A boy was reading his favourite message board. There were lots of topics to click on, but he chose one called Describe you Close Encounters with Celebrities. Some of the stories were probably fictional accounts of netizens meeting Bill Murray. The type that had been making the rounds on the internet, talking about what a zany and unpredictable actor he was. He didn’t even have an agent you know? How did he get job when he didn’t have an agent? Who cares?

Ugh. thought the boy. People jumping on meme-wagons. He clicked on the ‘reply’ tab.

“God I’m so fucking sick that Bill Murray meme. Do you little trolls even know what movies he was in before Zombie Land?” he typed. He stopped for a second and thought before continuing.

“OT: I once saw popular musician and frequent Letterman guest John Mayer hanging outside a mall. The throngs of teeny-bobbers hadn’t recognised him yet so we shot the shit for a couple of minutes and shared a J. Cool dude but he makes shitty music.”

Then Bill Murray appeared out of nowhere and snuck up behind the boy writing on the computer. Bill Murray yanked the boy’s seat over, the boy’s fall being cushioned by semen filled tissues. Bill Murray looked over the keyboard and held the backspace button until the boy’s original message was deleted.

“I love these Bill Murray stories and think that his turn in Zombieland was nothing short of genius. Tell me more.” Bill Murray wrote into the text box.

Then Bill Murray took a knee next to the boy, who was still experiencing the fruity tingle of his could-have-been-offspring wafting up his nose, leant down and whispered in his ear “And the worst thing is nobody will ever believe you.”

Then Bill Murray rode off on an electric scooter he had somehow got into the boy’s room with a tissue stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

11:02 am  •  30 December 2011

420 monologue to your hairdresser about your adoption everyday.

10:11 am  •  30 December 2011

A one armed woman who had her other arm ripped off in a fierce animal attack (it does not matter what kind of animal it was) was buying a present for her boyfriend. It was a new iPad, and her boyfriend went with her to find the right one. They looked at all the iPads until they found one the boyfriend liked.          

They went up to pay but the woman had her arm full and couldn’t hand the man serving her Mastercard. It was over $45 so she couldn’t use that Swipe And Go thing if you were wondering why she didn’t just do that instead of going through the rigmarole of swiping and signing.

“Babe, can you hold my handbag for a second.” asked the lady as she fumbled with the task of holding three things in one hand.

“Haha, no way. I’m not that whipped. People are going to think you carry my nuts round in there with an autographed copy of The Notebook that I bought you as a surprise. I still got my dignity Sweetheart.”

Then she still bought him the iPad but he decided it was the wrong colour.

7:07 am  •  30 December 2011

420Pour one out for the young Kenyan boy who thought that Florence + the Machine’s ‘What the Water Gave Me’ was about Cholera and he’d finally found a Western pop song he could relate to.

9:19 am  •  28 December 2011

Kyle Sandilands and the fuckin’ little shit from The Slap were in a duel to see who could make it to the top of Zoo Magazine’s 100 most hated people in Australia.

It started off innocently, as so many attempts to make it to the top of the Zoo list do.  The fuckin’ little shit by hitting complex, nuanced, and well-crafted characters who walked straight off the set of an ethnic Home and Away and with a cricket bat.  Sandilands by threatening small breasted women who criticised his creative endeavours. If they were a D-Cup maybe- maybe- then Sandilands could acknowledge some constructive criticism if it came with a BJ and pat on the head- but small breasted women had no business saying anything other than “One Breast Enlargement please.”

But soon the two found traditional notions of being an asshole tiresome. Each tried to come up with more outlandish and controversial ways to alienate people. Sandilands did it because he wanted to retain his position at the top of the list, the fuckin’ little shit did because The Slap had wrapped and he had nothing else to do until the sequel was written.

Kyle Sandilands made a contraption that, when correctly placed in a city street, could flip over any bus that drove after it, killing any passengers without adequate titty cushioning. Then he tried to market it to illegal refugees that came into the country, saying that while the bus was overturned they could sneak up and pilfer its metal parts to sell back to Australians.

But then the fuckin’ little shit’s parents took him to an ANZAC day parade and the boy was allowed to sit of the top of a tank. There he had excellent field of view, and began spitting of the veterans as they marched past. Nobody could tell if it was spit on their faces or the manly tears that came with thoughts of best friends left languishing, slowly suffocating on their own blood in the middle of a Redgum song. Then the fuckin’ little shit began laughing and pretending he was Mario, jumping on people’s heads.

“YOU’RE DEAD. YOU’RE DEAD. YOU’RE DEAD.” the fuckin’ little shit yelled, as each brave veteran fell.

Kyle Sandilands heard about this while he was buying all the petrol in Australia and then charging everyone double price for it.

“Fucken’ little shit!” Sandilands yelled at the bowser head he was holding. All of his work would be in vain if this little cunt got his way. The fake job descriptions he placed on seek.com.au to give job searchers false hope (if only they knew there was no such thing as “Pudding Consultant”). The effort he put into becoming one of the most prolific bit-torrent sharers, only with of his files titled incorrectly and his MP3s encoded at 128kps. Telling everyone that Jimmy Barnes didn’t even write Working Class Man. Asking to be a guest star on the X-Factor and then called visiting superstar Avril Lavigne, therefore to promote her new album, a “mongo cunt” then gave the audience the finger. Not the middle finger, but the ring finger, which he had decided was a much more offensive gesture.

It was small-and-there-fore-useless tit for tat. Neither could see their escalating feud ending, and it seemed that it was going to end in mutually assured destruction. Just like the Cold War if Khrushchev asked a girl on live radio if being raped was the only sexual experience she’d had.

The two finally met, mano-mano, when Kyle Sandilands went to the fuckin’ little shit’s playgroup to play them bestiality movies that he had downloaded. “It’s you.” Kyle droned in his voice that many Croatian immigrants played back to their children as punishment if they didn’t behave. They called him the Woolgamore and said he ate the sunshine out of childrens’ dreams. “You’re the little cunt who’s tyrin’ to beat me to the top of Zoo magazine list. Aren’t ya?”

“Fuck off.” The fuckin’ little shit replied and then man to mum. “That man tried to rape me” he said, pointing at the grotesque hunk of flesh that was holding a DVD-R with Pets with Benefits written in sharpie.

“DID YOU TRY TO RAPE MY CHILD?” Melissa George yelled, in what would surely be known as her most nuanced and critically lauded shouting performance. “I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS! APOLOGY NOT ACCEPTED!” Then she kicked a nearby fridge and pulled her breasts out. “HUGO! FOOD TIMES NOW!”

“Oh fuck up you old bag” Kyle said to her. “I can’t believe you’re popping out those speed bumps around me. You’re horrifying sweetheart. You should put paper bags over those things.”

It was then that the fuckin’ little shit’s eyes lit up in a way that it rarely did unless he was swinging sporting implements at the shins of people and ruining what looking like a perfectly enjoyable Sunday barbeque if you ignored the malaise and middle class hopelessness of everyone there.

“You’re funny!” the fuckin’ little shit yelled.

“…Thank…You?… Kyle replied, his beady little eyes filling up with beads of tears. Nobody ever appreciated his artisty, the way the muses of misogyny and rudeness sang to him in whispered tone, and now he found appreciation in the child who he thought was his mortal enemy.    

“Come on kid. You should come with me. We need to go and rip the last pages out of the books while we’re pretending to be police and telling people that their loved ones have been in an accident and that they have 30 minutes to get to the hospital before they die. Gunna make a killer radio segment.”

“Okay.” said the fuckin’ little shit, then he bit his mother’s nipple in one last act of fuckin’ little shitness.

7:04 am  •  27 November 2011

“FUCK YOU UBISOFT” the man typed on his Razorback 3000 pro gamer keyboard. It was lucky that the keys didn’t stick and reacted perfectly to even his most subtle tap, because he was no mood to be messed with. “This pretty much guarantees that I’m going to boycott Ubisoft games. Calling honest PC gamers pirates is garbage and just shows it’s all about big business and on one puts the customer first.  This another pr stunt gone wrong by the guys in marketing? Whatever the case. Not Happy Ubisoft”

The man had been formulating this response ever since he read an interview with a producer of I Am Alive talking about how it was not fiscally viable to make a PC port of the game because it would just get the shit pirated out of it. Now his the rage that had built up  in his flabby and gaut body had begun to curdle like milk left out of the fridge because the milk’s owner is in the very preliminary stages of dementia.

As the crème de la crème, he quickly created an image of a popular meme espousing his opinion and attached it his post. He pushed send three times to make sure his message got through.

Now he only hoped that the site’s comment box could withhold the full force of his anger. They had better have some ace HTML programmers, the man thought, or this sorry site will be 404.

Then he went to pirate bay and downloaded every game ever.

“Twelve minutes left for the download? I can’t fucking believe this shit” he typed into the Word Document that he used when whatever he was mad about didn’t have a comments section.

11:35 pm  •  25 November 2011

 PALININARKHAM: After you arrest each enemy they are executed by the state, meaning essentially that Batman rids Arkham of crime entirely.

FIRSTAMENDMENT: Gives Batman a gun and removes his objections to killing, making the game much, much easier.

SIMSINCITY: After finishing the game, you play as a city planner, tasked with transforming the dilapidated Arkham City into flourishing new suburb.

BATBRAINED: Batman finishes every communication with Robin by saying ‘Think you can manage that, you fucking nitwit?

DONOTCALL: Batman petitions Arkham’s mayor to make everyone join the Arkham Do-not-call list, leaving Zsasz the Cold Call Killer open to massive fines if he makes unsolicited calls to them.

BAHMEN: A group of stray dogs walk through every boss fight. Everybody sees them nobody’s really sure what to do.

VERIFIEDRIDDLER: Riddler’s created fake Bruce Wayne Twitter accounts, and you have to do through several tiers of Twitter administration to get them closed down.

JUSTICEONTAP: Gives Batman the Johnson and Johnson (TM R) Soap power up, allowing Batman to wash the mouths of everyone who keeps calling Catwoman a ‘bitch’.

BOMBINGONTITAN:  Bonus level set in a comedy club where Joker’s trying stand up. You play as Bruce Wayne disguised as a lower class steel worker who has to heckle the Joker.

9:40 am  •  24 October 2011

70s rock superstar Meatloaf and internet alt celebrity and fleshlight aficionado DemoniusX are the same person.

Conjecture includes:

-Never seen in the same room. YOU KNOW WHAT THAT COULD TECHNICALLY IMPLY?

Meatloaf has a Wikipedia but Demoniusx does not. WHY WOULD HE THEY’RE THE SAME PERSON!

-Both have a knack for clean, sharp insights on masturbation, internet comedy and just what exactly they will and will not do for love.

DemoniusX has had sex, something that the popular song Paradise by the Dashboard Light frequently references. CAUSE FOR AN EXPLORATORY COMMITTEE?

DemoniusX vlogs strangely absent from YouTube during the three hours where Meatloaf was involved in an emergency landing at Heathrow airport during 2006. COVER UP?

Neither have done anything of note since the 1980s. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

-Neither replied to my emails asking them to explain their respective alter egos. PROOF QUESTION MARK

9:39 am  •  23 October 2011

The Chuck Klosterman of cats sat on his owner’s lawn after a hard morning of watching old episodes of MASH. He had been watching the old episodes because he wanted to do research about a piece he was writing regarding the way that MASH structured its episodes in a manner that prophesied the rise of soccer in middle America.

Several times during his article he would want to make a point and make his readers laugh. To do this the cat Chuck Klosterman would write a list. The first two things would be serious and expected, and the third would be WHAM! straight out of left field and unexpected. For example, if the cat Chuck Klosterman were talking about important modern figures he would say something like:

“Modernity has been defined by three people: Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and the kid off Two and a Half Men.”

This was a special comedic tactic that the cat Chuck Klosterman had invented himself.  He didn’t want anyone to steal it, so he always made the things that he wrote extra difficult for other cats to read.  “HAHA.” Cat Chuck Klosterman thought to himself in capital cat speak latters as he sat on his owner’s lawn. He was laughing at how clever the piece he had been writing earlier. He called things he wrote ‘pieces’ because he a proud cat, and that it sounded fancy and like a special achievement.

His internal monologue that comprised only of laughter was interrupted by cat Chuck Klosterman’s agent walking up to cat Chuck Klosterman. “Hey cat Chuck Klosterman, what’s your new book going to be about? My superiors are going bananas because you still haven’t told them.” The cat Chuck Klosterman ignored this question, and pounced back with one of his own.

“Are you my friend?” Cat Chuck Klosterman asked his cat agent, who fiddled with an old blackberry that he found discarded. He had tried to eat it, but it was far too tart for him, so he just carried it round with him and occasionally rolled it around on the ground in front of it.

“No.” the agent replied, rolling a small pip between his paws. “I’m paid by your book publisher to help you publish your books and stop you from yelling out “HEY IS THAT CAT CHUCK KLOSTERMAN?” in crowds of cats.

“So you’re paid to spend time with me?  That seems to be the most authentic form of friendship there is.”

“Really? Is that so” said cat Chuck Klosterman’s agent, taking a deep cat breath and preparing for the onslaught of words that cat Chuck Klosterman would hurl at him.

“Yes. I pay for all my entertainment. My TV television which I paid for would be nothing without Mad Men, Breaking Bad and popular masturbatory fantasy of frat dudes Entourage which all air on a pay- for station. And I pay for books, music and for people to pretend to recognise me on the street so I can masturbate to the feeling of being recognised later. But why should I not pay money for friends and for companionship? Spending time with people is just another form of entertainment, and that’s a commodity.  And ultimately that’s what makes the plot of the little known Debra Messing Film The Wedding Date is actually the truest and most accurate critique of love in a post-Seinfeldian era. And you are my best friend”

“Okay.” said cat Chuck Klosterman’s agent as he walked off the lawn again, leaving cat Chuck Klosterman to ponder the imponderable (at least to everyone but him).

1:44 am  •  22 October 2011

Cross post from sbcc.tumblr.com

Sighting notes:

Was walking along main road of Sandy Bay when I saw this cat in the lower level of a small store that sells cross stitch and knitting accessories. Unknown if the cat is the proprietor of the shop, but lack of opposable thumbs and non-existent approach to customer service suggest the cat in question is merely the pet of the store’s owner.

Real owner may live underneath craft shop in a quaint one bedroom flat decorated with tastefully framed Joni Mitchell tour posters and wall decorations from Threadless. She may dream of one day meeting a special cross stitching man who walks into the shop looking for yarn.

“We don’t sell books about burnouts or Ruffian’s Quartlerly here.” the lady owner will say because she has had her heart broken before by men and even though she dreams that every man who walks into this store could be a love interest she knows that will not happen. Most men do not cross stitch she has realised. At least not good men who will look after you and put organic, vegetarian friendly food on the table. The cross stitching community was full of devil may care men, who left sewing needles where cats may tread on them, and approached the organisation of cotton in a haphazard way. She had tried many times to change them, but to no avail, and the sound most familiar to her was a symphony of tears hitting her half-finished ‘I Love You’ cross stitch as tyres peeled away from the parking zone outside her shop/flat. If she listened to commercial radio she may have found some comfort from her predicament of finding love in the gravelly gravitas of Shannon Noll’s cover of the song What About Me? But she does not, as she mostly plays classical radio in her shop.

 “Actually I was just in here to get some cotton for the cross stitch I’m doing.” he would reply and then go about his shopping. He would spend a solid ten minutes looking through all the different varieties. He would have collected so much cross stitch yarn that he’s have to set down the issue of The Economist that he was holding to be able to pay for them.

“That issue of The Economist looks thin.”  the lady would say, as she began to feel like a teacher sent to a tough inner-city school with thoughts of being scared by the hard knock life students, but then realises she underestimated the troubled but ultimately well- meaning pupils who just want to be given a chance by the system that has let them down. “I only say that because I have the same issue. I found the story about the Sudan to be liberating and gratifying. Most people don’t know that conflict is still going on.”

 “Oh yes.”  he replied, his voice carrying a certain lisp, not much, but his strange enunciation of the letter ‘o’ was just enough to scare away potential girlfriends so the man was almost certainly inexperienced sexually. “It’s thinner because I tear out all the ads because I feel that distract too easily from the reading experience. Then I mulch the ads and give them to homeless people. By the way have you seen any homeless people? I need to give them this.” he said, as he dug into his pockets and pulled out mulched up ads for the Toyata Yaris, the once popular car that had seen a weak last quarter and as such had increased their advertising budget by 37% in an attempt to increase sales.

Then the man would leave the lady to her shop while he went off to look for homeless people. She will spend the rest of the day hanging threads on the wrong knobs, recommending a customer .6 gauge knitting thread when they really needed .5 gauge thread, and misspelling simple words on reorder forms.

The man will continue walking into the shop every Wednesday for a number of months. “Oh, they have the Sapphire Bronze back in.” he will say to nobody in particular in the hope that proprietor will hear him and realise he’s not one of those people who’s into cross stitching because it’s cool.

Soon they will start dating and the lady that owns the cat and the shop will find herself falling into a keep kind of love. The kind that John Mayer writes songs about.

The man will be perfect.

He will keep his sewing needles in an old Ed Hardy box that he found discarded behind an old McDonalds. He will find the design distasteful and a little crass, but the thought of something useful going to waste burns his soul.

Once a year he will literally and go and find the poorest person in Tasmania and give them $20 and a pair of bootstraps. Most of them just sell the bootstraps because they don’t understand the significance, but it’s still quite a nice sentiment.

He won’t pile up his plate and make an embarrassment of himself at the buffet from some misguided notion of ‘getting his money’s worth.’

But the shop owner will still stay up at night stroking her cat while the whole town is sleeping or pretending to be sleeping because their partner didn’t pick up the fact they wanted sex, the lines on her face creasing like the rolls of stomach fat on an overweight trucker sitting down on the toilet naked because they just had a shower and why bother putting a shirt on? Something is not right.  She knows soon he will run, leaving the landscape of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo they were cross stitching together half finished.

One day when the man comes to help the lady shop owner close up the shop and surprise her with two tickets to a remounting of A Streetcar named Desire set in Shakespearean times, the cat’s lady owner tells the man her doubts.

“ I am scared of you running away. We should not see each other anymore and maybe you should go somewhere else to get your cross stitching yarn from now on. I inflate my prices a lot. In fact the only reason I pretended to like you was so you would continue buying things from my shop. But now I have new customers who buy lots of things and you are useless to me.”

She says this, but she knows this is a lie. She is actually struggling to keep her head above water and the sharks are circling and it’s a race to see if she would drown or be eaten first. But she needed to drive him away even though she still loved him. If you needed a movie scene to compare it to, you could probably say it’s a lot like the scene in Harry and the Hendersons where the Henderson father makes Harry leave.

“I am not going to run.” he says, and then as a bizarre display of affection and commitment he pulls up his slacks, takes off his recently resoled brogues and reveals to her that he has no feet. “I was born with no feet, but I have learnt to live without them. Now I want to show that I will not run away. I have never shown anyone this before. Not even my podiatrist.  I have just made small talk with him for the last twelve years he’s never asked to see my feet, and I just keep making appointments out of habit. Isn’t that strange?” he will say as the tears will well up in her eyes.

She will ignore the fact this is really a technically and only satiates her fear if she takes a very narrow and literal definition of it. It would be easy for the man to crawl, fly, scuba, hang-glide, or drive a specially modified car that some disabled people have away from her. But it is enough, and they will settle down together in the apartment below the cross stitch shop.

And one day the cat will be lying in the lap of this man while he re-reads Jonathn Franzen’s Freedom for the third time. “This. This is my home now.” the cat will think in cat language, before drifting off to sleep, with flowery prose about bird watching floating six inches above its contented head.

But for now the cat waits for the next customer. Staring out the window.

8:46 am  •  16 October 2011