The Budgie and The Bitter

It's Midday in a windowless office. There sits on a desk an idling winning Melbourne Cup ticket with unclaimed cash the prize for correctly being able to deal with the local TOTE grump, a fat man with glasses and folded arms cursing having to do any kind of work. He was the kind of man who pines for the weekends, joyless, friendless, a man bound in a corner forever smelling stale beer on the breath of punters and perhaps upset by the desperate nature of betting. Perhaps I'm being too poetic, he might just have been a prick. Vanessa Amorosi is belting out some affirmitive but ultimately bland and forgettable pop on the radio, and I'm reading a story on an online newspaper about some hapless duo that stole luggage off a carousel time and time again. I'm also humming the theme song to Shirls Neighbourhood like some sort of unseemly mantra as a viral video someone sent me embeds itself into my head. I work with an uncaged budgie, a tweeting flapping unseemly overly nervous parrot who has to fill every single space in the day with conversation, inanity and upbeat observations without the clarity or wit to become a fully fledged sentence. Escape seems to be quite impossible, so I'm writing what no doubt most people who aren't peering over my shoulder is some kind of office based memorandum, but is in fact this very piece of writing. Is that post modern? Or just lazy? I haven't decided. I'm nursing a headache anyway - the parrot by the way got herself into such a tizz yesterday that her horse was running in the Melbourne cup she gave herself a stomach ache and almost passed out - because I'm angry at someone, someone who should know better than to send e-mails proclaiming themselves to be more mature than they are. I mean, what's the point of sending speculative I'm far too mature to be drinking with you e-mails to people when in your past you dressed like a reject from the Matrix and passed out topless in a Burnie rock climbing club drunk at about 6ix in the evening 1ne night? The parrot files her nails and begins a story about her weekend trip to Deloraine. She thinks I'm listening, but I'm not. I've picked up her conversational cadence. In fact I don't even need to listen. Simply through patterns, I can pick up by now when to say yes, when to say no, and when to say that must have been nice. I can do it with my eyes closed. Instead I'm watching an incredibly evil parking meter attendant chalk everyones tyres. I like to think his eyes meet mine as I watch him and he shoots me an apologetic glance as he walks, a sort of I've got to make an honest living guvnor shrug of the shoulders, but it might be a trick of the light, and I lose track of following him mid bite of a Subway sandwich, and mid saying that must have been nice for the 8th time in a minute...

There's a family outside the window who have dressed their barely old enough to walk child in an outfit that very Fonziesque. I can only imagine that they are tormenting the poor child, sticking him in a leather jacket and white T-shirt and making him walk around with his thumbs up. Outside Subway there's a very large girl I used to work with - with an unprintable reason for hating Santa Claus - devouring and munching on the biggest sandwich Subway can provide. She's probably on her mobile phone. She used to do that, get her mobile phone out in the middle of the day to ask her boyfriend if he loved her. I got the impression he mostly said no, and her day would spiral out of control until she was sobbing in the car park or throwing sushi on the ground. It was best not to pry though. Time is moving slowly anyway. The Fonzie Kid has found a lump of dirt on the ground and thinks it's a treat, but his parents are too busy arguing to even notice the completion of the mouth and dirt transaction. I can't hear what they are arguing about, but the gesticulations are not very lady like. She's got two major assets the mother, the ability to slide her bogan self into size 0ero costumes, and gesticulating hands that make it clear when she's annoyed. I can tell from experience he's not really listening, because our expressions match at the present time. Only I'm not being told off, just being told of part 2wo of the fascinating Deloraine story. The Fonz Family are so engaged in their argument that their child has wandered completely away from them to go and see if some weeds taste even more delicious than the dirt, and that the slightly awkward I'm just making an honest buck traffic inspector armed with enough chalk to make even the geekiest 80tys school teacher jealous is writing their car a ticket as they speak such bitter words to each other. This time, I know he sees me looking at him out the window, but I don't know whether he sees my disappointed shake of the head, because if he did, it wasn't for him, it was a rueful shake of the head that the parrot had managed to come up with part 3hree of the Deloraine story...who knew it had a parrot prologue...man I wish I was a kid that was eating dirt again...

I went on a school trip to Deloraine 1nce. It was just before the Melbourne Cup, and they took to a butter churning facility or a box factory or some nonsense they used to take the kids to when Australia still had a manufacturing industry. After a while all those Grade 2wo school trips blended into 1ne. We always seemed to be getting onto a shiny Kergers coach for some pointless reason then frying because Laurie the bus driver was too tight arse to turn on the air conditioning and getting off in a field because Laurie the bus driver was too tight arse to park at the meter near where we were supposed to be going. We had a fight on the way to the box factory - split the bus down the middle until even Laurie felt obliged to take a side. Can't remember what started it, but I think it involved who was responsible for the break up of our primary school power couple. I like to assign random adult themes to my early conflicts, but there's every chance it was just about whether a sea green crayon was somehow more boss than burnt sienna...an insane point of view. It ended up being 1ne of those things that got completely out of hand, and even with my reputation for level heading thinking and logical problem solving, I had clearly compromised my position entirely by taking a side on whatever the issue of the day was. The teachers threatened to throw us off the bus, Laurie, compromised as much as me, threatened to turn the bus around - not with your driving skills big L - and the whole box/butter/standing in a field of poppies in a more innocent age day out would have been ruined if Daniel Custis, our school benny, hadn't had the presence of mind to break wind in the middle of the argument, thus ensuring that we were able to make it to Deloraine for a simple, easy, relaxed day out. He was like the UN but effective our Daniel. As we dis-embarked the bus, 1ne of the main protagonists in the heated crayon debate handed me a note written suitably in the crayon of discussion, on pink paper, and that was the first time I knew Sarah, my first girlfriend, actually liked me. That's how I like to tell it anyway - there's every chance the note simply said I was an idiot for my support of the burnt sienna crayon, but the more illustrative side of my brain chooses to remember it in a particular way, the way i like, the way that makes me happy on days when budgies are squawking, twirling...god why is she twirling...I can't imagine what part of the story requires twirling...

It's 4our O'clock by now, the day has passed in a flurry of inane conversation, lunch time sandwiches, parking tickets and Vanessa Amorossi song - singular. My in tray, such as it is, is no smaller, but I feel aged and tired. There's more travel brochures for New York than any actual work surrounding me, and the phone is ringing off the hook but I can't be bothered to answer it. I leave on the absolute button of when I can, and drink water in a long and lengthy queue just so I can purchase a book full of things and opinions I can later impart as knowledge to try and impress some1ne. An entire Girls Can't Catch album goes by on my IPOD by the time an old woman at the front of the queue spins and unspools her life story to the cashier. The bogan couple from before have been put into a divvy van and taken away, Fonzie child in tow, for some unspecified reason. I know because I saw them being lifted and the ambulance chasers were out in force gawping as the van drove away, nearly crashing into a bus as it did so. Had they been a bit more vigilant, they could have made a double arrest and picked up the girl who's just stolen a Ray Martin autobiography from the table outside Big W. I feel a bit strange to be honest, it's a strange time to regret having never been in a gang, apart from the 1ne in primary school devoted to our love of sausage sandwiches. I wonder if I missed anything. There's a woman with a beaming broad smile and a touristy T-shirt just in front of me in the queue. She's buying a giant pair of pants that look about 20th sizes too big for her. She unfolds them with a care normally associated with the more dilligent members of a camping party until they take up the entire register and threaten to jam the belt. I'm trying to find the chocolates because it would take a hell of a binge for her to fit into them. She smiles her best smile and asks the cashier how her day was, at which point the cashier pulls her foulest Claude The Crow face, mutters something about how does she think it was, and throws her change back at the lady, having folded and crumpled the pants into a bag faster than the naked eye could see. I'm not sure why we all shuffled in such a morose fashion having been clearly told of the registers no chit chat policy, but we did, for we had homes to go to, pants to binge into, and facts to devour and impart to strangers to try and impress them...

I might try some out later, over dinner, or over a shared lime spider...actually, get your own lime spider, this 1nes taken...