So, yeah. I got myself dolled up to a degree and went to a local establishment yester e'en to watch an INXS cover band. I purchased my ticket and the bar, and grabbed a glass of water (I elected to drive because the nights are FINALLY cooling down, and I was wearing my good boots), then sat at a table to people watch. People watching can be interesting, and a little disconcerting when you are the only sober person in the pub. Oh, I'm sure I wasn't the only sober one; there were others, but they were called 'bar staff'. For reason I cannot fathom, I tend to attract weird people. I am a shy but friendly type when approached, so I am amenable to have a conversation with folks at the pub. I have actually made good friends this way in the past. But I really don't want to have a conversation with someone who is staggering about like a sailor fresh on shore leave. Some woman lurched over to me, slammed her UDL-in-the-Holden-stubby-holder on the table with inebriation-fuelled forcefulness, and proceeded to tell me about the previous few days she had experienced. Let me point out I had never met this woman in my life. I'm guessing she was in her late fifties, with long greying hair, and dressed for extreme comfort. Being polite (and a glutton for punishment) I gestured at the eye pad taped to the corner of her left eye, and the fact she was wearing sunglasses, and asked about the surgery she had obviously undergone. I think she thought I was sorry for her, but my sympathetic expression was for her anaesthetist and surgeon, whom she had warned off during the procedure. ('An' I said to 'em: 'Don't farkin' drill that needle in me eye again, ya cunts!''). She bemoaned the youth of today, some of whom had been rude to her outside the pub, and taunted her about her sunglasses ('An' I just said to 'em, 'I've farkin' had an operation, ya cunts!''). I politely agreed they were extremely ignorant and callow. My words, not hers. She had a filthy mouth, and by this I do not mean the obnoxious vocabulary. Nay, it is the festering pit of foulness that lurked inside. My late aunt would have said she only had a tooth every quarter of an hour. Her breath could have stripped the paint from the wall. The blast of noxious fumes to which I was subjected, when she leaned into my face to inform me what cunts her medical team were, made me think she had surely just been rimming the arse of some pestiferous old hobo. So, I held my breath for as long as I could before excusing myself to go to the room where the band was due to play.
The band started, and being an aficionado of most music, I realised they were singing a Diesel number. Then they sang a Dragon number. Then an AC/DC number. They also sang some Angels, Thirsty Merc, and Screaming Jets. I did wonder what happened to INXS, notwithstanding I actually liked the songs they were singing better than most INXS material. The singer solved the puzzle by announcing the end of their 'Aussierama set', and promised the band would return forthwith. When they did, they were actually dressed in clothing similar to what members of INXS had worn, and yeah, they sounded very, very like them. For some reason, it interested me to see the members of the band were very young, far too young to have remembered those heady days of INXS riding high in the late Eighties. Indeed, if any of those young men were even out of primary school back when Hutchence tragically stretched his neck, I will eat my hat.
I looked around at the revellers, and it was surreal and peculiar to tumble to the fact I was probably the oldest person there, and closing my eyes as they sang 'Burn For You' was not going to make me twenty years old again. But I don't think I would want to be twenty years old again (unless I could take my fifty year old wisdom with me). No, I just sat on the stool, leaning against a pillar clutching my iced water (had I been twenty, it would have been a West Coast Cooler) watching people executing drunken dance moves of such spasticity they would have made Peter Garrett look like Rudolph Nureyev. I did some dancing, too; one of the patrons yelled out, 'Simone! Come and dance with us!' Hopefully, I was not as unco as some of the others.
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