Houses o’ Horror

Posted: April 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , | 1 Comment

No.

This is one of those ‘sneak up on you’ NOs, the kind that you insist is actually a YES, right up to the moment that you find yourself in foetal position, wrenching off what used to be your favourite pair of underpants, and vomming into a bile-soaked gutter.

Running away from this guy, like this guy.

Houses of horrors are deceptive. At first they seem innocuous and tacky and something you can ironically enjoy. “That vampire bride is wearing Crocs! Hah hah!” you openly mock, while also noting that the sign by the door, the one next to the ‘NO REFUNDS’ written in faux-blood, lets you know that this ride is suitable for children over the age of 10, but “as parents, you know your kid better than anyone else”, so you’d best determine for yourself whether this ride is going to make them shit themselves in the middle of the Royal Easter Show.

Well, I’m 26 now and that sign is WAY off. Either I’m not made of very stern stuff (which, let’s face it, is pretty likely) or these guys need to take a good hard look at the Australian National Trauma Guidelines and re-evaluate their shtick.

I will not soon forget this House o’Horrors, in the same way that the arm bruises it gave me will not fade. The whole thing was thematically based on the idea of old Hollywood horror films, the sorts of films that are all just concepts and not REAL in my head, cos the only sorts of movies I tend to watch are teeny rom coms and maybe the odd impressive indie film about people-smuggling or whatevs. So we line up to go to the house; it’s me and an anonymous friend that for the purposes of this story I will call…Nikita…and we’re scoffing and LOLing our way through the line, and the guy at the front with maybe fake acne scabs but maybe not fake acne scabs is like “Aaaaare you scaaaared?” and we LAUGH in his FACE and just kinda go “HUH” and he gives a little wry grin that we don’t read into just now, but we will later.

And then it’s ON. And here is what I’m really interested in talking about. The way that irony and detachment are pretty groovy and fashionable all the time from the vantage of your free trade cafe or vintage dog-wear boutique, until you find yourself in the GRIP of something BIGGER THAN YOU. When you are running, and screaming, and hiding, and wading through bodies, and little corpse brides are whispering in your ear, and two SEPARATE guys with chainsaws chase you, and there are strobe lights, and Nikita digs her nails into your arm until you have to yell “NIKITA STOP – I KNOW YOU’RE SCARED BUT YOU’RE HURTING ME” and then Nikita uses you as a human shield against the second chainsaw guy, and then you heave and scream your way back into the free air and you guys are so exhilarated and overwhelmed and FREAKING OUT that you bump heads against each other, and it’s lucky you both wear nerdy playwright glasses, or you’d be the one hurling in the gutter.

SO I guess what I’m saying is that, Houses of Horror teach me important lessons about the power of adrenaline, and about the unhelpfulness of detachment, and about how good Nikita is in an emergency vs how good Jess is in an emergency. Whilst I value all of those lessons, I’m also quite happy to never repeat them again. Ever again.

We did eat cheese on a stick beforehand, though, which for the record – is a YES.

BIG yes.

Sweat.

Posted: January 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

NO.

Oh man. Oh man oh man. Even just writing the word makes my teeth grit and my eyes crazy and my skin start to raise off my veins and muscles in little clots of fear, and that pricks up my adrenal glands and suddenly little beads are bursting out of my skin, and the back of my neck, and SWEAT IS HAPPENING and it’s just ironic and shit – it’s like the only cure for ‘fear of needles’ comes in a huge fat injection.

Ok let’s start from the beginning.

I hate sweating so much. At school we had a girl who was always MEGA sweaty and I vowed “I WILL NOT BE LIKE THAT” because I could see it, the shame of it, following her around like a ghost in an 80s film, all “You need to acknowledge me in order to move forward” and I thought “it’s so simple to prevent sweatiness, just a quick spritz or roll, and suddenly you’re socially acceptable and attractive and not disgusting to anyone, well at least not for the particular reasons outlined above.”

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Dude is on top of things.

But you see, it’s not as easy as that. Sometimes sweat is just uncontrollable, despite all your best efforts to curb and avoid it, and I call this story “the time Jess went to the Northern Territory, in outback Australia.” (I am specifying the country here because my 2011 Blog Summary Stats just came in and turns out 3% of my readers are from Peru and another 5% from a country in Africa I’ve never even heard of, and so who am I to assume that they are down and familiar with all the states and territories of Australia?)

Anyway. Part of travelling around outback Australia, especially if you go in Summer like this dumb bitch, is eventually accepting the fact that you have sweat trickling down every single surface of your body. That the act of wiping it away will actually generate more sweat. So you get to a stage of such pathetic, helpless acceptance that you just sit back and slump into the indignity, you let those beats of salted bodily refuse crystallise on your skin, harden in moments of briefly snatched air conditioning, and it’s this state that we call DROWNING.

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HE IS JUST NOT COPING

There are some people out there who go “pfft, sweat is just part of life” and “embrace all that dirty messy shit that’s part of being human” and to those people I say “obviously you have never bought what you thought was a 100% cotton shirt and it turned out to be poly-nylon and grey marle coloured, because you just have no idea” and “do you know what we call it when sweat trickles down your back and into your butt-crack? We call it SWAMP ARSE. We. Call. It. Swamp Arse.”

Sweat that one out. Just nowhere near me.