Lunch & Shopping

David sent

The FATTEST PIG that EVER lived !!!

EVEEERRRRR

6.40am. Bruno wakes me up. We head downstairs together.

I send David an obese pig YouTube video.

I make coffee. It is already light at this time of the day at this time of the year. And you’ve got to love that.

I open up The Guardian.

Taylor Swift is the biggest pop star in the world again. Apparently? According to what? Who? I think to myself. Apparently, her latest tour has been so successful it has added to the GDP of economies. I guess you can’t really argue about that.

But, is that judging her to be the biggest pop star in the world according to accountants?

She has now re-recorded 4 of her old albums, in response to her song rights being sold with no regard for her. You know, that is pretty good going. Don’t get mad, get even, hey?

7.26am. Sam is up.

7.30am. I started to make coffee and toast, when I realise, I had to go to the bakery and get a new loaf of bread until they open again on Wednesday, so I did that. They struggled with change, as they always seem to now, with me paying cash all the time. I’m simply not going to pay the bank fees when I can use cash and not pay them. And, it often means I get a discount just because they don’t have the change to give me.

I made toast. I’m still eating charcoal activated bread. I really like it.

I chatted to Mark – 10 years ago today, Australia got itself back on track by electing @HonTonyAbbott - TheYoungLiberalAus – seriously?

We both chatted about the disaster that was Tony Abbott. The worst prime Minister in history, that was until Scott Morrison came along, of course.

I listen to Gnarls Barkley Crazy. I don’t know if it is a TikTok thing at the moment, not that I watch TikTok, but I keep hearing it, and I like it.

I watched What’s My Line. Oh, I love that show, it is such an indulgence, do you like that. (It is me wasting my life, in all truth) All those old movie stars I’ve only ever got to see in old black and white movies, I get to see as themselves, and quite often when they were young. It is interesting to see them in the prime.

10am. I made more coffee and vegemite toast for Sam. (He is so bossy)

I decide to stop wasting my time on YouTube and get back to writing my April 2020 journal/blog, even though I decided not to do that, as it is just an indulgence and nobody is going to read it now, and to concentrate on new writing, but I think it is preferable to be writing my April 2020 journal rather than staring at YouTube mindlessly.

11.44am. David calls to say he’s having a really down, can’t get out of bed, day. “I want someone to lift my head and feed me yogurt,” he says (just like the pig in the obese pig YouTube clip I sent him)

I have a shower.

12.20pm. Sam is in mid indecision about what to do, once I come back downstairs.

Sam instructs me to clean my teeth.

“But, we are about to eat lunch, I don’t want to spoil it.”

“Brush your teeth, you are not brushing them two times a day regularly, now are you?”

“No.” I go and brush my teeth.

12.35pm. We walk Bruno to Victoria Street.

The sun is trying to shine. The cool breeze is blowing.

13.15. I’m in the Salvos

I get Laurel Canyon (2002). I’m pretty sure I don’t have it, but to tell you the truth with 1035 films, at last count, I can’t exactly remember all of them anymore.

Now 1038 films.

I loved it when I first saw it, and for ages I got it confused with Mullholland Drive, so I don’t think I have it. Cross your fingers.

I got a greatest hits by Janis Joplin which unbelievably has a track on it that I don’t have.  Mary Jane. That just didn’t seem possible, but checking my collection it kept coming up no.

Sam and Bruno walked on.

The sun is warm when it comes out.

1.20pm. I’m at the Vietnamese restaurant for lunch, sitting out on the footpath.

Sam instructs me to wash my hands. He’s always been bossy, I think, but is he getting worse, lately? I’m still wondering about that when I go and wash my hands.

We ate Vietnamese pancake and rice noodles with ground beef and salad.

Sam goes in to wash his hands when we were done. When he came back, I went and washed my hands.

1.45pm. We’re done with lunch. We walk off heading to the shops. Suddenly, the owner of the restaurant is behind us. I thought Sam paid, because he didn’t tell me to pay. And Sam thought I’d paid. How embarrassing. But we’d eaten there many times, surely, they knew it was just a mistake. I think they did, as he apologised to me.

“No, I’m sorry,” I say. I repeat that I thought Sam had paid.

Oops.

1.48pm. Bruno and I are waiting in the doorway to The Hive while Sam shops. A fat chick in a shot green silk cagoule walks past us as we approach the centre with an aggressive Jack Russell straining on its lead to get to Bruno. A short time later she is back, with the Jack Russell just as aggressive. Then she walks back again, her shit of a dog still barking and trying to get to Bruno. Bruno is so funny, he just gives a withering stare in return

1.52pm. Sam reappears.

1.53pm. Bruno and I are waiting outside Minh Phat in the cold. It feels like it is going to rain, and we have the long walk home immanently in front of us.

A white Subaru Impreza is parked in front of us with extensive hail damage. The guy gets out of the car and smiles at Bruno.

There is a house being auctioned in Nicholson Street with an auction flag flying out the front. Bruno decides he doesn’t like the look of it and starts barking at it. He doesn’t listen when he thinks there is something that may be dangerous… or something like that, who knows what goes on in their heads

It looks like it is going to rain as we head over to the butcher for meat. There is a ratty looking chick walking up Victoria Street towards us as we cross at the lights, with a huge dog on a lead. Bruno and I walk more in the raised left lane of the new raised tram stops, when suddenly the big dog bolts over to Bruno. He was just interested in sniffing Bruno pretty much, more so than being aggressive, but the chick on the other end of the lead clearly had no control over him for that split second that he bounded over to Bruno. It was fine on this occasion, which may say it all, but it is one of my fears with all these socially challenged individuals with big aggressive dogs – there are a few about the place – that moment when they lose control of their killer on a rope and it is free to attack.

Sam, who was in front of us, turned around and said, “Did that dog just try to attack Bruno?”

“No, it wasn’t an attack,” I said. “It was just a sniff.”

2.04pm. We’re at the butcher in Victoria Street.

The sun comes out again. It shines brightly on the footpath and it is nice. It is nice to feel the warmth, it is nice to see the its brightness lighting up the world.

The guy in the wheelchair missing a leg with what looks like gangrene in his remaining foot is getting off trams and getting back on them again. He’s a demanding got-any-change-mate kind of guy. I’ve bumped into him a number of times when I have been waiting while Sam shops in and around Victoria Street. He is particularly aggressive. I wonder if he is asking for change on the trams.

2.11pm. Sam reappears.

The sun shines brightly. We start heading for home up Victoria Street.

That particularly good looking nutjob who has those muscular legs, who wears those tight shorts with the hard not to notice sizable bulge in the front of them, (Oh, I know, and I don’t mean to, um, notice, but I’m not dead) is sitting on the seats at the tram stop on the corner, the hood of his hoodie over his head. He is chatting away to himself and dribbling all at the same time. It looks as though he is building something imaginary with his hands out in front of himself.

2.30pm. We’re halfway up Victoria Parade and the rain starts to fall, rats! There is no shelter up Victoria Parade, and you just can’t make a run for it with a bulldog, that is never going to work. What to do, as the rain gets heavier. But wait, there is one bit of shelter, the walkway to Melbourne Pathology next to the Porsche dealer. Bruno lies out on the concrete, always able to get comfortable.

Not too long after, maybe 15 minutes, the sun comes out and the rain stops. We still have to share the footpath with all the football fans, but you can’t get everything.

Sam remembers to get a cutting of a succulent that caught his eye when we were walking to the shops, despite me telling him that I thought we had enough plants and that, in fact, we could be giving some of our plants away. I love growing them and potting them up and the like, but lately I haven’t been giving them away to friends too much. We’re still being a little unsocial, really still a hangover from Covid lockdown.

2.49pm. We’re home.

I watch YouTube Shorts. Oh, are they sucking the hours out of life, or what. I’m just glad I don’t have a TikTok habit.

I watch Rolling Stones ‘School Boy Blues’ on YouTube with my headphones on.

I watch Rolling Stones ‘I Think I Am Going Mad’ on YouTube with my headphones on.

I watch Gnarls Barkley ‘Crazy’ on YouTube with my headphones on.

I listen to The Stones new single, Angry, again. There is a process with a new Stones single – it is the same for any favourite artist that has a new single out. There have to be multiple listens to it.

We watched the end of Three Thousand Years of Longing. The genie thing. Maybe at another time, in a different mood, I might have enjoyed it, but it was like I just missed some of it and I never really seriously caught it up again.

We ate 5 spice pork belly with tofu and egg for dinner.

The boys next door were out in the back yard playing music loudly. 

(The twenty something boys who line up in front of our security camera, focussed on the side of our house and the number of windows that are there, with their dicks out to piss in their garden) 

When I opened the back door to tell them to turn it down, I didn’t think the music was all that loud, so I close the door again. The problem was that they were playing the music in their kitchen, but they were sitting out in their back yard

We watched Guardians of the Tomb. I felt like I’d seen it all before, and that’s being kind of kind.

We watched The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, an English guy from the turn of the last century who painted cats. Who, rom all accounts, was a cat nut. I think the implication was that cats weren’t popular as pets in 1900.

9.45pm. We went to bed, as the boys were still noisy next door.

I am still re-writing my April 2020 journal, so I can fill in all the blank days in April 2020 on my blog, and there were plenty around April/May 2020. The beginning of the pandemic, seems like a time when I’d write more, not less. Unless, of course, you subscribe to the theory that the busier you are the more you get done.

Actually, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was really into writing my novel code name CJ. Wow! Whatever happened to that.

10.55pm. Sam calls lights out, puts on the sleep music and expects me to fallow suit. Be under no illusions, ‘Nan’ won’t have any disobedience.