Just a few months ago I remember having the realisation that I have NEVER missed a flight in my life. What did I do with that realisation? I began boasting to everybody with total cockiness about my achievement. What happened just weeks later? I missed a flight. UHUH.
Unfortunately I don’t have a great or interesting excuse. No, I wasn’t incoherently drunk. No, I didn’t get stuck on a train during a bomb scare. No, I wasn’t kidnapped by a creepy lunatic. I just didn’t give myself enough time. BORINGGGG.
Anyway, for the first time in 4 years I have managed to park my arse in my own amazing country Australia for longer than just a few months.
In that time I have completely enjoyed holidaying in my own backyard, cruising around the countryside, hanging with my fellow bogans.
In May I returned to my home town Alice Springs to earn a bit of cash and hang out with the desert rats. It was miserably cold, I was working a ridiculous amount of hours, but I got to catch up with the people that I know best: my fellow pisshead buddies who somehow manage to be the worst influences of my life. At least this trip I came out with no injuries. I didn’t lose any more teeth face planting on a coffee table. That can only be a good thing!
After Alice Springs I headed up & over to Cairns in the beautiful Tropical North. I decided I needed a “home base” where I could gather my belongings (which are all over Aus!) and somewhere to call home for the first time in years.
I happily settled in, pimped my room, but within 2 weeks I was off on the other side of the country. I visited Perth for a week… drank for most of it, caught up with my wonderful Martha and then back home again.
I just started to get into the swing of things again and then I was off down South to Melbourne via Brisbane. I had a night in Brisvegas before my flight out and that’s where I missed that damn flight. Never mind though, luckily I have a bloody great friend who works at the airline who, not only changed it, but rewarded me by putting me in the very front row. Being rewarded for missing flights? I could get used to that! And boy, is it another world up there in that beautiful front row. On first, off first, no screaming kids, no abusive alcoholics, extra leg room & if you’re bored you can watch the hostess do her thang! (Which I find rather amusing… Oh and I might have just been checking she did everything right to ensure we didn’t fall out of the sky!)
I got to Melbourne and despite the cold I had a bloody amazing 3 weeks! I was staying with my insane mate Wayno and a couple of the boys from the band Zenith ASP. You could say my health wasn’t at its finest, being in all that excitement with a Bottlo so close by. I had a pimple that lasted almost 3 weeks! It was the size of a small planet… I was told it needed its own postcode. UGH.
I met a fellow female-boob-lover who obviously I became instant friends with. On one beautiful Sunday we decided to make a boob cake. Yes, a boob cake! Delicious. It took about 6 hours of cooking and preparation and icing. It was indeed a marvelous cake!
Some of my girls came over from Adelaide for a night. We had a bridesmaid fitting first thing on Saturday morning.. It appears I was still drunk from the 3 bottles of red wine I drank the night before. As soon as the fitting was over it was back to the pub and it was a crazy 24 hours that followed! We had a hotel room in the city that looked like a scene from The Hangover the next morning! Who would have known a bunch of girls could be so feral?
The next weekend some friends were over from Alice Springs so we went to see a game of AFL (for my international fans AFL is Australian Football League… And not football as in “soccer” either.)
That night was the finale of my trip (and the reason I went down to Melbourne) when Zenith ASP launched their brand new album! We pre-drank in the city at a hotel my friends were staying at and then headed off on the train to the venue. We were stopped half way and pulled off the train by police who suspected the “brown coloured water” in the water bottle, was in fact, not water.
After they dicked around for what seemed like forever we were off on our way again. A few trains, a few buses and a taxi and we finally made it!
For some reason that night, my friends Abbie, Ria and I decided that it would be so super awesome to head-bang. Well, I don’t even know if you would call it head-banging. It was more like throwing your head down and then whirling it around repeatedly and sporadically. I wondered why later my head felt so heavy and as if it wasn’t attached to my neck anymore. It wasn’t until the next day when the hangover wore off that I realised I had done some serious damage!
Anyway, after the gig was over I somehow found myself in the boot of someones car for what seemed like an eternity on the way to the city! Luckily I had company as my mate and I both couldn’t fit in the front.
The rest of the night was all just a blur of awesomeness and at 5.30am a friend and I wound up in a Chinese restaurant eating peking duck and miso soup. Hmmm.
I retreated back to the hotel at about 6am and discovered that not only did I not have a key, but my girls had kindly locked me out and could also not hear me knocking. On top of that, Carmen had lost her phone during the night and I didn’t have Michelle’s number. Would have been handy if the receptionist was doing HER JOB and was manning the check-in desk. I exhausted every option to get into that damn room, but in the end I just decided to lay down in the corridor and go to sleep. I was fully tired man!
I had a glorious sleep for about an hour, but when I woke I realised people would soon be getting up to start their days and I wasn’t sure if I could deal with that kind of public humiliation that early in the morning. I finally found the receptionist who claimed she had been there “the whole time.” Yeah, right.
Anyway, she gave me a key. Hurra! I made it into the room and onto the couch and slipped into a lovely little coma.
Sunday was the worst hangover of my life and on Monday I flew back to Cairns and reality only to discover I needed some urgent attention on my neck. It wasn’t ideal explaining to the Osteopath how I got this injury, let alone the first one that caused this fragile-neck-thing 2 years earlier. “Yes, well 2 years ago I was drunk and I fell down a bottom step. Nope, not the steps. Just A step.” “This injury? Yes, I was head-banging at a friends gig….drunk.”
I returned old & frail, injured & torn, but what a bloody great trip! I lurvvvve you Melbourne!
