Isobarred (the ironic continuing study of people wearing lampshades who aren't me)

So you know when you are tired and exhausted and grumpy and the fattest girl you've ever seen in your life sits down on a seat and pees...um, OK, that's a specific frame of reference that only applies to me today. Actually, I'm feeling pretty good apart from the chafing and urine - and god knows who has to clean it up - there's something quite touching and exciting about having friends good enough to have your entire 2009 planned, even if the phrase "a week away" keeps worringly coming up. I need to go home you know people. We found a picture of my Mothers 21st the other day, a photo that she wasn't in because she'd already gone to bed, and I can be like that sometimes, sometimes needing to get away from everyone. Other times, it's lampshades and spilled beer a go go. I got out of going to see Pink though with some carefully constructed financial mistruths. I've spent most of the day looking at brochures to go to America, the home of the wry sideways glance at life and the hamburgers the size of Cooeee. I don't know why I want to go to America - maybe because it's not Scotland? I've seen Scotland, I've done Scotland, now I want to go to a taping of the David Letterman show and eat different tepid hot dogs that aren't served up from the St Mirren canteen. It's actually kind of sad in some ways - this won't mean much to most people but St Mirren are my team, and they are moving ground away from Love Street, the football ground I spent most of my childhood at, to some other dump. I think this is a sign that in many ways Scotland isn't going to be an ongoing concern in my life, it's going to be somwhere where I stop off rather than some sort of fantastic wonderland. That is apart from Greggs Bakery, where you get the best fudge filled donut in the world...once you negotiate the complicated and confusing two queue system. It also says a lot for my day that not only did I have my entire year plan for me, but I found out that my big toe has a really stupid shape to it. Yes, the future is bright, but the present, well, it's all out of shape...

So anyway, the big news down here is that local underage club sensation Isobar (where the queues are long and the bouncers are less punch happy than syrup) has re-opened, to the delight of people who normally have to use fake Idents on MSN and 15 year old girls everywhere, after being shut down for 48 seconds due to a problem stopping patrons punching each other. To the universal embarrassment of everyone one of our politicians went into the nightclub to, er, talk to patrons about the situation. Yes, your eyes meet over a crowded table, you raise an eyebrow, she nods, then she takes your opinions on waterfront violence on a scale of 1-10. It wouldn't have made a lot of difference to me if Isobar (or Isobar, The Club, as it's marketing would have it, as if the multi level stair case and Bicardi model saleswomen are unique to the wharf) had closed - I've only been in there twice, at least one of them as sort of ironic joke (and the other time I was so drunk I could have been talked into eating a burger at Mykonos) and as I said my study into post modern Hobartian sub cultures ended with some girl I was sort of talking to blankly started vomiting in a pot plant, and the only other time I was there it caught fire. Yes, I smelled smoke, because I was on fire with the lad...oh, no, hang on, it really did catch fire. This wasn't entirely verified because there's a better than average chance some dickhead just set the fire alarm off or someone was just reallly upset about the pot plant being vomited on. As it happened, my cousin worked at Isobar (just to keep track, she's the one adopted from Asia who said the problem with Australia is too many Asians...they don't do irony in Seoul) and, in the midst of what can only be described as the Hobart version of a hubbub (a lot of bogans wandering around going "nerfuckin sucks") I decided to take charge of the situation and find out what was going on. I was cool, I was calm, I assured my friends all would be OK, I was aware that wearing a novelty retro T-shirt with a cartoon character on it was a horrible fashion trend, I was realising that girls licking their fingers so wasn't a turn on at all, given their bogan little faces. I went up to my cousin in the midst of a bewildered panic and a loud fire alarm and asked what was going on...she pushed me in the chest and said Sir you have to leave, the fire alarm is going off. She didn't recognise me. And I looked like a bit of a dick. I stood there and had to justify myself and we proceeded to have a massive 2am argument...the point is, of course, she was entirely right, we really had to leave, but family disputes just won't wait. As we looked around after about a ten minute argument, every single person had vacated the club except for me, her holding a clipboard, and a girl on E in the corner who was trying to lick her fingers in a seductive fashion with no one in particular paying her attention, her denim jeans fully stretched around her industrial thighs. As a social study of Tasmania, it was nigh on perfect, especially when we both realised that the music that was playing at about 1/2 speed on the pre recorded PA system was The Last Good Day Of The Year by Cousteau...who could argue, we thought, as we left the Colonel to her finger licking fun, one day building to chatting up her dream apparition...

Actually, the most significant thing that's happened at Isobar is that a particular Australian cricketer pashed a thirteen year old, but that's just libellous. Imagine letting a thirteen year old into a nightclub - that'd never happen. My mate told me that once at Isobar, one of his mates actually hired a prostitute to flirt with in view of his girlfriend (they'd had an argument about dimmer switches) while the dancefloor throbbed to the hypnotic beats of the sneakiest of all the sound systems. As it happened, the prostitute was a dominatrix, and he was late because of the giant queue, so in front of his girlfriend the dominatrix instead of cooing and flirting and laughing at jokes about airline peanuts actually gave him a complete mouthful about his timekeeping and poured a drink about him. He then had to watch as his girlfriend left with a flight attendant. I'm not sure that, despite the mythology, that too many delighted and fulfilling relationships have begun amidst Isobar (or any other nightclubs) bewildering multi layered system roof or it's mirror ball while thumping Ministry of Sound compliations throb onwards. Obviously in my own experience it ended with a girl vomiting in a pot plant (nightclub girls just don't appreciate my conversation about the demise of the Egg Flip Big M) but there was another time at Syrup - in fact, the night Tasmania won the Mercantile Mutual Cup and me old mate Brendan Julian had to hold up the sponsors sign because it was about to blow over the fance - when I was about to go home and this incredibly vacant but pretty promotions model looking girl grabbed my arm and demanded that I came and danced (I was tired so I just danced...eh...eh...ah forget it) and we were all set to dance face to face when the DJ in a fit of absolute fatigue played a techno funked up The Rose by Bette Midler. I believe my face betrayed my emotion, which was well this has all gone horribly wrong, and we silently parted ways, her to, I don't know, probably go and sell some Bicardi, and me to talk about football, in a far more comfortable setting, with a falling asleep taxi driver who was close to swerving into a Southern Outlet wall....

Of course, there was every chance she was just a politician out to canvas my views. And as much as I'd like to put my patronage of these establishments down to some sort of irony or study of human movement, obviously going there is just the same strain of reality that makes me wear that famous lampshade - being pissed. As it happens though, both times I've been to Isobar, I've ended up on my own at the Salamanca bakehouse, Tasmanias premiere establishment for horrifically tepid sausage rolls and surprisingly custard tarts, all served by a wonderful racial mix of Sudanese refugees and bogan girls from Dodges with pink eye shadow who are "between jobs" and who painstakingly count every five cent piece. I sat outside there after the fire incident, for god knows what reason since it was so cold a penguin had a cardigan on and I was sitting outside another bakery waiting to be picked up, which was strange in itself, a bit like ordering a pizza from Dominos to be delivered to Pizza Hut, when I realised that across from me, two guys were trying to peer into the girls public toilet through a small shaft in the window. The right on PC warrior in me wanted to shout out for them to stop it, but since they had completely got the mechanics wrong and had the skinny bloke holding the fat bloke up to have a look (you need to put the fat guy on the bottom as the base of a pyramid, not the top) I was aware that soon, trouble would occur. Plus, there was something pleasingly-newsagent-judging-the-guy-buying-the-Playboy-desperate and pathetically sad about how excited they were to peer in the toilets. And of course, throw in the ice and the cold and the rain, and inevitably, to an inadvertent and somewhat surprising cry of "wa-hey!" from me, like some end of the pier comedian, they fell over and slipped and slid and crashed in a big pile. At which point, from out of the toilet, stepped a man in a giant black coat and docs, who took one look at their broken limbed form and said "Womens toilets are to the left" and moved on. I laughed so hard that I ended up taking a big bite of custard tart and sausage roll at the same time, choked, tried to drink water to fix it, and choked some more...at which point, my brain thought, what a way to go, dying in Hobart in the rain, looking at broken limbed perverts and I had a final, awful thought...that girl who was licking her fingers didn't have a top on....I hadn't even realised...it wasn't the comforting thought that I had hoped for...

I'd have banned it just for letting her in, and as far as I know, she's probably still there...it's an easy life you know...