Sunday, June 22, 2003
Shock new finding: Parties an excuse for everyone getting blind drunk
Okay, picking on the Salvos, just for trying to re-invent wowserism for a new generation, is a bit below the belt. But it is Sunday morning, and I still feel seriously ratshit some 30 hours after ingesting my last party-enhancing substance. And it was no ordinary party, either – not only was it mon anniversaire, it was the last such one of my dirty thirties.
All disclaimers aside, surely nothing can forgive or justify this little pearler from the president of the Psychologists Registration Board of Victoria (& clearly, non-Mills and Boon reader), Dr David List (same URL):
“Young males refused entry to a party could see it as an affront to their emerging manhood".
Quite. Hence the priapic origin of the battering ram (“gatecrasher”, geddit), I assume.
And by way of Sunday morning penance for my cheap shot at the Salvos, my frazzled neurons have just regurgitated up this gem from my past. As a hard-drinking undergrad, when beer was eighty-something cents a pot, one of the said Army was forever flogging the “War Cry” at my local. Only one of my drinking buddies ever coughed up, but his unflagging enthusiasm for the product surely alone made my local one of Melbourne’s top ten sales outlets for the “War Cry”. My mate never read the product, of course, and had fried his brains out, Syd Barrett-style (but on booze alone) by the following year.
Which fact has ever since made me suspect that the Salvos are just a boutique corner outpost of the overall Demon Drink Industry. My mate Peter paid a tithe of 10% or so of his drinking budget to the Salvos, in return for – peace of mind, in an immediate gratification sense? Or just being left alone and absolutely without limits for the other 90% that stretched out endlessly from that point?
Shine on, Peter, my first true comedian buddy. And fuck you, Salvos – why don’t you practise some satiety* in your own backyard media-and-welfare empire?
* Scroll to FICKLENESS, n.
Okay, picking on the Salvos, just for trying to re-invent wowserism for a new generation, is a bit below the belt. But it is Sunday morning, and I still feel seriously ratshit some 30 hours after ingesting my last party-enhancing substance. And it was no ordinary party, either – not only was it mon anniversaire, it was the last such one of my dirty thirties.
All disclaimers aside, surely nothing can forgive or justify this little pearler from the president of the Psychologists Registration Board of Victoria (& clearly, non-Mills and Boon reader), Dr David List (same URL):
“Young males refused entry to a party could see it as an affront to their emerging manhood".
Quite. Hence the priapic origin of the battering ram (“gatecrasher”, geddit), I assume.
And by way of Sunday morning penance for my cheap shot at the Salvos, my frazzled neurons have just regurgitated up this gem from my past. As a hard-drinking undergrad, when beer was eighty-something cents a pot, one of the said Army was forever flogging the “War Cry” at my local. Only one of my drinking buddies ever coughed up, but his unflagging enthusiasm for the product surely alone made my local one of Melbourne’s top ten sales outlets for the “War Cry”. My mate never read the product, of course, and had fried his brains out, Syd Barrett-style (but on booze alone) by the following year.
Which fact has ever since made me suspect that the Salvos are just a boutique corner outpost of the overall Demon Drink Industry. My mate Peter paid a tithe of 10% or so of his drinking budget to the Salvos, in return for – peace of mind, in an immediate gratification sense? Or just being left alone and absolutely without limits for the other 90% that stretched out endlessly from that point?
Shine on, Peter, my first true comedian buddy. And fuck you, Salvos – why don’t you practise some satiety* in your own backyard media-and-welfare empire?
* Scroll to FICKLENESS, n.
