# 68

I was invited to a function today. Nobody asked me to stand before the congregation, bow or to speak my mind of how poor I think the state of recent affairs has been. So I didn't. It wasn't that I was offended by the non-gesture. Oh, fuck no! Far from it. I was relieved. You see, I find it beyond reproach and arrogant to the extreme, like a Coca-Cola advertisement narrated by Sam Kinison, that someone ought to assume that s/he should be asked to speak when all they've done to contribute to the assembled throng is to devote his/her time, energy, and pursuit of unrivalled excellence to the very cause that's biting him/her in the ass.

Ah, I'm just fucking around, pretending to have a whinge because it's been many a day since I've whinged for real. *twirls index finger high above head*

Next paragraph begins very much like this: So there I was, dressed in my blue tailor made original Khan Thuy label suit: matching dimensions for the dark brown long-sleeved shirt underneath and guilty by colour-association light brown tie to complete the nostalgic gangster look; its knot as perfectly tied as any computer generated single-frame image could hope to achieve. I felt hot, in the sense that I was warm, borderline ill to my stomach. I wondered briefly about the physical properties of dark colours then nodded off into a light sleep where a gang of talking Snickers bars instructed that I eat them without second guessing why.

Much to my relief, nobody, as far as I could determine, had noticed my actions of sliding into nod or how I had strayed from the superbly crafted pink programme. I picked up my lens and snapped a few dozen frames, more out of frustration at having unknowingly raised myself from the sweat-based, thoroughly deserved accidental sleep than anything. You won't see those shots here because I say so.

And then realisation hit me, smack-bangola at the bridge of the snout. It fucken woke me up for good as well. As I tossed the rubber baseball back to the guilty party I realised these third-year cadets were on the way out: their crafts had survived the war; their bodies and minds had withstood the pressure; their mission had been accomplished.

'Had it been another year?' I asked myself much to amusement of those who couldn't understand my language; John Howard's prickly racist variation of English. To them I was merely a fat foreign bastard in a cheap Vietnamese suit armed with a camera partaking in a one-sided conversation with thin air.

It had, indeed, been another year. By rights, the third year cadets were now packing the type of mental muscle that could floor a rampaging bulldozer at thirty paces, if unleashed according to methods which I, and others like but different to me, had shown them. It was frightening to the point of making next to fuck-all difference to me, seeing as I'd most likely never need to console them again. But I wondered whether the third year cadets were worthy of progressing to the next phase of life's bewilderment. The answer, sadly but truthfully, was maybe. After all, who was I, a foreign man sans head hair, to determine otherwise?

Third-year cadets of the two-year Andy Kaufman Programme, I salute you. Go forth, experience life for what it is, come back and tell me what you've learned once you do, and don't ever ask me for money.

P.S. This post was supposed to carry an image of Sam Kinison. The blogger photos bot determined it would not be so.

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