Talking Poofy Tour blog - Day three

Dear Computer Journal, has it really taken me nearly a month to bring myself to write the final chapter of Talking Poofy's world tour of tediously provincial Australian state capitals?* Or is it only now, listening back to the podcasted reports of our antics that I can remember what happened? In any case, for some reason I feel the need to complete the cycle, and write a final chapter to resolve everything that occurred.

I won't test your attention/slavish fanboy devotion by repeating what you can already hear on the podcast, so let me fill in some additional blanks for you:

What sticks in my mind most persistently about that day, apart from the stench of that awful sweet champagne that had so much sugar in it, it gave diabetes to the grass I poured it out onto, is the aftermath. The next day.

Oh. My. God. I mean, I am no stranger to The Morning After. I mean, I've been binge drinking semi-professionally since I was fifteen. I went to an all-boys Catholic private school, I've done things that transexual airline stewardesses don't have names for, I've had hangovers that have been misdiagnosed as terminal cancer. But I have never known misery like that bleak Saturday morning.

Distinct from the hangover after the Hobart show, when I literally was too hungover to speak, this morning I could speak just fine, I just couldn't live. We got up, checked out, and went and had breakfast where I tried not to think about the food that the other two were eating, every movement of their gullet like a blow to my brain from inside my skull. Seeking some respite from the bright, loud world, I announced that I wanted to spend the day at the cinema while we waited for our afternoon flight, "and see something miserable, where everyone gets cancer and dies in the end".

Which is what we most conveniently did. Thanks, Cinema Nova, for your support of maudlin indie Australian cinema on a crusty Saturday morning. I made it through about thirty minutes of movie before I had an irresistible urge to sit shivering on the toilet floor for twenty minutes, making the great Sophie's Choice of Talking Poofy hangovers: there's only one bowl in the cubicle, do I fountain-shit or projectile-spew into it? Ah, comedy... you don't make much money but you're following your dream, right?

Sitting in the Rundle St Mall afterwards, watching the other two have a coffee (I would be nil-by-mouth until the following Tuesday) I reflected that of the various life skills I have developed in forty years of rough living, chief among them is the unique, instinctive talent of, on mornings like these, positioning myself such that I am never more than ten metres of unobstructed progress from a public rubbish bin. Yep, some people can see auras, some people can calculate impossibly complex sums just in their head, but me? I will never be caught short when the urge to vomit in the street strikes suddenly. Just call me rain-spew-man.

Thankyou God/Buddha/Krishna/Oprah, shortly afterwards, standing on the corner of King William and Rundle, I felt something in my guts thud very definitely, like I'd just passed an aeroplane rivet from upper to lower colon, and after a moment's panic, felt very clearly that the worst had passed. I would be fine. And from then on I began to climb my way out of the greasy, musty pit into which I had dug myself. And just as well, imagine having to fly in that condition! It would have been like trying to hide Linda Blair in the Anne Frank attic, to mix my teenage metaphors.

Yours, Doogie Howser MD. 

*Perth is insular, not provincial