“It was too early for you to yell at someone in the Telstra store, huh?”
“Get out of my head.”
“You so want to beat on some poor bastard, don’t you?”
“Very much so.”
And she was right. I did. Very much so.
I had been in a foul and vicious mood since I got home from that virtue-signalling Cancer Council carry-on at the Grey Gums café the day before. Actually, my blood had been angered up some days before that.
The whole lead-up to those dreadful Cancer Council morning teas and the fund-raising horse-shittery that goes with them – and indeed, almost every single “charity” event that feeds off vulnerable and frightened people, funnels money into indecipherable places, and cynically cashes in on the strange Australian need to “do something about something without actually doing anything…and here, have a twenty” – angers the fuck out of me.
That fancy-dress DGR bullshit, the Black Dog wankery…you name it, I despise it and the bottomless, awareness-raising black holes everyone’s donations disappear into while simultaneously funding the organiser’s “admin costs”, and making donors feel good about themselves – I hate it all.
My wife, who has been battling cancer for 12 years, also hates it. She has seen behind the façade and she has not liked what she saw.
You wanna help people in need? Then help them. Personally and individually. Not the wretched organisations that say they help those people and raise money on their behalf, while keeping their directors swimming in donated cash which is being used as running costs. All perfectly legally, of course.
But what is legal, can certainly be immoral. So fuck all of that.
Contributing to my anger was a recent encounter with the local Telstra store, which Lynette and I visited in order to get two new phones. We last bought phones when the iPhone 6 was the nil plus ultra of communications. Mine now looks like a gibbon shat it out its bum and beat it with a rock. Hers is pristine, but prone to strange behaviours. So new phones.
The Telstra operative was able to take our money, but unable to complete the sale and give us the phones because of something described as a “switchover” issue. She explained that Telstra was between two systems, and was unable to change my address to my new one (something that has been going on for three years), and also unable to process anything she had spent the last hour uploading into the system.
She also assured us the issue would be sorted out the next day, probably, but certainly by Monday at 10am when we could collect our phones.
Another Telstra operative called me yesterday and said that there was still an issue, and that our 10am Monday appointment was now cancelled, the issue was to be “escalated”, and they would call us when the issue was no longer an issue and we could come in and get our phones.
I got that call while I was at the Grey Gums feeling my bone marrow turning into dust as I listened to some mouth-breather from a Christian motorcycle club complaining how no-one wanted to participate in the gymkhana they had not organised very well. I was going to offer to “escalate” his issue, but went and had a piss instead.
And so on and so forth, all day. I came home mad, and I went to the Telstra store at 9am so that my anger had somewhere to roost. The shop was closed. Presumably it opened at 10am.
I came home, and my wife was on me like giggling fury.
“You know that’s the only Telstra store in town?” she said.
I nodded.
“Just as long as you’re clear on that.”
“Like fucken crystal.”
“How long you plan on being the house thunderstorm?”
“As long as it takes for all the people who do wrong, and who have done me wrong, to die screaming.”
“Oh,” she said. “You’re in THAT head-space. Maybe you should go for a ride.”
“Don’t want to.”
“Since when?”
“Since you suggested it.”
“What’s it gonna take?”
“Me wearing the Tesltra cunt’s skull for a helmet and his hide for a cape. Also smoking ruins where the shop once stood.”
“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen,” she sighed.
“I know!” I snapped. “But it should! And if it did, then I would be happy. But since it won’t, I will not be happy.”
“Have you written anything today?”
I shrugged. “A bit…”
“Is it shit?” she asked.
I shrugged again.
Lynette laughed. She has this wondrous crystalline tone to her laugh. It’s like a cascade of sparkling joy. And when I am in this state it galls me like a shirt made of pig-bristles.
I’m now going to split some firewood and then go to the Tesltra store to see where the “escalation” is up to.
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