Category — Tales from the Dark Side

+ I saw Ides of March last week and the more I think about it, the more I realise how clever the script is. Ides/Ida, the double crossing, the themes of loyalty and betrayal, how sometimes an act of betrayal can be the ultimate show of loyalty. Clooney did a great job of directing, espcially the last shot of Gosling, his pupils dilated, unblinking as the camera quietly envelops his face. It made me want to watch The War Room and West Wing and read All The President’s Men again.

+ I wrote a few pieces about our US trip for  Crikey and they’ve started to go up, along with some photos. The first one is about the time we spent in Death Valley and the second is about Halloween in Salt Lake City.

+ There are four sleeps until I go to Melbourne to see Tom Stoppard and Neil Gaiman, which is pretty much all that’s keeping me from going insane in between now and Thursday when if I’m not finished packing my life into boxes, I’m in a huge trouble with my parents, my siblings, in-law siblings, the removalists, my new housemate, my real estate agent, friends, enemies, and my cat. You would think this would be motivation enough, but you’re looking at a person who sat frozen in fear (read: asleep on the couch and waking up in huge fits of panic, which I dealt with by falling into more restless sleep, followed by waking up in huge fits of panic and repeat) on my couch yesterday and actually started talking aloud to the cat (read: to myself, but I have a cat so I can pretend at least I was talking to her) about how it was all going to be okay. I think I have learnt a lesson in all of this: I really don’t like moving.

This will be the 18th place I have lived. That means on average I have moved every 0.6 years of my life. That’s a lot of packing and unpacking of boxes. I always manage to move in summer. After years of roping friends in to help with promises of pizza and beer, grossing them out with a taxidermied deer head with a very full set of antlers and stressing them out with copious long-winded emails detailing how I imagine the move will pan out, I’ve decided to use removalists for the second time. Sure, they might smell pretty bad and be grossed out by your taxidermied deer head with a very full set of antlers, but you’re paying them, so if it can be lifted, they pretty much have to lift it.

Anyway, it’s enough to drive me to drink, which is why I was extra special happy to come across a bottle of gin yesterday. So tonight I am going to drink it. And pack my clothes. And cry a little.

See you on the flip side, punks!

When I got back from the States, I felt at a bit of a loss. I’d spent a year saving for the trip – missing nights out, not buying clothes or shoes, not going to many gigs or movies, constantly broke at the end of each week and all of a sudden it was over and I’d had an amazing time but I’d never considered what I’d do when I got back. Add to that Sydney’s decision to revert to rainy winter weather and my return to the routine of work and rent paying and grocery shopping, and I was feeling a bit off-kilter, which was frustrating because I’m actually really happy right now.

One night I was sitting in my lounge room and I decided that I own too much stuff and that I wanted to rid myself of things I had no attachment to, so I started throwing stuff away. Anything that wasn’t inherently “me” anymore was getting tossed. It felt good and I made a plan to do one room of my unit each week until the end of the year, when I’d be left with just the things I really wanted. Like porcelain heads of sleeping baby dolls. And a statue of a sheep wearing black shades to protect his eyes from the glare of a nuclear explosion. Just, you know, the bare minimals.

On Monday night I was idly looking at Facebook when I noticed the friend of a friend had posted that she needed a flatmate for a house in Newtown at a rent significantly lower than I currently pay.

I am not a spontaneous person. It’s amazing I even made it to the States, considering Fiona had to patiently explain to me that people choose to travel all the time and it was okay to say I was going to. In the past, I haven’t coped with change very well and I really have loved living alone, but my rent is exorbitant and I miss being the socially gregarious person I was last time I lived in a share-house. I also want to go back to the US as soon as possible, to the South and to New York City. I did a few quick calculations and on the rent I’d save alone, I could spent another month in the US this time next year. So I messaged her, ending with ‘I also have a cat, she’s a totally indoors cat and I know that might be a deal-breaker, so I completely understand if you want to give it a miss’, not really expecting to ever hear back from her.

A few hours later and we’d planned for me to go over on Tuesday night.

Half an hour after I walked through her door, she’s messaged the other people interested in the room to say I was going to take it.

In three weeks time I’m leaving the suburb I’ve lived in for about six years, to share-house for the first time since uni, in a suburb closer to the city, surrounded by cafes and pubs and friends who live nearby and I can’t take most of my stuff with me, so I’m being forced to leave almost everything behind, which is actually really exhilarating.

I just have a great feeling about 2012. In 2010 I learnt a lot about myself and this year I’ve struggled with what all of that meant, and while it hasn’t been fun at times, I think it’s all been building to something and that thing might be finally coming into my own next year. And being able to afford jewelry made from human teeth.

Last week I turned 29/old. I didn’t want to make a big deal of it because I’m very elderly and because we leave for the States so soon that I felt the familiar pang of Catholic guilt at the thought of having a huge blow out so close to the trip. Why should people celebrate me when I have this awesome, huge trip coming up? I am like your superstitious grandmother, I don’t like to have too much fun in a short space of time, lest I accidentally will something to go wrong.

Turns out it was a pretty perfect day, regardless. I arrived at work to find the gorgeous flame-haired Nomes waiting outside for me with flowers from her and Monsieur Gorman. Lesson: if you want amazing flowers, be friends with lawyers, they have good taste. The bouquet was so huge I had nowhere to put it other than the kitchen, and so they’ve been slowly blooming (and smelling amazing) for a week now and I stand and enjoy them every morning while I wait for my toast to cook and The Wuz to have the ten minutes of quiet time under the sink that she demands, daily.

Also waiting at work was a cupcake of love, from Ms Michelle. I’d never had red velvet before, because I don’t think myself deserving of amazing food items (really, I am exactly like your emotionally manipulative grandmother, you know the type, a total Livia Soprano).

I’d asked Fi for suggestions for somewhere for dinner because if there’s two things Fiona is good at, it’s finding amazing places for dinner and finding me photos of Bruce Springsteen that hint at his having pubic hair. One of the places she suggested was The Dip, at the back of GOODGOD, which looked amazing. Hot-dogs! Pulled pork nachos! Cocktail jugs! Deep friend coke sundaes! My clogged arteries gave a weak pulse of joy, just looking at the menu. It did not disappoint.

It really was amazing. I can wholeheartedly recommend the hand-cut regular and salsa fries, the Lev’s Dawg and the jugs of Cherry Moon and The Coaster cocktails. Thanks to all who came along, it was a rad night.

You know those people (they are usually very attractive people, so you would have noticed them) who have amazing luck with gigs? Somehow they’re tapped into the vein that pumps out names of bands that you’re going to love way off in the future and they see them in some small, smokey bar that serves amazing whiskey concoctions and they stand by the stage, having a numinous experience that you’ll never understand, because by the time you hear of this band, they’ll have just toured the city you live in and you missed them, or they’ll tour when you’re flat broke, or they’ll be in the US at the same time as you are, but their tour will be two weeks ahead of you at every stop.

Clearly I am not the former kind of person, I am the latter.

I have terrible luck with gigs generally. The only reason I ever see gigs these days is because someone manages to penetrate the concrete fog of work that’s enveloped me for the last six months, long enough to tell me I’d like this band or musician and they’ve bought me a ticket and could I please put money in their bank account. I nod sternly, before the chain around my neck that is attached to my computer, snaps my head back to do some more work.

Not this time. Not today. Turns out that one of the last bands on my current ‘Would Sell My Soul and Your Soul and Maybe My Mother’s Soul’ list is going to be in Vegas the first night we are:

Shellac? For $10?

Bless me Father for I have sinned.

Before I begin, there are two things you need to know:

1 – I have a horrendous history of talking to celebrities/”celebrities”. I should have learnt my lesson long before I decided to talk to Neil Hamburger. There is nothing to discuss with someone you have nothing in common with except their life work. There is only one opening line: “I like your music/films/jokes about shit and vaginas”. Then what? They stand there looking like they’ve heard the same thing one million times already because they have heard the same thing one million times already. Then you both stand there feeling like the air has been sucked out of the room and then you turn red, awkwardly laugh and say ‘Oh gosh! I bet you’ve heard that one million times before!’ except you’re dying of nerves, so you probably actually say ‘Oh gash! I bort you’ve heard that one billion tomes before!’

2 – Neil Hamburger, if you are unfamiliar, makes jokes about shit and vaginas. Together. With added Julia Roberts. It should not be possible to shame yourself in front of this man. This man’s entire career is based around the fact that there is nothing he won’t say aloud. Also, hacking coughs.

I discovered Neil Hamburger through an old manfriend, who sold himself as having encyclopedic  knowledge about obtuse music and/or pop culture and I fell for it hook, line and sinker and for the most part, it served me well.

We used to see Neil quite often, either opening for some band, or random stand ups he’d do in weird little pubs. Usually he would perform after Dr El Suavo who is a magician who once stroked my old manfriend’s face with a very realistic and large dildo as part of his act. Actually, I believe it may have been on this night that I shamed myself. Let me set the scene:

We are at a random pub in the Blue Mountains. Dr El Suavo is performing magic onstage, before stalking the crowd looking for someone to “volunteer”. It is one of my greatest fears to be chosen to “volunteer”, so imagine my horror when this maniac circled me as the pub’s PA played a very pornographic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Also, I think the good Doctor was drunk. I was sober and terrified and of course, he picked me, dragged me onstage, put a bondage mask on me and a giant hat shaped like a condom and made me buckle him into a straight jacket. I didn’t realise I had a giant condom on my head and as I wept behind my mask, I gently stroked it, assuming it was just your run-of-the-mill hat. The crowd laughed. My manfriend looked at me condescendingly. The Doctor flailed around, jerking around until he was out of the jacket and then released me into the crowd, where I took my seat, broken and was offered no sympathy from my manfriend. The Doctor circled us again, this time wielding a giant, very realistic dildo. My legs instinctively clamped shut and I started to sweat. He sneered at me, and then, almost lovingly, stroked the side of my manfriend’s face with the dildo, the tender part of the face, right up close to the mouth. It was my turn to look on condescendingly.

It was in this atmosphere that Neil Hamburger took the stage. If you’ve never seen Neil, I won’t spoil it other than to say his purpose is to make your feel incredibly uncomfortable, and it works best when most of the audience have no idea who he is, which was the case this night. He slayed them, if by slayed you mean he insulted a large portion of the room and spent a large chunk of his allotted time hacking his guts up louder than the hecklers could heckle. It was brilliant.

After the show, he was sitting on the stage, signing things and chatting to the crowd and I thought to myself, well, I’ve had a huge condom on my head, a stranger put me in a bondage mask before I strapped him into a straight jacket and my manfriend had a plastic penis very close to his mouth. What harm could there be in making some small talk with a celebrity on a night like this?!

The answer to this question should have been ‘there is so much harm that will come from talking to anyone in this atmosphere’, but instead we approached the stage and fuelled by a masochistic desire to make some connection with this man whose entire existence was designed to repel me, I spoke.

‘I find you really funny!’ said Julia to the comedian.

Ah, we were off to a great start.

He looked at me through huge, dirty glasses and from beneath a greasy comb-over. I panicked and grasped at straws, both physically and mentally, as a small, silent crowd of fellow Neil Hamburgerites looked on, uneasy as this tall, red, awkward woman stuttered at their idol. Suddenly it came to me. My manfriend had told me that the man behind the Neil Hamburger persona co-owned Ipecac Records, whose news section I found mildly amusing. I lie. I didn’t even find it mildy amusing, it had maybe made me smile once. I was about to lie to a celebrity.

‘You’re record lable’s site made me laugh the other day!’

‘Really? Which part?’

‘The news section mostly, you know, on Ipecac?’

This is the part where I should have taken the nearest beer bottle, broken it, inserted it through the front of my throat and removed my voice box, taken my voice box into the ladies bathroom and flushed it down the toilet. Never, never act like a know-it-all fanboy douche bag. Do not name drop.

‘Hmm…I don’t really have much to do with that website actually. Here! Have this sticker!’

The worst part about this story was that while I walked away, kicking myself for going the fanboy douch bag option, it wasn’t until years later that I made the most horrifying discovery of all: the reason Neil Hamburger was (admittedly very politely) confused by my Ipecac reference was because Neil Hamburger is played by Gregg Turkington. Ipecac Recordings was co-founded by Greg Werckman. My blood went cold when I realised this and I looked at my soon-to-be-ex-manfriend with disgust.

It would be like if someone left a comment here, congratulating me on my Photoshopping skills over at Perez Hilton because they assumed that as our names shared a few letters and our Photoshopping skills both extend to drawing white penises next to people’s faces, we must be the same person.

I shared this story, which I have honestly never been able to bring myself to tell anyone before, because my friend Pete ran a half marathon on the weekend and I promised that if he raised $600 for The Black Dog Institute, which helps those with depression, I would write about being the world’s most giant loser.  So there you have it, in all its horror.

The other day I was thinking about my first manfriend.

When we first met, I was 16 and he was somewhere in his mid-20s. He drove a station wagon with blinds in the back and was in a band and lived in a terrace on the highway with two other men, also in various small country town metal bands.

I never really wanted a manfriend. All my friends had manfriends and they seemed like a lot of hassle. Their problems became your problems, their family hated you, you couldn’t stand their mum. I had other things on my mind, like getting my licence and sneaking into pubs and hiding my braces while I ordered Malibu and Cokes, lugging my mum’s vinyl collection to the local community radio station to play with a much older guy who was looking to be some sort of musical mentor to me (and who would years later describe me as ‘the nicest person he’d ever met’. This is wildly inaccurate) and sitting in my room listening to Hole, or going to see bands, or trying not to accidentally kill myself every time I opened my cupboard and five years worth of Rolling Stones fell out.

Then one night I was at a party and this older guy, whose friends mercilessly mocked me (and with good reason. I used to watch their band rehearse by sneaking through their yard and watching through the window. That’s creepy right there), suddenly told me that he “liked” me and so almost as though I had nothing better to do and it didn’t make me want to stab myself in the forehead with a fork, he became my manfriend.

Turned out he was the best first manfriend I could have hoped for. He was very sweet and funny and didn’t even mind that I was heading into a horrible phase of dressing like Fred Durst when I wasn’t at school. Our relationship blossomed. There’s nothing more romantic than having to get your mum to drop you off, clad in Catholic school uniform, to your manfriend’s terrace, where you’d wave over your shoulder and skip through the front door, having arranged to be picked up or dropped home “later”. My poor mum admitted years later that she felt like a pimp. For the most part she didn’t have to worry. Once the front door closed, normally I’d head straight to the lounge room, not phased by the plumes of cigarette smoke, the Dr Evil and Metallica posters barely clinging to the walls (the terrace had a massive issue with damp), and the obligatory barely conscious stoner. I’d hop over the large hole in the kitchen floor, grab a glass of water if anyone had done any washing up recently and plop down in the couch with his housemates, whose main form of entertainment was throwing the lids of long-necks of VB behind the TV, which grew into a pile which must’ve been a few feet tall. I wasn’t even phased by the bong or the bathroom that no-one ever cleaned. This was adulthood people, these were the awesome older kids who I wanted to be like when I grew up!

We established some lovely traditions during our relationship. He used to drive me and my friends out to the boondocks and let us practise driving his car; he took me to the local prison to meet his mum (who worked there as opposed to being incarcerated there) and once a month I got to choose which centrefold he stuck up next to his bed. I think I actually initiated that one. Not the concept of the centrefold being next to his bed, I think probably a man invented that concept, but that I’d pick. My favourite was a Wizard of Oz-themed poster, where a very pert, topless Dorothy sat underneath a rainbow, cuddling a little dog. The only creepy thing about it is how non-sexual it was. I’d kneel on the bed, push hard on the edges of the newest girly poster, stand up and admire my handiwork, dust my hands off and high five the manfriend, then we’d go eat beer-battered chips.

It was so sweet, playing house!

However, all good things must come to an end, and a few months before I left high school I decided that I needed to be a single lady because I had plans to move as far away from that town as I possibly could, so I ended the relationship. I don’t think it took him long to get over me as I left home, lost my mind, cut all my own hair off and returned to town, tail between my legs and a mullet which was the result of my DIY haircut growing out. I was also still dressing like Fred Durst, so it wasn’t so much my tail between my legs as it was my wallet chain.

I see him every now and then, he has a wife and some very cute kids and a business and we do the smile and awkward wave and pretend my younger sister never accidentally got him so drunk that he passed out at our dinner table one night.

The end.

On the weekend, Fi, Marty and I decided to go on a pre-America road trip. Fi and Marty wanted to see some country sights, catch up with a friend, and cook their own steak at the pub and I wanted to prove to myself that I can actually drive and that death is not something that happens every time I get in a car. Before you judge me, tell me the last time you looked up and saw another car floating in slow motion towards your windscreen, only to just miss it and go over the top of the car you’re in. Because that happened to me once and even though no-one died ( but as the tow-truck driver who took both wrecks away cheerfully told me, it was very lucky no-one did), suddenly I became aware that driving is dangerous.  Before that night, driving for me was all country roads, windows down, stereo up loud and fishing around between my feet for the glowing red stub of a cigarette I’d just dropped. It’s semi-amazing that I didn’t cause the accident I was in, but I didn’t. I was just another victim, kid.

But I knew, a month on the road, I’d need to brush up on my skills and with my parents away and a car at my disposal, I decided to drive a bit over 500kms in two days, by myself, and show Fi and Marty some country sights at the same time. I’m all about killing multiple avian with one solid aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids.

I made three travel mixes and got very lost on the way to Fi and Marty’s, but once we were in convoy, it was all on like Donkey Kong. Here we are on the M4 Motorway. You can see Fi and Marty in front of me. This was when Fiona ‘Speedy Gonzales’ Laughton was driving and I was still finding myself floating between gears a lot, counting from one to six to figure out which gear I wanted to go into next.

After a few hours and one freezing pit stop, we hit the country roads, where I was in my element. I love less traffic and faster speed limits; however, by this stage I had discovered that I make the world’s worst travel mixes. They were so depressing, I was either sticking my head out the window to dry my tears, or falling asleep to the dulcet tones of someone moaning about unrequited love. The 45 minutes of sleep I caught up on between Lithgow and Bathurst was just what the doctor ordered.

Finally we made it to the farm, where we all immediately gave up on the idea of cooking our own steak for dinner when confronted with the judgemental eyes of some of my parent’s cattle. Who know beef could induce such feelings?*

Here I am getting reacquainted with my country roots, by throwing on a pair of manure-stained boots to go and collect firewood. That makes it sound like I’m knowledgeable about rural life and handy with an axe. Really what I mean is I threw on a pair of my dad’s manure-stained boots to walk ten mitres to the shed where there was a pile of wood he’d left there, already perfectly cut down to fire size. I totally lit that fire though and got it going. By which I mean Marty did while I stood at the side of the fire saying ‘So, Mum said this handle is like an accelerator. Push in when you want the fire to slow down … no wait. Push in if you want … I have no idea why you push this handle in’.

After we’d successfully burnt my inheritance to the ground, we went into town to the Union Bank to  drink fine wine and eat fine cheese and catch up with my friend from high school, Camille, who’s just had a baby. She left the baby at home though, which is good, because I hate drinking with babies. They can never hold their booze and always get so aggressive and threaten to glass people. Small person syndrome, babies.

After we wine and cheesed, we went to a local pub and ate the best garlic bread I’ve ever had. I wanted to sneak into the toilets with that bread and make sweet love to it and I don’t even believe in making sweet love.

Then I decided that I was going to drive home, so I stopped drinking and sat back and watched what I’m in for in Vegas as Fi and Marty gambled, drank and whooped it up. Trouble, that’s what we’re in for. I have no doubt Marty is going to win big in Vegas, and that Fi will out drink us all and join a Fleetwood Mac cover band. Meanwhile I’m all over my role as the sober girl snarling ‘When I say Coke, I mean cola!’ while getting winked at by meth heads. It’s my pretty hair that sucks them in like moths to a flame. Such pretty hair.

We got home at about 1am and watched in horror as some escaped lunatic chased the steers through the moonlit paddock, then we reclined in front of the fire with a nightcap and Marty made me sick with laughter translating some bad pickup lines I’ve had this year into German. German makes porny language sound very stern. If a German wants to have their way with you, that’s an order.

The next day they set off and I went to the Blue Mountains to visit some family before driving home.

Coming up my street, I smirked, confidently readjusted my breasts and high fived myself for overcoming my fear of driving, before  almost crashing into my own fence. Regardless, we’re chalking it up as a win kids. It was a win.

* Vegans, that’s who. Always the vegans.

Dad is renowned for two things. The first is his stubborn unwillingness to seek medical advice for any physical issue until it’s far too late. I’m not talking about niggling little issues either, I’m talking probably could use an ambulance issues. Let me illustrate by compiling the list of injuries he’s had that I can remember, where he didn’t seek immediate medical help:

• Broken back (twice). He can’t remember how he broke it on either occasion *blank face*;
• Kicked in the head by a steer, which rendered him almost unconscious and left his face mangled and bruised;
• Kicked in the knee by a bull, which splintered the bone in his knee, which gave him stabbing pain and a limp for over six months;
• Caught behind a fence which swung back on him when it was hit by a cow, when ended in broken ribs;
• Dropped a running chainsaw, which hit him in the chin, then badly burnt his stomach. The first thing he did was take a photo of his bleeding chin and send it to us, claiming Mum had hit him.

He drives Mum up the wall with his injuries, yet she’s not much better, having reattached the tip of one of her own fingers after sticking her hand under a running lawnmower.

Needless to say, I don’t call my parents expecting sympathy when I’m sick.

The second thing he’s renowned for is never discussing feelings, either his own, or yours, except on the rare events that there is a full moon in the month of August, which falls on a Friday. If you attempt to discuss feelings, you will find yourself talking to his disappearing back, as he heads outside to take a long walk in a paddock to get away from the feelings that polluted his afternoon.

The Friday just gone happened to be one of those rare occasions he wanted an insight into my life. We were chatting on the phone about how much rain they’d had and what I’d been doing at work, and in some context I mentioned the word ‘husband’.

Dad: Speaking of, when are you going to get a husband?

Me: Oh god, really? Never. I could tell you some horror stories, Dad.

Dad: … I don’t know that I really want to hear about that, thanks.

Me: No, I mean stories about men my age. Seriously, they’re not like you, they have all these feeling and they want to talk about them all the time.

Dad: Oh! That’s not good. You know what you need then? You need a country boy, they don’t have feelings.

Me: Like Farmer Wants a Wife?

Dad: Yes! Or … what industry would you say you work in?

Me: Media?

Dad: Okay, here’s an idea! Let’s pitch a show called Media Woman Wants a Husband!

Mum [in the background]: Have you ever thought that maybe Julia doesn’t want a husband?

Dad: If you don’t want a husband, that’s also fine.

Just between you and me, I think Dad would prefer I never get married so he can spare himself the horrendous shame he casts on his reputation as the Strong Silent Type, because whenever he marries off a daughter, he ends up weeping in a corner at the reception and then making long speeches about wanting grandchildren.

Don’t ever tell him I told you that.

It looks like I’m going to have to move out of my ‘hood at the end of the year, which really sucks. By then I will have lived in the same suburb, in fact, in the same three block radius of the same suburb for almost six years and I really love it.

I’ve seen the Vietnamese couple who own my closest vegetable store raise three little kids now, and I don’t even mind when they crash their trikes into me because they have parents who work long hours and they have nowhere to ride their trikes during the week but on the footpath.

Wow. That was a fond story that suddenly turned sad.

I will miss the Greek bakery where they are constantly displeased with my inability to read the Greek signage. I will miss the group of old Greek men who drink at the same café every morning. I will miss my elderly Greek neighbour who cheerfully pulls me aside to tell me things like ‘I see everyone who comes and goes from this building! You, you work very late!’ and ‘Something something something, new people in apartment two, something something, but we don’t care Julia, do we, unless it’s illegal, hahaha!’ Man I wish I knew what she’d said about those new people. For a few weeks I thought she was trying to tell me they were a gay couple, but since then I’ve seen them in the daylight and realised I had incorrectly identified them as two women.

I will miss my Vietnamese restaurant who have faithfully served me the same order for five years now without ever mentioning that maybe I should expand my diet.

I will miss the fellow commuters with whom I have silent, passive aggressive moments with every morning as we battle for the few remaining seats. I will miss Con, a local man who comes to the train station almost every morning to tell everyone when the next train is coming and sometimes hops on the train and yells the station name really loudly just before the train pulls in. I will miss the expressions on the faces of people who’ve never encountered Con and his loud voice and love of train stations before.

Sadly, I live in an awesome neighbourhood and people are moving here to bask in its awesomeness and the rents have crept up to the point where my jeans have a huge hole in the groin and I tried to pretend it was a fashion hole for as long as I could, but there’s really no escaping the fact that it’s just a hole in an old pair of jeans. I can pay my rent, or I can buy new jeans.

I’m fretting like an old woman. I have a place lined up to move into, but part of me thinks I need to suck it up and share house again to save money. Then I remember my years of share housing…

I remember the feisty South American housemate who got into bed with me on her first night in the house, lay down on my pillow, smiled and said ‘Tell me about the first time you had sex’. We’d only met that morning. In the ensuing months, her boyfriend would move in rent free, which caused her Centrelink payments to be cut, which caused her to scream at them on the phone, ‘We’re not in a relationship, we’re just having sex! Who is to say how many times you must have sex before you’re in a relationship?!’

Her most infamous moment came when she stormed through the house brandishing a razor yelling, ‘Who did use my razor?! Who did use my razor?!’ When a male housemate meekly admitted he’d used it to shave that morning, she waved it in his face and screamed ‘You use this? I shave my pussy with this!‘ which was followed by the sounds of the rest of us quietly closing our respective bedroom doors and laughing into our pillows, while he was left standing there, his face a mixture of shame and curiosity.

Then there was the housemate who would drunkenly come into the bedroom of any female housemate, pretending he’d lost his way trying to find his own bed, which led to me jumping out my bedroom window once and sleeping on the floor of a dorm room on campus.

There were couples breaking up, random overnight guests who would lead to couples breaking up, the inevitable task of mowing the lawn when it got to be about three feet tall, the seedy Sundays when everyone was too hungover to move, bills to split between housemates who pleaded ignorance about the three hour long midnight phone calls someone needed to pay for, food going missing, trying not to gag while eating a housemate’s attempt at soup, dealing with housemates who moved their beds into the lounge room to mourn a relationship in front of the TV, break-ins, the discovery that someone had been living in the garage and subsisting on cans of baked beans, cleaning a bathroom used by five people, one of whom liked to blow his nose in the shower…

Maybe share housing in my late 20s would be a really different experience, but since I last had to live with people I wasn’t dating, I’ve discovered that I don’t like wearing pants, I like leaving DVDs paused for hours, I like eating the same meal four nights in a row, singing in the shower, talking to my cat.

I would either be the overly strict housemate from hell, or the dark haired freak everyone would quietly avoid.

But I’d probably be able to buy new jeans.

As of late last week, Trip USA USA is fully booked and Team USA USA are a teeny bit excited. Flying out in October shall be Fiona, her partner Marty, my best friend Kelly and me! 

The trip itself goes a little somethin’ like this: 

Day 1: Arrive in Los Angeles after a 14 hour flight, lots of in-flight booze and probably at least one adult tantrum, thrown most likely by this six-foot taller. 

Day 2: Drive to Las Vegas and spend three nights in The Venetian, where I plan to pass my time riding gondolas and finding me an American gentleman to marry so I don’t ever have to leave. Here we also plan to shoot guns and I want to see one of the Blue Man Group, so I can yell ‘You blued yourself!’ like it’s the first time some drunk jerk tourist has thought that would be funny. 

Day 5: Drive from Vegas to Death Valley, where we’re staying overnight to join a cult take photos at sunrise. 

Day 6: Drive to Phoenix. Somewhere between Death Valley and Phoenix is where I’m going to have my second adult tantrum and demand that on the first straight piece of desert road we find, we listen to Tori Amos’s ‘A Sorta Fairytale’. What? A girl’s allowed a misty/clichéd side. 

Day 7: Drive from Phoenix to Tuson where we are staying for two nights at a place called Hotel Congress where we will be celebrating Marty’s birthday! It’s here I plan to run out of money. 

Day 9: Drive from Phoenix to Verde Valley where we are visiting the vineyard of Maynard Keenan. This will tickle my mum’s fancy: the vineyard is called Merkin Vineyards. After, we shall spend the night in Sedona, unless I get invited to join Tool, which is obviously on the cards. 

Day 10: Grand Canyon. 

Day 11: Monument Valley 

Day 12: Bryce Canyon. At this stage I pretty much guarantee I’m going to be sick of looking into things, marvelling at their expansiveness. 

Day 13: We head from Bryce Canyon to Capitol Reef National Park. At this stage we will have been in a control state for a few days. ‘Control state’ sounds much less awesome than ‘dry state’. I had to Wikipedia what that actually meant because we don’t have them in Australia. Turns out it probably doesn’t mean we’re going to have to smuggle booze into Utah, which is a shame, I had all kinds of fantasies where I played an Al Swearengen-esque character. 

Day 14: We head to the Bonneville Salt Flats. It’s a shame I’ve had to cut salt out of my life or I imagine this would be amazing. This will also be Halloween. Americans, you are not going to know what hit you. I’ve been wanting to Halloween since I was about about four (yes Henry, I did just use Halloween as a verb). 

Day 15: We’re still going to be in the heart of it, Salt Lake City itself. I’m going to go to that temple and I am going to stare at it and have my little godless mind boggled. Then we drive to Boise. I have no idea how to pronounce Boise. Boys? Pardon my ignorance. 

Day 16: We drive from Boise to Seattle. I don’t know what to expect of Seattle, but I’m excited. By this stage I will have been drinking a coffee for a few weeks (I don’t drink coffee, but it’s on my bucket list to start doing so in the US. Coffee drinkers keep telling me not to because it’s more addictive than crack and harder to give up than Lolly Gobble Bliss Bombs), so I guess I’ll be quite the pro. I think this is going to be my sitting in bars, drinking quiet beers stage of the trip. 

Day 18: We’re heading to Portland, which I am majorly excited about. I have a list of bars and things I want to see and do that’s about a mile long (eh, eh *wink* see what I did there? Talkin’ like a local!). I guess this is the part of the trip where we might catch some bands too? You Americans have no idea how cheap your live music is. 

Day 21: Portand to Medford! I don’t know what’s in Medford. Wikipedia tells me it’s about 75,000 people. I’d be interested to know what constitutes “small town America”. Would this be considered small? In Australia it wouldn’t be, the second largest city in my state is less than 300,000 people. I once lived in a town that had about 1000 people though, so when I think small I think people-don’t-like-the-new-family-in-town small. 

Day 21: San Francisco! We’ve rented a house for four days in the Haight-Ashbury district and this is the chilled part of the trip for bike rides and walking along, holding hands, smiling into each other’s faces. Also, blowing obscene amounts of cash on everything I’ve always wanted because I’ve been saving for this trip so hard that my jeans have a huge hole in the groin area and I can’t buy new ones! 

Day 25: San Fran to LAX, where we fly out the next day and I cry and start saving to come back to do the other coast and the South. 

Before then, we have to figure out what the weather’s going to be like in the States at that time of year, and I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ll be buying new reading glasses and changing my hair (which sounds suspiciously like I’m trying to make myself look unlike my passport photo), get us some bona fide American dollars, and make play lists for the road (this doesn’t extend to the music of one Bruce Springsteen, who we’re taking over on an iPod of his own, named ‘bossPod’). 

If anyone has any must sees, feel free to hit me up. 

All photos in this post are by the one-and-only Ryan Russell, and come from the author’s personal collection.