Is this anything?
Scenes, snippets, and snafus
There’s a note on my phone titled, ‘Is this anything?’ where I write down the little weird things that happen to me. That happen to everyone, I’m sure. The toaster shooting bread straight onto the plate. A neighbour's loud and shockingly heated argument about what the best kind of cheese for a charcuterie board is (Gouda, apparently). A fluffy white cat purring and following me up the street, only to scramble desperately up a tree when I turned to him and said, politely I thought, ‘Can I help you, Mr Cat?’
That kind of thing.
The scenes tend to lack the length and the indefinable All My Eggs je ne sai quoi to turn into a full story. But when I read through the note, I felt that the contextless scenes became a story unto themselves. At any rate, it saves me the trouble of writing something from scratch—all I had to do was remove the really deeply personally embarrassing stuff and fix the typos. Most of the typos, anyway. Enjoy.
There is a young woman sitting behind us at Wicked: The Musical who literally slaps her knee when she laughs. It’s concussive. Resonant. Painful? And often slightly out of sync with when the actual joke lands.
At the first trill of the piano of each new musical number she will say. ‘Oh, yes, now this is going to be good.’ She knows every word of every song and will remark loudly on the staircase on the way out that she felt there were one or two members of the ensemble who had ‘more to give.’
I have a catastrophic computer failure at work. Something about a Boot Configuration—the bottom of the laptop was exactly as hot as a plate in a restaurant that a waiter tells you not to touch because it’s so hot. I’m worried it’s a fire hazard. Never in all my life have I met a computer with a more total inability to restart. Finally, after an hour or so, I get to a blue screen that shows an actual old school punctuation sad face =( and large white text that reads ‘Something went wrong!’
No kidding.
I call IT. The English guy who answers speaks as if he is peering down at me through a pair of Opera Glasses. He goes so far as to suggest that I have not held down the power button for long enough. I have. He suspects I must have held down the power button for too long, then. I didn’t. He even asks if I’m ‘really sure’ that the ‘machine’ is actually ‘plugged in.’ It is. I start to explain that the power cord is now also hot to the touch, but he suddenly interrupts me and says, ‘Ah. I see. You’re in the Inner West?’ I am stumped by this one. I ask, guardedly, if he has triangulated the call? He says no, he just heard an aeroplane on my end of the phone and thought it ‘sounded low.’ I laugh and say I didn’t even notice it. He laughs and says that his friend who lives in the Inner West is the exact same. ‘I suppose you get used to it!’ he cries. Somehow the ice between us is broken. We are comrades? Pals! Fierce, fierce friends. ‘We’ll get you a new machine, Angus!’ he decrees, all sunshine and rainbows, and then we hang up.
Five minutes later, the IT guy pocket dials me. This feels wrong in all kinds of ways. I say ‘Hello?’ a few times but get nothing back except for pocket rustling. I can hear distant, chipper, vaguely British whistling, and then he unleashes an almighty, extremely wet sneeze. I say, ‘Bless you!’ from his pocket. He lets out a little yelp. Scrambles. Terminates the call.
My new laptop works great.
There is a woman on the train at Town Hall at 6:30 p.m. on a Wednesday with a genuinely stupefying quantity of big, bright, love-themed balloons. Like, it’s a tie-them-to-a-chair-and-float-away amount of balloons. Like, potentially lethal amounts of helium if they all burst. Even though she’s pulling firmly on the many (many) strings, the balloons are in disarray around the carriage, all along the roof, bobbing against the backs and faces of late-peak hour commuters who are all for some reason scrolling on their phones instead of drinking in the veritable cornucopia of red and white and heart shaped air bubbles pulling taut on golden twine. I make refracted, bulbous eye contact with the woman through a light silver balloon and I smile sheepishly. As if I’m the one that’s being weird. I alight at central with moderate (but fun) difficulty.
My phone is slowly dying one overhead baggage compartment and two zip pockets away. I’m trying to live in the moment more. For the plane ride at least. There is turbulence. I’m looking at my book but I wouldn’t call it reading. I’m actually watching Maddie watch Meg 2: The Trench on her phone with no subtitles in my peripheral vision, and three gigantic prehistoric sharks have just started totally going to town on a picturesque beach resort. Chomping tourists. Gobbling up entire piers. One of the camera angles is from inside the shark’s mouth—good heavens. This turns out to be a shockingly compelling and frankly hypnotic way to watch what I’m assured is a very bad movie indeed, plot- and dialogue-wise. We are flying above a layer of scrambled egg clouds. I can actually feel the knees of the guy behind me digging into my lower back through the seat. Living in the moment is so boring it hurts. Wow these sharks are hungry. I tear my eyes away from the phone. Try to get it together. I beam my eyes directly at the ink on the page and I compel myself to READ. The letters look like heiroglyphs. More turbulence. I need to go to the bathroom but there’s a drinks service either side of me. Maddie taps me on the arm and rewinds to Jason Statham launching an explosive-tipped trident into the eye of one of the mega sharks from a moving jetski. I think I know how he feels.
Waiting for takeaway souvlaki on a Friday night on King Street, two young, boisterous and extremely well dressed young men walk past. All I hear of their conversation is:
Man 1: Wait, you mean like lentils lentils?
Man 2: Yeah man.
Man 1: Shiiiiiit.
Maddie found a couch on Facebook Marketplace. Vintage. All pink. Plush coverings. Free pickup. Say less.
We hire a van and drive west south west through the tunnel. It is 42°C in Liverpool. Fan forced. To stand in the light of the sun on the curb of the guy’s house is to stand on the inside of a flood-lit oven—a thick, complicated and distressing heat rolls through in waves with each unanswered ring of the doorbell.
Eventually the seller says, via text, that he’s at Westfield, but to just go ahead and take the couch, he doesn’t mind. It’s already outside. In the front yard we find one jetski. Two cars, one undrivable. Shin high grass. Tables and chairs and suitcases and miscellaneous junk that is too obviously junk to even give away on the internet for free. We text to ask where the couches are and he says what do you mean, just out the front. Right there on the lawn he reckons. Umm. Are we dumb or is he dumb? Maddie sends a picture of the couchless wild grass and he says back, ‘Wait’ and then ‘wtf, let me call my mum’ and then a bit later again, ‘so, you come far?’
It appears that in a window of no more than ten minutes between the seller’s departure for Westfield and our arrival at his house, on what must have been close to Sydney’s worst couch moving weather in recorded history, some opportunistic furniture mogul managed to load and flee with a humongous, pink three-piece couch set. This is a weird one to stomach on the long drive home.
There’s a place around the corner from the office that does really good fried rice. Oily, light, mouth watering fried rice. The broccoli is a rich emerald green and juicy and salty—but not like gah that’s so salty salty. The broccoli packs punch. Don’t get me started on the tofu. I sit on a bench outside the office and inhale it while I read. It’s hard to hold the book and the biodegradable plastic spork without losing any precious grains of rice, so I crook my knees up and wedge my elbows in there and get both the book and the plastic container as physically close to my face as possible. I’m hauling fried rice into my wide open mouth as if it were coal being shovelled into a bottomless fire.
When I get back to my desk, feeling, for some reason, profoundly digestively ill, a no nonsense colleague informs me that to ‘the crowd’ it looked like I was eating my book.
The tailor does not hear me enter over the sound of his machine. I wait, admiring his silks. The yarn looks rich and soft and spans the full spectrum of colour. Too much time passes. I’m so close to him that I fear that any word I say will send him jumping through the roof, and a whole minute's worth of morbid sewing machine accident fantasies runs through my mind. I clear my throat to no avail. I whisper, ‘Excuse me.’ Nada. Finally, I leave the shop and then come back in, treading heavily. Still nothing. I cough. I laugh at attempts to make myself sneeze. Finally the tailor looks up at me as if I am the man he knows best in the world, as if I will be there on his dying day. ‘Ah. There you are,’ he says. ‘Sorry. I was lost in a thread.’
Thanks Gus!
Very entertaining as always.
And so relatable (it's almost scary)!