FICTION: The Moral of the Story

The Moral of the Story

At first, he did it to prevent himself climaxing too early.  Like most men his age, he wanted to be seen by his romantic partners as an unselfish lover – indeed, much of his self-identification as a “manly” man was tied up with his ability to bring his partners to climax in a sensual-type situation.  Sure, he had many of the other mainstreamer-type privileges – he was fully employed in a well-paying job, was physically-abled, felt relatively well catered for in terms of opportunity and social support, and was not under-bestowed with what passed for broadly-recognised facial and physical attractiveness in his culture, etc – but despite the relative ease with which he slotted into life, his self-diagnosed lack of stamina in the bedroom left him feeling less than optimal.  Indeed, the relative ease with which he “picked up” didn’t help ease his inner turmoil whatsoever, more often than not actually “rubbing his face in it” when it eventually came time to turn off the lights and get down to business in the heteronormative boudoir.  A man who never “picked up” at all (he reasoned, ruefully) would never so thoroughly have to face his own ineptness as a lover; a man who never “picked up” could go on without having his masculinity so often tested and found so desperately wanting.

To be honest, it was in the heteronormative boudoir (with its decadent mirror-tiled en-suite spa-bath and all) that he really wanted to shine.  His job and privilege and easy navigation of the mainstream world seemed to mean less to him every time he found himself unable to bring ladies to fulfilment in a sensual-type scenario; what he really wanted was to be a master lover, a craftsman of the sheets, a rugged macho machine-man of almost dangerously powerful proportions.  He wanted his erotic partners to be delightedly surprised at his prowess, lip-bitingly incredulous at the dizzying heights to which he was taking them.  He wanted the heteronormative boudoir to be his domain, his princely estate, over which he had absolute dominion.  Attractiveness - pah!  Wealth – phooey!  He wanted to be a damn good root.

However, life being the contrary thing it is, he wasn’t a damn good root at all.  He was pedestrian at best, at worst embarrassingly short-lived.  He went into the physical act of love-making with passion and fervour, but would all too often find this very passion and fervour being his undoing, as, with only a handful of thrusts under his belt, he’d come to fruition while his partner was still just getting warmed up.  It was through no selfishness that he was quick to orgasm, it must be said, but through a lack of staying power that he blamed squarely on gusto – if anything he was too enthusiastic, too present, giving it too much of a red-hot go.  If he could somehow become more detached from the process (he reasoned), he’d be able to keep it up for longer; if he could reduce his own fiery gusto (he suspected), he’d be able to become a better lover, and prince of his domain.  And life would be good.

And that’s why he first started to imagine the old obese man shitting.

(He wasn’t particularly ageist, nor was he particularly interested in fat-shaming: it was just an image that, to his own personal tastes, was conducive to not blowing his load inopportunely.  In all honesty, many of his closer friends were on the larger side, and he certainly had no qualms with the elderly: he just found that, personally-speaking, imagining a very old, very fat man straining to expel faeces from his rectum helped somewhat diminish his ardour.)

The first time he pictured the old obese man shitting, he swore that the image gave him a good two minutes extra: that perspiring, grimacing man astride the obscured porcelain throne, laying thick cable with audible groans and splashes, helped defocus his own sweaty thrustings just enough to curtail his rising passions, prolonging his love-making by that extra one hundred and twenty seconds or so, and thus making him, in his own estimation, a better lover.  (Not that his partner had mentioned anything at the time – but had that glance been a little more satisfied-seeming than was the norm?  Impossible to tell for certain – but deep inside, he knew that he was on to something.  Something good.)

The second time, he really tried to focus.  As his outsides were busy with all the normal required sexually-centric activities, his insides were conjuring up vivid detail: the beads of perspiration that ran down the shitting man’s jowls; the red flush to the large man’s forehead as he strained at stool; the laboured breathing; the shuddering of the rolls of fat as the warm cargo was finally ejected into the hidden recesses of the bowl.  From this distracting mental picture, he gained several precious minutes extra, and when he finally reached orgasmic release, his collapse onto the bedsheets was triumphant.  (And he couldn’t be sure, but he thought – he felt – that his intimate partner displayed a contentment that he’d hitherto been unable to deliver.  Given he was too scared to ask about such things, that would have to do.)

As his sexual confidence increased, so did his goals.  He didn’t simply want to avoid premature ejaculation, he wanted to become a regular Casanova.  And, as his heteronormative goalposts shifted further and further away from their humble beginnings, so did the level of detail required to stem his libidinous tide.  Soon enough, he was spending most, if not all, of his sensual congresses with his head filled with close-up scenes of faecal matter gliding wetly downwards between cellulite-pocked buttocks, of grunts and sighs and facial contortions, of stubborn excrement being slowly forced through puckered apertures distending, of dark brown heads of obstinate waste inching towards him with all the tension and inevitability of a horror movie.   As he became (in his own estimation) a finer and finer lover, an imaginary army of enormous elderly naked men soiled toilet bowl after toilet bowl, while he prodded and arced in the very opposite of arousal.

Finally, he was content with his activities in the heteronormative boudoir.   Finally, he was a magnificent lover. (Yes, he did spend an awful lot more of his time imagining elderly corpulent gentlemen backing out brownies than he’d like to, but: priorities.)

When he went swaggering through the laser-lit dance-floors of the night-club underworld, he knew he was king, and that any lady who was lucky enough to be going home with him that night was going to be boned by a master.

Then came the tipping point, the threshold:  

One day, he found that, at the mention of sex, his mind was not filled (as it once had been) with images of bouncing bosoms and labial filigree, but man-boobs and the hairy winking of sphincters.  Instead of pleasing images of fellatio in his mind’s eye, he saw aged chaps dislodging brown loads from wrinkled rectums.  Instead of the womanly moan of passion, he heard wheezing and cold kerplops.  Even worse (in a practical sense), he soon found that the images that now flooded his mind served no longer to prolong his love-making, but to prevent it entirely.  As his partner had looked down at his unstirrable member, asking what was wrong, he realised too late that his libido was now so thoroughly enmeshed with the images of a naked shitting fat man, that what had once given him the sex life he’d craved had now rendered him limp and useless.

He’d never cried in front of a partner before, but that night, he sobbed (inarticulately, it must be noted – there was no way in all seven levels of heck that he was ever going to admit any of this stuff to anyone).

Ashamed, defeated, he’d left the dating game entirely.  Unable to cope, he’d left his job, let his social circles atrophy.  Eventually, he became a recluse.  But the images wouldn’t leave him.  Somewhere in the back of mind there was always the difficult defecation of the pendulous elderly.

The years dragged on.  Most days, he barely left the house.  Some days, he barely left the room. 

Until the day came.  Going to the toilet one day, he paused and looked at his reflection.  The mirrored en-suite which had once seen so many acts of one-sided sexual pleasure now saw nothing but a sad, broken, crushed old man.  Age had not been kind to him (and, let’s face it, like many recluses he’d let himself down in the personal grooming department).  Years of inactivity had piled onto him layers of sadness and fat.  As he gazed at himself in the en-suite’s ubiquitous mirror-tile, he saw an old, overweight man, who, just at this moment, needed sorely to defecate.  Sitting himself on the matte plastic seat of the toilet, he suddenly felt a tingling sensation in his groin he’d not felt for years.  As his excrement departed his ballooning anus and the cold backsplash from the water below tickled his perineum, his eyes widened.  His hands eagerly pushed and pulled at his abdominal rolls until his glory was revealed: there, the erection of all erections!  Good god, how it stood proudly against his old-man sags, turgid with enthusiasm!  It was like seeing an old friend, or discovering a treasured childhood memory.  With his excrement still cooling beneath him, he tugged on his long-lost todger: and in a matter of seconds, all three of his eyes were gushing.

Tears streaming down his liver-spotted cheeks, his hand sticky with seed, he leaned back on the white throne and breathed in his pungent collection of bodily odours.  His old lips curved upwards in a smile.

He was back.  And finally, finally, he was filled with self-love.

He wiped his face, wiped his hands, wiped his arse, and flushed.

FICTION: Wishy-washy Flim-flam: an Excerpt from the Hitherto Unpublished Manuscript "Beef"

Once upon a time, apparently, songs hadn’t been about specific products or companies at all, but about wishy-washy flim-flam like love or loss or hope or metaphysics.  Instead of singing about a particular construction company, they’d sing about imaginary watchtowers; instead of crafting a piece promoting the benefits of using a specific insurance firm, they’d write a song about made-up riders on a made-up storm.  And, even when songs had been about actual tangible products, like drugs or blue suede shoes, they’d been about generic drugs or blue suede shoes, and had failed to mention which specific brands of drugs or blue suede shoes they’d been actually referring to.  It was like the past had been some fuzzy cloud of inter-bleeding greys and browns, out of focus and impossible to really discern.  If the present was like a display window of precisely-labelled and correctly-categorised leisuregoods, the past had been like the same display window after a tornado.  Things had been thrown together as the musicians had seen fit, without any specific sponsorship, and no particular direction.

Even ancient classics like the Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint it Black With Dulux’, or John Lennon’s ‘Imagine (the Comfort of Sorbent Toilet Tissue)’, had originally been product-free, instead being about insubstantial abstracts like bad moods and hazy utopian daydreamings (respectively).  Back in the day, popular musicians, despite being immensely respected at the time, had churned out nothing but self-important odes to nothing-much-at-all, and billions and billions of dollars had been wasted on selling the public nothing but existential ramblings, personal points of view, and lists of things that rhymed. 

All said, it’s amazing that anyone had listened to music at all.

Indeed, so pervasive had this vague attitude of artistic incoherence been, that when the first corporate-rock pioneers had begun creating their product-specific pop music in the early 2000s, they’d been derided and belittled (according to reliable history sites).  Like Galileo being imprisoned for declaring the world was not the centre of the universe, these forward-thinking artists had put up with personal insults, vile slander, and (unlike Galileo) the accusation that they’d “sold out” (which, given that their music had been created in a self-declared culture of free-market capitalism, had been akin to accusing a politician of running for office). 

But, much like the popularity of vatmeat over corpses, slowly corporate-rock had spread.  Music publishers, desperately looking for some way to recoup the losses they’d suffered under the digital file-sharing revolution, had been first to jump on board: with business sponsorship, suddenly they’d found themselves raking it in.  Music fans had loved it; now, not only could they sing along with their favourite tunes, but they could actually hold their subject matter in their hands.  Abstract notions and pretty verses had finally turned into solid, tangible products and services.  Instead of just having posters of their idols and wishing they could somehow connect, fans could really drink the actual soft-drink, really wear the actual pants, really wash with the actual moisturising and defoliating emollient and humectant cream with enzymes. 

Finally, instead of just buying into the message, the public could buy what the message was about.  And they loved it.

Musicians too began to universally realise that while there was no career in writing about wishy-washy flim-flam, there was always money to be made in advertising.  As eyes and ears had begun to open across the world, musicians had finally understood that they had been selfish and childish, trying to just push their own idiosyncratic barrows, when there were larger (and more socially-shared) barrows that needed pushing up the cultural hill.  Musicians no longer merely had to rely on selling their little songs, but had themselves a whole line of merchandise already there for the selling.  And collectively they’d understood that it hadn’t meant compromising their unique artistic visions, either; rather, it had made their visions more concrete, more accessible to their fans.  One could still sing about dreams, or love, or existentialist despair, but one could drive the message home, make it really connect to their audience, if one made it dreams about wearing a specific perfume, the love of the refreshing taste of a specific cola, or the existentialist despair of missing out on these crazy crazy bargains.

It had not taken long, relatively speaking, for the entire music world to have shifted from an irrelevant and meaningless charade of silly selfish shadow-puppets selling themselves, to a creatively-robust economically-essential driving cultural force.  There were still, of course, the normal dichotomies of art: mainstream musicians and alternative ones; high-brow musicians and low-brow ones; musicians who displayed creative genius and those who churned out dross.  But the entire game had shifted.  Soon enough, if you were a musician but didn’t have a product to write about, you weren’t really a musician, any more than a stamp-collector without stamps is actually a philatelist. 

Finally, the music business had realised what it really had been all along – business, set to music.

Having grown up several generations after the music industry had awakened to its untapped economic potential, Gene had never known a world where songs had been unconnected to real, solid, proper product.  And, as most of her friends had been fellow musicians, Gene had seen many products used for creative inspiration.  One of her friends made extreme noise-music about a chain of body-piercing / tattooing / body pigmentation studios.  One friend made dark droney power-ambient soundscapes for a depressive boutique clothing franchise.  Another created high-energy distorted 8-bit slam-rave to advertise emo power-tools.  One made glam-pop rapcore for a range of bathroom cleaning products.  One crafted blackened folk-surf for a jelly-repellent wetsuit company. 

But in her estimation, these were all light-weight products, with limited creative value.  After all, one emo power-tool was pretty much the same as any other; the world didn’t care which one you used, really.  There was nothing important to say about piercings or wetsuits.  But vatmeat!  That was something she could really get her teeth into (so to speak).  That was something that had revolutionary appeal – something that had literally changed the world for the better.  Sure, situational cellular growth technologies had been pretty much ubiquitous, and, competition-wise, the Beef Corporation had been at the top of the pile.  But that hadn’t meant that there wasn’t untapped awesomeness yet to come.  Gene knew, deep inside, that she was finally on the right path.  Her music, her voice, her song-writing skills, coupled with Royston’s PR know-how, and his company’s unparalleled expertise in the field – what could possibly go wrong?

As she’d left the MegaConvenience Friends Plus, lighter in hand, Gene couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear, humming a little tune.  A tune that would, one day, turn into her biggest hit single, and reach the ears of millions.

(Of course, she hadn’t known that at the time.  But even if she had’ve, her smile couldn’t have been wider.)

ARCHIVE: Collected (and Rejected) Media Empire Joke Archive

Over the many many years I've been doing this writing thing, by far the longest and most powerful collaboration I've been a part of has been with my dear old friend Warwick Holt.  I met him when I was 18, fresh out of high school, and almost immediately we became firm friends, bonding over comedy, prog-rock, and copious substance abuse.  He was writing and performing comedy on 3PBSFM's Sunday radio show 'Laugh, You Bastards', and I was writing strange novels and sketches and short stories.  When Peter Tatchell left the radio show, Wok was quick to invite me into the fold, and we really haven't looked back: it was together that we first wrote for 'The Glass House', 'The Side Show', and 'Good News Week', and we're still working together today (on various screenplays and series and animation ideas and feature scripts that will, ideally, eventually actually see the green light of day).

(We were also in a band once, a chaotic piece of frenzied nonsense called 'Lump Ump Mump Pump', often abbreviated to L.U.M.P, the less about which is spoken, the better.)

Anyway.  Point is, as we churned out gag after gag for the Paul McDermotts and Wil Andersons of the world, the lovely Mr Holt collected and displayed our raw input, revealing our comedic grist for everyone to see, on his Media Empire website.  This unedited, unexpurgated, and frequently unfunny collection of raw proto-comedic chaff is basically a window into what we did day after day.  We'd be given a news story / topic in the morning by head writer (Australia's most awarded comic wordsmith) Ian Simmons, and Wok and I would just crank out as many possible jokes about said topic as possible (bouncing ideas off each other in frequent document swaps), and send 'em back at the end of the day.  Because it was almost impossible to know what jokes would work and what wouldn't (sometimes a joke would be so bad that it became funny again, or so wrong that it would flex back into rightness), Wok and I would just blitz poor Ian with pages and pages of potential.  Our mantra was 'Quantity Street' (remember those assorted chocolates called 'Quality Street'? No? Well, let's move on then).  It's a strange job, really, knowing that 90-95% of what you're writing is a waste of everyone's time—a particular story that made it to air might have 4 or 5 jokes, total, and here we were, cranking out pages and pages of the things—but it's ultimately satisfying, and very very fun.

So.  Here, then, are the collected raw jokes that went into our years at the GNW coalface—the jokes that made it to air, plus all the jokes that didn't.  Read them and weep.  I know I do.

WARNING: only read these if you're really really determined to wade through the chaffiest chaff and the gristiest grist in some kind of behind-the-scenes glimpse into why these shows have dedicated editors.  This shit is unpolished, unperformed, and mostly rejected.  Even the hilarious stuff is massively dated.  Seriously, I am in two minds about even sharing this archive of turds; part of me thinks we should forget this stuff ever existed and just focus on the brightness of the future.  Read at your own risk, is what I'm saying.  Go in with your expectations lowered; around ankle-height is appropriate.  Okay, well, I've warned you all I can.  May you make it back out alive.  

The Archives of Doom.

PS: The Media Empire Archive is incomplete, I think: as far as I can tell, it doesn't include the sketches we came up with for the miserably unsuccessful and tragically misguided (and executively-compromised) 'Good News World'.  This is, all things considered, probably okay.   (Nor, of course, does the Media Empire Archive contain any of the sketches I created for 'Wednesday Night Fever', as that had nothing to do with Wok, and Media Empire is his baby, really.  Which, given the universal hatred and scorn WNF attracted in its short time on air, is again probably okay.)

REVIEW: Kine - Meditations in April Green

A review of balls-trippin', trance-inducin', psych-drone-experimentin' group 'Kine', written for Heathen Harvest, and edited by Sage Weatherford.  He changed the simple and straightforward 'Note' to 'Author's note', which seems to me to call into question the rest of the article's authorship; plus instead of the simple and straightforward 'Oh, and what's a garrahand?', he changed it to 'Oh, and are you asking yourself, what’s a garrahand?', which sounds clunky to my ears.  But I can forgive both of these unexpected quirky editorial decisions because he's generally such a nice chap.

"[T]hat’s what proper improvised experimentation is about: leaping into the void without a parachute and trusting that you and your companions have, through years of tireless practise and perseverance, actually grown wings." 

Kine - Meditations in April Green