Backyard

Apparently China is interested in setting up a base for its warships inSolomon Islands? Which are in the Pacific? According to Australians with heads made entirely out of the dog food that is easily mistaken for luncheon meat the Pacific is Australia’s backyard. Last time I checked a backyard was an area of open space at the rear of a dwelling, both the dwelling and the open space bounded by a fence. This is the classic Australian suburban set up, or it used to be until Australians realised they could sell their backyard for insane amounts of money to the entire generation desperate enough to build a house with no backyard. No outside area. So, just literally living in a box then. Sounds awesome. When I was a child, I would play in the backyard of whatever house we lived in this month. Well, I would sit under a tree reading a book in the cold of winter until I became extraordinarily ill. I was a bookworm. I hate Australia, torch the suburbs.

Australia is a nation that sees nearby nations as stops on a pub crawl or maybe villages to help Americans destroy. Australians have no responsibility except to the people who own our resource depletion industries. We are employees at a quarry. We are allowed to live extremely boring lives within very narrow parameters. We make so much noise about the importance of our borders because we have been trapped in our heads by a brain damaged culture that shuts down if it hears a genuine question or a noise outside.

It’s pretty wild that an Australian commentator arced up last week and said that if China is serious about setting up a nurturing space for its warships in the Solomon Islands, Australia needs to invade Solomon. Firstly, if you want to talk up a war you should pay for your own ticket, fly to the front line and go for a stroll to see how you like the place until you step on a landmine. This fucking idiot story was then picked up by the Courier Mail and from there it went on to blow a lot of people’s minds because, of course Australia isn’t actually full of fuckwits, it’s simply run by and for total fuckwits. If you can find a way to feel positive about Australia, I’m sorry but I need to steal your energy and leave you behind like a discarded snakeskin. I must find a way to survive somehow.

Fortunately, we don’t need to do complex, expensive research to find a point to Australia, we know what the point is: don’t be a fucking cunt to other people. You can live an interesting life just trying to work out how to not be a fucking cunt to people. While you’re trying to work out how to not be a cunt to other people, you discover that you can’t afford to be a cunt to yourself either. But don’t be a cunt about it.

In Australia we live in other people’s backyard. Nearly all of us live in backyards that are not ours, that we don’t own, never can and that we barely understand. You only have to look at the mass destruction of the Great Barrier Reef to see that we have zero idea what we’re doing here. Are we here so we can be affluent and own holiday houses? So we can have holidays in Bali, a place we also don’t understand, or are we going to hold hands, love each other, kill everyone in charge and live a life we can live with? I’m not sure if live a life we can live with is the best bunch of words I’ve ever written, but this is an emergency and I will climb over you to get out if it comes to it.

All I can do is freak out, foam at the mouth and shit down the back of my legs like a normal person presented with the idea that Australia should do American style invasions.

Every day I, as a middle aged Australian piece of slimy filth, see that my generation, like the boomers, have made out like bandits, climbed the ladder of financial freedom, pulled the ladder up after themselves and closed the hatch. They’ve disappeared into the sky, they live in the clouds, there’s no point even praying to them anymore.

Driving expensive ridiculous cars, they tell us that the kids are gonna save us. They’ve given up so completely yet have so much power, are so influential and that’s our backyard. Sit on the back step and roll a smoke. In your backyard middle aged and old people are playing, mucking around, engaging in horseplay, japes, jests and fun. Writing articles about doing invasions, scampering about the place, they live in the moment, they’re sucking their thumbs, they’re filling their nappies with shit and expecting us to change them and put talcum powder on their little bottoms. The backyard is a raging festival of affluent dickheads so deep into the comfort zone at this point that the only thing to do is to work out how to shut this whole system down. Block the ports, block the docks, stop the trains from running, close the highways and the freeways, shut down the airports. I know I’m talking about things that are illegal, but that’s how people talk when everything is getting worse. Everything.

Name one thing that’s not getting worse. Okay, my writing. Go me!