all from just admitting you don't understand.
    Shiram; Don't understand what?
    Me: That I don't like being woken up by phone calls.
    Shiram: Are you sleeping?
    Me: Not at the moment.
    Shiram: I am confused.
    Me: I am tired.
    Shiram: I am tiring too.
    Me: We should go to bed.
    CLICK!
    Okay so we never got past the "Yo"
    but I can fantasize a little can't I?

PayPal

Help Keep

AwesomeDude Online

Scan to donate

QR code
×
×
  • Create New...