We made our way back to my room for a bit of post-wedding adult fun. The insanely beautiful girl was lying naked on my bed and we started doing the Wild Thing, sweat dripping from each other’s skin, moaning with pleasure . . .
Wait. What? Uh-oh.
EPISTAXIS
Epistaxis, or a nosebleed, as it’s more commonly known, occurs for a multitude of reasons. Genetics, nasal deformity and cocaine use are the most common causes. However, the sudden change from a cool climate, such as a Whyalla winter, to a hot and humid environment, such as the Gold Coast, can equally cause epistaxis.
While the dying seconds of a close AFL grand final or when making a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech are considered inconvenient times for a nosebleed, the most unfortunate time for epistaxis is undoubtedly mid-coitus.
We both watched in horror as two perfect drops of blood spilt from my nose and splashed onto her navel. I’ve never seen a girl get dressed in such a rush. I raced into the bathroom and stuffed toilet paper up my nostrils, but I couldn’t fathom why this scene wasn’t sexy to her anymore. She was kind enough to kiss me on the cheek as she hastily exited my room, the moment ruined. I cracked a beer from the bar-fridge and sat on the bed, pondering all possible nuances of the notion: being me is a form of contraception.
I reasoned that the rigs weren’t my long-term answer; I just couldn’t handle the boredom. So I tried my hand at the South Australian mining game. There was a tumultuous period of unemployment where I accrued a metric tonne of qualifications to prove to employers that I could do certain shit. Most of the fancy-looking papers suggested that I was a competent safety advisor, so I did that. It seemed like a natural career progression to go from emergency response into safety – I had the skills that pay the bills, so I jumped into the ghastly world of occupational health and safety.
I landed a high-paying gig with an engineering and construction company who did some stuff for a mining company. It was a Monday to Friday, nine-to-five, regular job in the Real World.
THE REAL WORLD
The Real World is a frightening place, occupied by undead zombies known as grown-ups who spend their lives accumulating a spouse, a white picket fence, 2.5 children, and a hundred years of debt for a seventy-five-year lifespan. Marriage only has a fifty per cent chance of survival in the Real World, while seventy per cent of grown-ups hate their jobs. Between a spouse who hates you and a job that you hate, that makes for a very spiteful majority of the waking life for a lot of grown-ups.
No sun shines in the Real World. The atmosphere is polluted with a thick, dark cloud of dead dreams. Convicts of the Real World lost their will to resist during school, when the invisible shackles of social norms and responsibility wrapped around their ankles.
The Real World doesn’t need prison guards. No, no, the inner jailers of ‘the voice of reason’ fear and comfort apathy keep inmates permanently confined to their mundane cells.
Fuck you, Real World.
15
DOMESTIC BLISS
By some miracle, I met the girl of my dreams in 2009. She was gorgeous, inside and out. I was punching above my weight in every division: aesthetically, morally, developmentally and spiritually. Tara had short blonde hair, a beautiful dial and an amazing body that was surpassed only by her kindness. We met through a friend-of-a-friend sort of caper and quickly fell in love.
A few weeks into the courtship, we talked about all the stupid shit we’d done when we were drunk. It turns out that Tara had taken a $50 note from my zipper during the social experiment, but we’d both been too shitfaced to remember each other. And, we’d likely already met during our younger years at Port Vincent swimming school. Within months, Tara and I moved in together, a picture of domestic bliss. But although we were boyfriend and girlfriend, the relationship wasn’t official until it was announced on Facebook. This, perhaps, explained the anniversary-date confusion.
She helped disadvantaged people for a living, and I . . . I sold out with the safety stuff, which didn’t really do much to help people. But we had a mutually supportive and playful dynamic. During the honeymoon year of the relationship, Tara and I played flirtatious games like impromptu food fights or spraying each other with bathroom cleaner during the domestic duties. Our favourite game involved a clothes peg. The sneaky peg would always surface, attached to the victim’s clothes, during a highly embarrassing, typically public moment such as a social outing or public speech. Although we didn’t keep score, and I won many battles, Tara probably won the Peg War when all is said and done.
This was my first long-term relationship, so it took a while to learn the expectations and responsibilities. On most weekends, I was ushered into alien situations. We’d often go shopping for new kitchen utensils, amid a sea of bright advertising and an utterly ridiculous array of options. How the hell could a red-meat knife and a chicken knife be different things? I had a Spyderco blade that would suffice for neurosurgery and hack through a bank vault; it could do everything. I just didn’t understand.
CONSUMERISM
Consumerism is a prolific phenomenon in the Western world. It coaxes grown-ups to spend their hard-earned money on junk that allows them to keep up with the Joneses.
Consumerism is designed to covertly seduce Real World zombies into constantly purchasing new shit – such as little nick-nacks, white goods, and even the family home. The effect of consumerism is so pervasive that it makes grown-ups lose sight of the important things in life, as they trade their most precious asset – their time – for more and more unimportant shit.
That new high-definition 3D TV didn’t cost you $1500; it cost sixty hours of your life that you can never get back. And that new TV will only function for about five years before you have to buy another one, which will cost the bargain-basement price of another sixty-two hours – adjusted for the disparity between inflation and lagging wage increases.
The family home didn’t cost $500,000; it cost the majority of your waking life for the next thirty years – your freedom of time, your sense of adventure, any chance of leading an interesting life – and doomed you to the world’s most boring eulogy. And we piss and moan that stamp duty is highway robbery in this transaction!
Shopping for useless shit to feather our nest was an almost weekly ritual. Chopping boards were the next item on the hit list.
‘Ooh, this one looks good! It’s really big and stylish. What do you think, Tezz?’ Tara said excitedly.
Fuck if I know, dude; it’s a lump of wood. There’s a few planks of two-by in the shed. I’ll just sand those bad boys down and we’re laughing.
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Get the one you want, babe. I’m easy,’ I said.
‘I can’t go shopping with you if you’re not going to contribute!’ Tara exclaimed, pissed at my nonchalance.
‘Um, the bigger board can fit more food, but that smaller one looks easier to clean?’ I guessed.
My sins were forgiven, and boyfriend duty seemed fulfilled. She chose the chopping board she wanted anyway.
I always felt a sense of urgency and irritability in public, but I was a country boy – so it wasn’t abnormal, was it?
In our nights of downtime, I thankfully had the upper hand in movie selection. I loved action and thrillers, so rom-coms were kept to a bare minimum. But we were utterly smitten with each other, so the film choice didn’t really matter; just the time spent together.
As we sat together on the couch, watching the latest Hollywood offering, I would find myself wincing and turning away from the more violent movie scenes.
That’s weird. Gratuitous violence is my favourite thing.
Every now and then, I’d go down to the beach for a swim by myself. I really loved the calming, peaceful effects of feeling the sand beneath my toes and the lapping waves swaying me around in the gentle tide.
I wish.
At this point in time, the beach was just another place I could be at. It was just sand and water. Going to the beach was about as enjoyable as a visit to
my sock drawer, or to a shady, unlicensed proctologist.
I was still a junior occupational health and safety (OH&S) professional in the mining/construction industry, and my typical workday was so uninteresting that my mind constantly wandered back to Afghanistan. I’d often have vivid memories about the good and bad times in country. I was thinking about the devastating effects of explosive mortar trauma when I was being paid to think about the super-duper deadly risks of using a soft-bristle paintbrush.
I generally looked back on Afghanistan fondly, but my perspective, especially with regards to all those Afghan patients who I couldn’t save, had begun a slow decay. The contrast between the mundane goings-on of everyday Australian life and my experiences in Afghan made the transition back to the Real World intolerable. My shift in perspective started working against me. In Australia, it would be unthinkable for people to die from ailments like malnourishment and epilepsy, but in Afghanistan it was par for the course. I kept replaying my treatment of these patients over and over in my mind, trying to find an outcome where I could have saved the day – but, as time passed, I started to forget that the Australian medical standards of treatment didn’t really apply over there. I was looking back on these memories through the lens of modern developed-world medical care, beating myself up because I didn’t do more to help those people in a place that had a medical standard of practically zero.
Despite – or perhaps because of – my feigned interest in everyday dilemmas, a subversive undercurrent affected my relationship with Tara, but it was so very sneaky and unspoken.
I bought Tara a puppy for her 2010 Christmas present. The puppy was a neurotic border collie girl who we named Sasha. She was a gorgeous pup, with limitless energy and a loveable mischievous streak, which she inherited from me. I had grown up in a cat family, but seeing the unconditional companionship of Razz the heroic explosive-detection dog had turned me into a dog convert. I loved our new dog. Sasha liked nothing more than chewing the bejesus out of anything within her reach. Shoes, underwear, furniture, the drywall: it was all fair game. Sasha was the glue that held our disintegrating relationship together.
Even though we were now responsible for a baby fur midget, Tara was a social butterfly, so we’d often leave the dog to her own devices and socialise with Tara’s friends on the weekends. Tara loved parading me around as the ‘idea’ of a model boyfriend, but I was less than impressive in the role. We’d often go to one of Tara’s friend’s social gatherings, but I couldn’t sit still.
One night, I sat around with a group of people as they heartily discussed the finer points of pre-workout potions, and coordinating the curtains with the lounge-room colour scheme.
Who gives a flying fuck? Is your life so dreary that fitness fads and curtain coordination have become passionate topics of discussion?
I desperately wanted to fit in, but just couldn’t bring myself to care about this everyday horse shit. So instead, I moved my chair back from the group and stared into space.
THE THOUSAND-YARD STARE
The thousand-yard stare is portrayed in the movies as a war veteran’s staunch, steely gaze into oblivion. The subtle implication is that veterans are reliving their wartime memories with an air of fragility amid the indomitable strength of the human spirit.
In contrast to popular portrayal, the thousand-yard stare does not involve veterans reliving gruesome wartime experiences. No, the most gruesome picture that a veteran contemplates is the shallowness and infinite black hole of boredom that consumes grown-ups in the Real World. Veterans just can’t relate anymore.
The thousand-yard stare is usually the result of veterans imagining exactly how empty a Real World zombie’s life must be to talk about such superficial bullshit.
‘Hey, babe, you’re doing that thing again. Where did you go?’ Tara asked, gently stroking my face.
Her question jolted me from the reverie. ‘Oh, nowhere, babe. Just off with the fairies again,’ I said, faking a smile. The truth was too rude to share.
I felt uncomfortable in this social setting; I was jittery. So the next ten beers slid down my neck within the hour. ‘Let’s get after it, bitches!’ I yelled, drowning the jitters.
‘Yeeeeew!’ the party patrons yelled, seemingly on my side.
The partygoers were always keen to get fucked up and do some good old-fashioned dumb shit, but I couldn’t help being the drunkest person at the party and making a fool of myself once the tequila came out.
One shot, two shots, thr . . .
Oh fuck. Where am I?
I woke up the next morning with a satanic hangover. I looked around the room. I was thankfully in my own bed, but I couldn’t remember how I got there. It felt like there was a violent prison riot going down inside my skull.
My sweet Tara. She’ll love me and make the pain go away.
I rolled over and met Tara’s gaze – a glare that made my testes shrivel.
GUILT
Guilt is an emotion that mercilessly stalks the human psyche, manifested in the form of soul-crushing pain inside the minds of hungover victims, whose blacked-out drunken antics have upset the socially condoned rules.
Additionally, guilt can be masterfully implanted into one being by another through the disapproving glare of an executioner girlfriend whose personal sense of morality has been defiled by the defendant’s boyfriend’s skull-duggerous buffoonery.
The purpose of guilt is to prevent recurrence of said morally questionable behaviour, although punishment is often afforded in magnitudes disproportionate to the alleged offences.
Fuck you, guilt.
Apparently, getting homeless-bum drunk, tripping down stairs and vomiting on yourself was not an attractive look. Who knew?
Given that I wasn’t in the running for ‘boyfriend of the year’ anymore, I spent the next week trying to make amends. Moments like these led to the realisation that ‘domestic bliss’ is an oxymoron.
Despite an overwhelming sense of guilt after each infraction, my public drunkenness showed no sign of stopping. My rapscallion behaviour became a regrettable theme in our relationship. Over the next few months of 2011, I couldn’t seem to handle my piss anymore; I kept having these mini-meltdowns. So I thought it better to avoid socialising and just stay home, drinking by myself. The last thing I wanted was for Tara to have to suffer through the embarrassment of my antics. With me staying home, Tara was immune to my drunken stupidity but I wasn’t much fun to be around. It seemed like a fair trade-off.
But my willpower to resist getting fucked up with my boys was a finite resource. After a few months, I had another epic public drunken bender and Tara reached wits’ end. She sat me down in the lounge room. Strikes two and three had already happened. This was the end. She explained that she couldn’t sit back and watch me destroy myself anymore. I felt that she was being more than a tad melodramatic, but we had an open and honest chat – probably the most candid talk of our entire two-year relationship. Our differences were irreconcilable by that point; the little things had festered into untreatable wounds.
Tara packed some clothes and stayed with a friend.
I looked down at Sasha, the pup, as Tara let the front door close behind her. Sasha looked up at me, panting, tongue hanging out the side of her mouth as she let loose a half-whimper, half-yelp. She looked confused, trying to figure out what was going on, begging me for answers.
But the break-up didn’t make sense to me either. We’d had a ‘meet cute’ story, we’d moved in together and we’d adopted a pet. We had a European holiday planned for the following year, where I was going to romantically pop the question. According to pop culture and romance movies, the ‘happily ever after’ story was locked in.
I knew I should have been devastated at losing such an amazing girl. But I felt nothing.
Oh well, I guess it’s time to get drunk.
I hit the bottle, hard.
Sasha was the most important part of my life, so I treated her like a princess. I fed her like a royal garbage
disposal and played with her in the backyard for hours on end, between mouthfuls of whisky and cigarettes. This went on for months.
Tara found a permanent house and moved out all the gear we’d bought from our adrenaline-surging shopping conquests. I even helped her move. Sasha had been my gift to Tara, so she had to leave too. I stood on the front porch, watching Tara reverse out of the driveway with tears streaming down her face. Sasha was on the passenger seat, completely unfazed by the sadness of the moment as she excitedly licked her long-lost Mum’s face. Judas.
The expression on my face was as blank as my emotions as I stood on the porch. I knew I should have felt something; but I had nothing. I just raised my hand in farewell as my girls the girls reversed out the driveway.
I went back inside. The lounge room was deathly quiet. The hallway was scattered with remnants of Sasha’s chew toys, but there was no life left in this place. The silence was deafening, so I turned on the TV for some ambient noise.
Oh well, I guess it’s time to get drunk; really drunk.
I hit the bottle, harder.
There was nothing left to care about, so I just kicked back and enjoyed the slide.
As I sat on the back porch, going through the motions, a harmless, neutral fog crept from beyond the back fence. Its tendrils snaked through the overgrown weeds towards me. I inhaled the poison as it enveloped me in the darkness. I always did; no point fighting it. It was neither for me nor against me – it just was. I tipped the bottle and lit another cigarette, seduced by the creeping nothingness as the mist snaked into my nostrils.
Vivid memories of the people I couldn’t save in Afghanistan seeped through the cracks of my fractured psyche. As a glorious momentary relief from the emptiness, a huge wave of guilt cascaded over me. But before the tears dripped down my face, the merciful, empty fog closed back in to fill the void.
Bad Medicine Page 16