The Dark Emporium of Earthly Delights

The lady sitting next to me in the library is typing even more frantically than I am. Her canvas satchel is emblazoned with the Harvard crest and it reads ‘Harvard School of Public Health’. I’m tempted to distract her by getting an educated opinion of Perth’s chances during a zombie pandemic.

My own conclusion is that we’d be more or less fucked, due to the relative nonexistence of firearms and edged weapons in Australian cities. I guess I would just have to use the hatchet in my room, or maybe I’d loan a cricket bat from a friend, apologising later for the nails that I would embed in its surface.

It’s also worth noting that whilst I am an avid firearm enthusiast, I do believe that this is a good thing. I would not vote in favour of any legislation that would increase in any way the circulation of firearms within the general (and mostly stupid/irresponsible) public. We have enough issues here with violent crime and the last thing we need is wankers wielding 9mm Glocks instead of screwdrivers and jelly-hewn dildos. I’ve always been bemused by the American response to this issue which is basically ’if there is violent firearm-assisted crime, then allow people to protect themselves with firearms of their own’. It reminds me of a liesure poster I saw at uni during semester 2 last year: ‘LIESURE: Finally, a campus group dedicated to solving UWA’s bear problem - introduce bigger bears to kill the bears’.

Still, I do occasionally have vivid dreams where I am operating automatic weapons in some remote location within the Australian ‘outback’ (a fancy word we use to describe the barren and desolate shit holes that are our parched deserts). My P.Js are always covered in semen upon waking up from such dreams.

‘This girlfriend of yours is clearly an amazing women to have captured you. What are her secrets?!’ - The awesome Schwartz

Well what can I say? She discreetly perved on me whilst we were strangers on the bus - right at the start of the first day of our ‘freshman year’ at University. Then I appeared rather coincidentally in 3/4 of her lectures, wearing a semi-translucent shirt with roses on it. She did some detective work and divined all of my classes and covertly plotted to appear in as many of them as possible whilst ensuring we’d continually ‘bump’ into each other ‘randomly’. We became close friends, started getting comfortable, and then….

and then…

“Hahahaha, did you hear what Tracy said about us? She thinks we’re going to end up dating… I mean, how ridiculous is that? We’re just friends!” (I still give her shit for this one).

Now my memory is a bit hazy, but a few days later we went to a park by the Swan River on a Saturday, rolled around in the grass like juveniles and, as the evening wore on, I wordlessly placed her hand on my chest, clasping it with my own. My heart was thumping about as fast as a death-metal kickdrum. Before she could figure out what the hell I was doing, I planted one on her lips and she didn’t blow her rape whistle. Then again she didn’t kiss back, at all. She just… kind of did nothing really, but she seemed cautiously happy afterwards.

Yeah, we kind of skipped the whole ‘will you go out with me phase’ and just cut to the chase, so there was no linear dating protocol awkwardness. After that it was pretty much a full night of non-stop making out after a viewing of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. And it’s pretty much been non-stop making out ever since - much to the revulsion of friends.

As for her secret… erm, she has eight nipples! It’s a trait she inherited from her brood mother, who sired a whopping 5 children. I have to wear a hazmat’ suit whenever I visit her residence, and I always have a cattle-prod with me at all times.

I kid. I think we were both very attracted to each other and everyone but us seemed to know what was just around the corner. No secrets really, just a bit of cloak and dagger and some smooth moves!

YeeeeeeahsoIsupposeit’sbeenalongtimecoming… but I knew I would do it sooner or later. It’s funny I suppose, as it seems to represent yet another chunk that crumbled off the hull of my inexorably eroding heterosexuality. But alas, my narcissism, exhibitionist tendencies, and my total indifference to the homophobic witch-hunting that I’m occasionally subjected to… they all all won out in the end.

I can almost smell the brimstone on Facebook.

I really lament the fact that I live in city where 90% of the male population is so insecure about their masculinity that they feel the need to lash out against all males with the balls to wear something pink or daring. I can’t imagine what it must be like sometimes for my gay friends. And if you are a lesbian or a bisexual female, shut up - people think it’s ‘hot’ when you kiss! 

The macho culture that is so deeply entrenched here must be a remnant of our convict past, or maybe it’s a collective guilty-conscious built around the sodomy that must have been rampant in the old colonial gaols. 

In Perth you are gay if you are a male and:

• If you wear pink
• If you own any clothing that is semi-transluscent
• If you do not enjoy beer
• If you are not zealously obsessed with that god-awful ‘sport’, AFL
• If you wear any sort of leather, other than that which occurs on shoes
• If you wear well-fitted clothing
• If you so much as mention gay people or talk about homosexuality with anything other than a scornful rhetoric

Yeah, I guess I am pretty gay, by these definitions. According to Schwartz, I might actually be ‘the only straight male on Tumblr’. Come to think of it, none of my male Australian friends have a Tumblr…

Then again, even my girlfriend thinks I am gay.

If you wore socks and shoes on your hands as you do on your feet, would your hands stink as your feet would on a hot summer’s day?