Wit and Whimsy

Hamish glanced at the bag I had set down as I entered the staff lunchroom, and reacted apparently without engaging a single critical faculty: “That looks like a female bag”, he offered, immediately followed by a minor facial spasm, which suggested that his brain had just caught up with his inane verbiage.

I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would choose the tedious complexities of a conversation about the trans-generational trauma unleashed by colonisation and the 250 years of subsequent oppression of First Nations Peoples over a simple, reassuring narrative about dole-bludgers desecrating our national heritage with their Marxist filth.

I have yet to see so much as a brass plaque commemorating the unsung heroines of motherhood, to whom we are all indebted for whatever approximation of human civility they manage to wrest from the delinquency of our self-absorbed adolescence.

"Nothing about us without us", he spat, flicking the words in my direction, like holy water intended to burn holes in my heathen postulations. We were discussing the plight of Queensland's Queer communities and the challenge of building and sustaining support systems in regional outposts.

A belief in God assigns one to a life of deep contemplation or no contemplation at all, depending on one’s disposition.

No longer indentured to conformity by the fear of failure, I suspect I may finally be reaching my potential and it looks nothing like I expected it to.

It is an irrefutable reality that once seen, an occupying weevil in one’s Alpine muesli cannot then be un-seen.

I suspect I possess emasculating levels of personal ambition and drive, but I must confess that I have never wanted anything badly enough to thrust another man’s face into a muddy paddock to get it.

The clichéd mantra of the straight man in a gay bar – “keep your backs to the wall, boys” - did not evolve, let’s be clear, from an observance of Feng Shui.

I love Mondays so much, I am considering coming into work on Sundays and calling it pre-Monday, just so that I can get more Monday into the week.

The boyband phenomenon of the 1980s & 90s may not have been the paragon of contemporary musical artistry, but its back-catalogue of melodic musings left us with fascinating insights into the male psyche.

When it comes to the environment, population control is the big fat elephant in an increasingly squishy room. It links to every environmental crisis we could mention but you’ll not hear a peep about it on any political campaign trails.

The pawn of American imperialism – the humble patriot – has become a sanctified figure, alongside George Washington, Paul Revere and that guy who loved his electric shaver so much he bought the company.