Are You In Love?

I tried to write a story about something that happened at work today but when I read it afterwards, it was terrible. OK, look, all that happened was that I rode the elevator with a woman who admitted that she never had a hairdryer, and she never wore makeup. I loaned her my phone that for some reason has a mirror on it, and she looked at herself in the mirror as she rearranged her hair and examined her makeup-free face, and said something about a boyfriend she had who was twenty years younger than her. I don't know why she told me all that. I couldn't think of anything to say, so maybe she just kept going.
What I should have tried to write about was when I delivered the mail to the HR department and there was the Filipino woman I like to talk to, and she overheard me singing some song I made up, and she came over and said what was that song? Where do you get those songs? I told her they come from another planet and the only way to stop them is to wear a helmet made from aluminium foil. She started laughing. Maybe that's why I like her - she laughs at things I say.
Later I found out I had left some other department's mail in the HR department - the Polish woman I'm CRAZY about told me that on the phone.
'You left it here,' she said. 'Are you in love?'
Why did my heart leap in my chest when she said that?
Are you in love?

Nile

Friday night Anders and I went to the Gaelic Club in Surry Hills to see Nile. Have you heard of them? Yes? No? Well, Nile are a US death metal band obsessed with Ancient Egypt. They write songs about all the different ways that people were killed by Egyptian gods and demons in the Ancient Egyptian world. As with all the best death metal, you can't understand any of the lyrics so you need to consult the booklet in the CD. You can't understand the lyrics because the singer growls, or rumbles; sometimes it sounds like he is vomiting, or he is trying to clear a blockage in his throat. It's a very guttural kind of sound, like you would imagine a zombie might make. It's really great and fits the music perfectly. The music is fast and violent and sounds like you are under attack, but in a good way.
Anyhow, we got there early so we saw the two support bands. The first band I can't remember what their name was, but they were pretty good. Then the second band came on and they were called Furor and they were pretty good too. But wait a minute, I thought, these bands sound like black metal bands! See, black metal has keyboards - there is more of a symphonic element. But I like black metal too, so it was all good, as the saying goes. But with this band Furor, I became sort of obsessed with the guitarist. What I mean is, for their entire performance I was trying to figure out what was going on with him or her. From what I could tell, this guitarist had long beaded hair with glowing lights in it, and goat horns on top. Sometimes he or she reminded me of the Predator in the Schwarzenegger movie, the way it moved. To get closer to the point, this guitarist didn't seem completely human! It was a hypnotic performance, whatever the case.
Then Nile came out and to the dismay of everybody there, took a while to get started. The audience chanted NY-AL! NY-AL! NY-AL! The air was buzzing with suspense! At last they began. They played some songs from their new album Annihilation of the Wicked (which I've got), and from their last album, I forget the title. Yes, I am a total Nile noob, ha ha! I only discovered them fairly recently, actually. But for years I have hardly gone out so you must understand, it was a big deal for me, and for Anders, for that matter. But Nile were great, and the sound quality was magnificent; loud and clear and brutal beyond words. The audience were as interesting as the bands too. Some of them looked like vikings, as though they might swing an axe any minute and send someone's head flying, spurting great jets of hot blood. Yet, consistent with my limited experience of death metal shows, the audience were perfectly well mannered and polite. Excuse me, excuse me, yes yes, of course, no, after you, by all means! etc. But having said that, what do you know happened after the concert! Anders and I walked across the road to sit down for a minute so I could have a cigarette, the cops showed up and started shoving their weight around. They were not dressed like regular cops but like some special division, the same that I have been seeing on street corners around the city lately. Anyway, three of them came over to me and Anders and said OK time to go, time to go. Move it. I said what, I'm just gonna finish my cigarette, but the cop said no you're not, you're going. Now! What the fuck? Well, we didn't feel like giving any shit to these bullies - it would probably not be a very good idea, so we got up and headed off, but the cop said not that way, that way!, pointing back towards Central Station. I said no, we're going THIS way, pointing in the opposite direction. The cop said oh is that where you live? I said yes, we live that way, we have to go that way. I thought it was strange, but soon figured that maybe it was because he thought that it was only Westies who liked death metal, so we would have to go back to Central Station to go home, back out to the Wild Wild West.
Anyway, it was a sour note to end the night on. But at least before those cops rudely forced us to move on, some dude handed us a flyer for another death metal show coming up in January: Behemoth! Hurrah! We'll be there!

Rabbit King

Earlier this year I read a news report about a man who had been arrested after allegedly having sex with and mutilating a large number of rabbits in an empty building across from the [Sydney CBD] office where he worked.
There is an update on this story here:

Rabbits case gets stranger still

Market City Beautician

Every day I go to Market City to have lunch. Every day I walk past this beautician joint. Every time I walk past it, my eye is drawn to a particular detail. I can't help it, it just happens. You can see for yourself. Would you not notice it? Of course you could not fail to notice it. But God! Is it strange to notice that? Is it perverse? Did only I notice that? Is it strange? Only normal?
*falls into a tunnel of madness*

Office Nipples

Pray tell, dear readers, what do you make of the following scenario?

A man is going about his morning routine of delivering and collecting mail around the many offices of the large organisation in which he is employed.
In one of those offices he begins a conversation with a woman he enjoys talking to and who, by all indications, enjoys talking to him. They are standing next to a large office machine being operated by another woman. In the middle of this conversation, the woman who a second ago was operating the machine approaches the man and woman and, with a big smile, leaning forward slightly and standing directly to the side of the woman, appears to examine that woman's breasts from her side-on perspective.
The man and woman are confused and maybe even a little embarassed by this odd behaviour, and even though the conversation is halted momentarily, they do not betray any signs of alarm or indignation. In fact, the man finds it rather amusing. And not only does the man find it amusing, but when he looks from the first woman's breasts (which, naturally, he could not help - there may very well have been something interesting to see there) to the second woman's breasts, he notices that her nipples are clearly erect beneath the red fabric of her sweater, or t-shirt, or whatever it was.
The only conclusion the man can reach is that, since he well knows that many women complain of the low temperature in these offices, it must be that she wants to find out if the other woman is *feeling it* to her own degree.
But that would raise the further question: Is this appropriate office behaviour?

Five Seconds

I was joking with somebody saying I would get in a taxi and see how far one cent would get me when all hell broke loose. Men started shouting, 'IN FIVE SECONDS WE ARE GONNA START SHOOTING, SO YOU BETTER START RUNNING!' They had set themselves up in the middle of intersections over a grid three blocks by three blocks. They wore blue denim and red bandanas. I started running. One of the men saw me and fired. I felt a bullet zing past my right shoulder. People were screaming everywhere. I felt sick with fear. At that moment, I remember thinking, 'You know, those super sadistic horror movies don't seem so funny all of a sudden.'

Devil May Cry II

I spent most of the afternoon reading my new book (The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - the Devil appears on Earth and torments Moscow's literary and theatrical community) but tonight I have been playing Devil May Cry. (Devils and demons everywhere! No wonder I've been dreaming about them.)
I'm at around the halfway point and now can do some pretty spectacular moves. My favourite one right now is double-jumping against a wall for height, blasting the hellfiends with Dante's twin handguns which also makes him hover in the air for a while, then on the descent come screaming down with a devastating meteor blast. The way the automatic camera spins around to get the action, sometimes you will have Dante in the air letting rip with his guns (he calls them Ebony & Ivory) and the camera is behind the enemy, so you see Dante high in the air in the distance, so when you do the meteor charge, he comes blasting in toward you, that is, the camera. It is impossible to convey just how awesome stunning amazing breathtaking and cool this looks. Not only that, but there is one breed of fiend called Sin Scissors - insane cackling witches with big scissors - and they fly around so you can land on them with your meteor strike move, jump higher when they block it, open up with the handguns, the witches will slash at you with their big scissors but if you jump at the right moment you bounce off the scissors and fly up even higher, so these battles can take place fifty metres in the air. This game is so pumped full of style it's ridiculous.
The game never gets boring. The missions are never too long. It's never too hard. OK, well I am actually playing on Easy mode (yes, by all means feel free to have a big laugh at Stratu who is not a hardcore gamer at all, ha ha!)
Anyway, even though I'm only halfway through, it's already become one of my favourite videogames. What are those games, you say? I'm glad you asked! ... The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, LoZ: The Wind Waker, Ico, Final Fantasy X, Resident Evil 4, Beyond Good and Evil, Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time and Animal Crossing.