I’m occasionally asked by local ABC Morning Show host Leon Compton to be a panellist on a Friday segment titled “3 Big Questions”. It involves three local media or superannuated political luminaries musing about political and sometimes more general issues of the day.
I was on it yesterday, and the third “question” was both Valentine’s Day-related and rather personalised, springing from a private email exchange I’d had with Leon. It was:
Ken Parish is becoming a Grumpy Old Man. I am noticing the signs in myself too ((my)lady says..hmmm how could we use that leftover chocolate mousse. She winks. I say think of the ants.
Finish this sentence.You know youre becoming a Grumpy Old Man when.
I didn’t really answer Leon’s question as such, because I don’t need to realise I’m a Grumpy Old Man, I actively cultivate that state of being. However I played along (as you do), observing that one of the things that currently evidenced my GOM status was the fact that I was grumpy about Valentine’s Day itself, regarding it as a tiresome wank whose existence I refuse to acknowledge.
However I thought about Leon’s tacky scenario later, and did indeed achieve a self-aware revelatory flash, namely that I’m not only a grumpy old man but quite a boring one too. If I ever arrived home to find Jen wearing only a seductive smile and a scoop of chocolate mousse in her nether regions, I imagine I’d probably say something along the lines “Gee dear, you didn’t break the last dessert bowl, did you? What about I pop down to Freedom and buy a new dinner set?”
I’m now really looking forward to a rare post by Jen about her coming home from the shops tomorrow afternoon to find Ken draped across a lounger on the patio in the steamy Darwin heat, wearing nothing but his tight old footy shorts with a open jar of vegemite to hand, smiling seductively (that is Ken and not the vegemite jar smiling seductively).
Incidentally I’m rather liking Kraft’s new cheesymite flavour. Anyone else tried it yet?
Personally I’m fighting off incipient attacks of grumpy old manitis right now by having moved forward to today my biannual flat cleaning so that the lady I’m dining with tonight wakes up tomorrow in a bed where all the croissant flakes are fresh.
Then she’ll discover I’ve plastered the pastries with cheesymite.
Also re the image decorating this post – what foul-minded little prick thought it would be funny to take two innocent pandas taking part in nature’s eternal dance of life and just LOLcat it for a cheap shot?
In his last days in the house Ken did not drape himself around anything, rather he positioned himself resolutely ‘in the way’. The little spatial awareness he once had all but deserted the man. He could barely get himself through a doorway and manouvering around the various items of furniture and in and out of various household positions finally proved too much for him altogether. He announced with certainty, ‘A man needs space’. He has claimed the backyard and now lives permanently outdoors.
To be sure in the past he did used to flop his considerable self and gut into a Jason recliner – until the chair gave up the ghost and rotted to within an inch of it’s leathery life – to be reclaimed and reborn after a stern scubbing followed by a thorough and generous moisturising. Ken was next, but, after four or five hundred rounds of chase him round the garden I gave up. For all intents and purposes he is now lost to that same garden. He is gone. And Nabs, the sad truth is we miss him here indoors.
But don’t think I don’t try…. and on Valentines day I left the vegemite out on the backstep where it could get all gooey in the sun. I even thought I caught a glimpse of him scampering about in his best blue gardening Speedos. ‘An elusive fat man is a rare thing’, I hear you say.
That evening as I rattled his plate for dinner, I noticed the vegemite jar gone and just before I pushed the plate under the shed door, I could just make out a rythmic swaying out behind the gazebo. I knew it was him when I noticed the flash of the jolly red and yellow jar. I can’t vouch for exactly what was happening, the shade is quite deep down there which makes the more murky colours difficult to distinguish.
Good wife that I am, I smiled fondly and sincerely hoped he was enjoying himself.
Too. Much. Information.
It really is more in sorrow than anger that I type this reply to Jen. Her generous instinct to pander to Nabakov’s perverse passions shows commendable community spirit, but the try-hard implausibility of her comic premise undermines it. I can only conclude that Jen has been reading too much of execrable teen author John Marsden with her middle school teenage brat English class. Jen’s teaching her class to evaluate plot plausibility, but has failed to apply her own lesson.
For a start, I seriously doubt that even sun-softened Vegemite would have the necessary lubricant qualities for a masturbatory aid. Golden syrup might conceivably do the job and also offer the requisite aussie iconic quality. But the wider issue is that if I really was permanently outdoors, Leon has it wired: the green ants would ensure that you’d only ever try it once irrespective of the yummy comestible employed.
Of course, Gummo seems to have happily embraced the scenario as plausible, but his usually impeccable judgment has clearly been badly affected by the trauma of being regularly flogged at trivia quiz nights by teams of bogans doing Barry Jones imitations while Googling frantically under the table for the answers using their iPhones. Otherwise why would he be bothering to argue with a ‘John Greenfield’ sock puppet?
It’s also momentarily discomforting that Jen’s attitude rather suggests that she’s unlikely in my declining years to adopt the solicitous attitude of that old biddy in the TV ad for prostate medication, who enters the dunny and tenderly pats her decrepit hubby on the back while he painfully squeezes out a few drops of wee. Then again, the whole idea grosses me out even more than either Jen’s scenario itself or pube-laden chocolate mousse. Prostate problems or not, emptying the bladder isn’t a family event in my book. You see, I think this ever-present feeling of being out of tune with the temper of the times is at the root of the Grumpy Old Man response. It can only get worse.
Undiluted golden syrup would be way too viscous – like Castrol BTX grease.
I see the Woolfymite is still strong in these ones. Not afraid of salty spreading.
Good to see you back in the blog trenches Jen.
Leon Compton did a top job filling in for Tones Delroy over summer.
“like Castrol BTX grease.”
There’s a Dark Alley Media movie – ‘Raw Crude” – that rigorously tests that hypothesis, Gummo. More topically, where’s Compton on Vegemite?