Day 44 - October 30th

Day 44 - October 30th
Mushrooms and cider on St Kilda Jetty
Brilliant day but kicked out of Pocky's house HAHA

        A bit more detail on Leon:
        From what I could tell he spent most of his time alone in bars trying to meet people and sell them mushrooms. He'd roll joints and ask people nearby to borrow papers or tobacco off them as a way of striking up conversations, then he'd try and make sales to the guys, and have sex with the girls. I didn't necessarily like him, but he wasn't bad company and I was in a new city, so he was fine. He was one of those friends who you only ever see one-on-one because you know if you introduced them to other people they'd probably embarrass you. He was filler, like a summer fling, without the passion – or the fucking. I promise we didn't fuck.
        He met Rach once when she came to pick me up from his house, and the three of us went out to the park nearby to kick a football. When we got there I remember him making some derisive remark about girls not being able to play sport. Rach and I both hated it, but when she pulled him up on the comment he got indignant. He was only joking, of course; “Jeez Taco, you're a comedian, right? You know that was a joke!”
        I hadn't spent enough time thinking about – or being in, for that matter – these kinds of situations at that stage to know that I needed to stand up for my girlfriend, so I laughed half-heartedly and said we had to go.

        On the day on this card we went out to the beach at St Kilda to meet this girl I knew from back in Adelaide – she worked in the strip club above Red Square while I was working behind the bar there. She spent half of her time in Melbourne but had to keep going back home because she was on bail for I thiiiiiiink assaulting someone or something? (Exciting!) I may be getting that story all wrong, but she had to keep going back to Adelaide to report to the police back there for some reason, so she'd dance in Melbourne where she could make more money, then make the trip back home to report a few times a month. It sounded like an insane existence, but then again I love that shit.
        We took mushrooms on the jetty at St Kilda and sat there all day drinking – at one point a fight broke out on the beach and I recall the far-away image of a huge Lebanese guy swinging wildly into another guy's head on the sand beneath him. We were stuck out on the end of the jetty until the cops came and the crowd dispersed.
        Back at my Adelaide friend's flat near the beach we were settling in for an evening of drinking, and all seemed well, but quicker than my mushroom-brain could keep up with, something happened between Pocky and Leon that ended in them yelling at each other and calling each other stupid. I thought maybe they were about to fuck maybe? I had no idea what was happened, and didn't realise that anything seriously wrong had happened until we were out on the street holding beers with a door being slammed in our faces.

        That was the kind of crap that came with hanging out with Leon, he thought he was so fucking smart with his hallucinogenics and podcasts and opinions, always justifying everything with a speech too long and tiring to come back at. I only saw him a few times after that, I'd started to make better friends in the city, and the mushrooms he'd picked in April were running out, so the friendship reached a natural conclusion. I've met so many more people like him in the years since. There's no arguing with these dirtbags, they're always right, and they'll rattle off all the reasons why and if you can't refute their dissertation point-by-point then you must, by rights, concede defeat and forfeit your opinion, because logic.
        Just because you're technically right, doesn't mean people have to like you, or listen, or spend time with you, and it doesn't even really make any difference to anything. You can scream, “Ad Hominem!” all you want, but at the end of the day if your Correct Opinion doesn't have a likeable person to espouse it, then it's of no use to anyone. I hope one day all of those people can find an island to all go to be right together forever, and while they're busy being right, we can all stay here and be happy.

Click here to read the next part - Day 45 - November 8th