Being single is fun, unless you’re trying to start the chainsaw.
I thought about dating and even went on a dating site, but I don’t have the energy for someone who doesn’t appreciate my weird idiosyncrasies and there were too many offers of dick pics. I did enjoy seeing how much better I look than a man the same age. Men really let themselves go, don’t they? I guess they can.
Don’t get me wrong, I am fully expecting to hag out any day. The only thing preventing it is Estradot patches. I’d happily shed little plastic squares everywhere I go for the rest of my life while basking in the calm blue ocean of mental harmony but I know I’m just buying time. For now, my legs still resemble female legs and there’s a demarcation at the place where magicians saw the lady in half that’s clearly a waist, but the haggening is coming. Oh, yes. One morning soon I will wake up and need to live in a gingerbread house.
It starts slowly, the same way you don’t often notice a much-loved piece of furniture getting more and more decrepit while you’re enjoying using it. Every time you turn around something else has fallen off. Hearing goes, your metabolism slows ... it’s a blessing when your eyesight starts to fail, but it does make you super paranoid that you’ve got clown makeup on. There’s a reason why middle-aged women often have mad eyebrows.
I will go full hag in a meeting, I think. A meeting about wallaby control comms. An eerie David Banner-like green pall will come over me and my skin will start to fizz and smoke. My nostrils will enlarge, my hands thicken at the knuckles, then ... poof! I’ll be able to turn children into mice.
Not such a bad thing really, considering the alternative.
Which I did last weekend, attending the NZIFF screening of the King Loser documentary. It was a real nostalgia trip, a buzzing, shrieking, manic journey back in time to when we were young and had so many dreams about what we would do with our lives. Before artistic endeavours made way for jobs that pay the mortgage.
The audience was a who’s-who of those of Dunedin’s rock and roll scene still standing. I was moved by the film, and simultaneously despaired and annoyed: such talent monumentally squandered, sadly obliterated by drug addiction and penury. How we in New Zealand overlook our mad bright stars and only appreciate their crazy fire when they are gone.
King Loser was a shambles of a band, a hunchbacked, surf-punk psychedelic monster driven by two volcanic chemically assisted personalities, Celia Mancini and Chris Heazlewood. Celia a brilliant banshee, and a horror after a moped accident caused a brain injury and her drinking became a career. They were a band that will never be again and thank goodness - the whole thing was like the screaming you do before your car hits a wall, only over and over. Those were different times. Dunedin had more music venues than coffee spots. The beer was awful. It was a time when being beautifully under the influence was cool, the languid pharmaceutical days of Dunedin, our own Velvet Underground.
Looking around the glorious, velvety Regent Theatre at the aged faces, we who have grown old, "We got away with it," I thought (not physically, you understand, we were all complete wrecks).
But, we made it through those hard drinking, chain smoking, bohemian decades. Became people who went to the cinema to re-experience nights in filthy venues listening to bands that are the reason we are all deaf.
Now our drug of choice is oestrogen.
