Bent Freak

When I was a little kiddy, I used to have to rock up to Soldiers’ Children Education every year, to talk about how I was going at school. That was ‘cos my da was a crazy disabled veteran and so the government felt obliged to at least appear to care. Little did I know then that Veterans’ Affairs had already written off me and my five siblings as terminally doomed, so PTSD fucked-in-the-head was my da. Cycles of deprivation are simplistic and naive, yes, but they are standard logic for mental health professionals, and so easy for them to justify, since their acts and omissions can create self-fulfilling prophecies.

Anyway, at those annual trips to Grace Building in Sydney, a once glorious pile of sandstone dog shite, I had to sit before some creepy bean counter who wore crisp white shirts and smoked Player’s cigarettes. I picked his overt homosexuality via his cultivated accent and the way he clasped the cigarette way too close to his palm. He made weird smacking noises with his lips each time he inhaled. Luckily, I can dream awake and so I phased out during most of his lectures to me about my academic performance. Two issues were of perpetual phony concern to him:

1) my total lack of ability in math; and

2) my increasingly left-leaning politics.

I completely stopped learning math when I was 14. That was not a good look at Paedophile High, the all-Catholic, all-boys, all violence high school in which I was incarcerated for nearly five years. Math=masculinity, English, in which I was top of the school=fag. Having the resident paedophile priest fawning all over me at the same time that I was struggling like hell to keep my sexual identity (ie. gay) all bottled up, set me up for ongoing beatings from my classmates. Some sort of perverse irony that while many of those boys were kicking the shite out of me for being a fag, they were being sexually abused by that paedophile priest.

Mr Player’s must have been a devotee of the television show ‘Kung Fu’. Occasionally, he sought to drop like rose petals onto the pine desk, pearls of wisdom that I guess I was supposed to notice, discern and take away with me. That was somewhat symbiotic with my da’s ritual of buying meat pies that were rumoured to be boiled cat, from the takeaway at Central Station, before making the long train tip back to Boom Town. My radicalism at age 15 would transform into conservatism by the time I hit 21. That was what Mr Player’s pronounced. He smiled, sucked and smacked. I left.

147 years later, I am still shite at math (thank Jesu-bob for computers!) and I am still leaning decidedly to the left. Where else could I go? The right in Australia is so fucking stupid and so fucking ugly. Thinking is much pissed all over here. Australians are wary of anyone who has a critical, independent thought about anything. Our heroes are dull sportsmen and dead soldiers. Swimming madly against the stream, in this particular space I intend to think aloud and write with gusto about anything I want. So now, let the torrent of mindless thoughts begin…

ultimo167