mr-onion's Diaryland Diary

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A Canadian Werewolf in Bangkok

Friday: our entire group of wankers turned out for Franz�s leaving do. After months worth of inoculations at the travel clinic for everything but Japanese encephalitis, flatmate is pissing off to southeast Asia for 6 weeks.

I miss her already. Who will re-enact infomercials with me, pretending to cut tin cans with our Ginsu knives? Who else will come to the corner shop with me in their flannel pyjamas just to buy a pack of smokes?

For the occasion we went to Treehouse to visit Minty at his new bartending job. We found him slouched over the bar, nursing his orange juice like the hard man that he is. Minty produced the Classifieds section of a local paper, and asked us "does this description sound like me in the 'I Saw You' bit of the Personals?"

I have never ever recognized any of my mates in the "I Saw You" section but felt the need to play along, in case he had been drinking dangerous amounts of orange juice and was off the rails. And indeed it was him, there�s no one else working at the bar (which was named in the ad) who resembles that very vivid description of Morrissey except for my friend Minty. He's so funny when he's proud of himself; I can actually see his hair getting taller.

I've been surreptitiously gathering information from Minty about getting in touch with his friend Daniel again. It�s a very longwinded story about me and Daniel but I need to find him and explain all our miscommunication over the months. He thinks I don�t care about him. I think I do. He thinks I�m being aloof and pretending not to recognize him. I am just very shortsighted/drunk and didn't spot him sitting behind me that night until he spoke to me, and then I still didn�t recognize him because he was wearing his glasses and I hadn�t seen him in months. He thinks I didn�t ring him. I did. Frustrating.

And then Treehouse changed the scheduled band at the last minute to our worst death metal nightmare, causing a mass exodus in the bar. Poor hungover Minty, we left him to it and ran off to the next closest bar, Mingers, its well earned nickname.

Franz, meanwhile, is absolutely bladdered � and I�m wondering if I can lift her, if it comes to that at the end of the night. She fancies being hungover for her 16 hours of flying.

Franz: When I get back from Laos d�yer know wha I�m gonna do?

Onion: What?

Franz: Well, answer me!

Onion: You ashed me the fucking question! Whadderyer mean?

Franz: millennium hand and shrimp thas what!

So I turn to another mate, who�s being chased down by a collection agency because of her recently acquired music addiction:

Dairy: I don�t care, it was worth spending all that money on 4 random trips to see gigs all over Ontario, Quebec, California. It's been such an amazing year for me.

Onion: We�re your friends, we�re here for you and if you should ever wind up living in a cardboard box in an alley, I know I�d give you a couple of potato chips out of my bag, if I happened to have a bag of chips whilst walking by your cardboard box.

Dairy: Cheers! That�s comforting to know.

Onion: That�s just the kind of friends we are.

Then my occasional drinking buddy, Cohen turned up. He used all his savings, from all these years of sewing his wallet shut and never ever buying a round of drinks, to form his own local music mag. I wandered up to him and was trying to sell him my friend�s services as a sex columnist: "she�s very versatile". Sara really is a sex columnist, but not quite Carrie Bradshaw yet.

Cohen�s one of those music elitists that won�t speak to anyone not-possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of dead 60�s jazz trumpeters: this is what happens when a man doesn�t have a date for 3 years. He�s clever enough, but basically one of the untouchables due to lack of social skills. Then he intimated that he would possibly like to use me to do some gig and album reviews. This was exciting for about 5 minutes and then I completely forgot what we�d been talking about.

And was hijacked by the twins: Ike and Mike. They lost their father recently in a very sudden and horrible situation. Mike has just recovered from a nervous breakdown over this and needed to talk to someone, but I haven�t been out for a while and it was just too much. They just lost their last family member and he was remembering the good times with his dad and how much of an inspiration he was. Mike was radiating pain and I started sobbing and making an ass of myself in front of everyone at the table. His brother came over, assuming Mike had done something bad to me, and hauled him off to a dark corner. Franz asked what was the matter with me, and after I related it to her she almost started crying herself.

We all re-grouped girly-style for some reconnaissance in the Ladies Room. Four of us in one stall, peeing one at a time.

Onion: So what�ve you got?

Laura: What the hell are you talking about? I�m having a slash.

Onion: I thought, when you all got up from the table, that we needed to go to the toilet to gossip and share vital information. Nothing really?

Belle: nothing but piss my darling

It�s still a fuzzy Friday night but Stu hung on to the bar for dear life until about 4:00am and thus witnessed Dairy sucking the face off of Cohen and dragging him back to hers � she�s kissing ass and probably tonguing a lot more than that, to get into the music business.

Saturday Morning:

We�re all hungover and collapsed on the floor from moving Funky�s stuff to her bijou new flat. Stu steps in, three hours late for moving after it�s all done. He informed us all about the horrors he�d witnessed at Mingers after we�d left: his two most opposite friends snogging right in front of him; he momentarily went blind in disbelief.

....later that afternoon, at the airport. Franz is surrounded by her family and Belle and I.

Her Mum: Do you know what the penalty is for drugs smuggling in Thailand - it�s the death penalty � death by poison spider bites as I hear from my friends at work.

Franz: I promise not to smuggle any class A�s, Mum.

Her Mum: You girls haven�t tried drugs before, have you? I hear things in the news about kids at raves buying ecstasy that�s gone bad; how on earth do you get bad ecstasy � it must have some sort of Best Before date stamped on it.

Belle, Franz & Onion (in unison): We wouldn�t even recognize drugs if we saw them. Nothing stronger than coffee for us.

...hours later at the Departures Gate

Belle and Onion: Have a wonderful time in Asia!

Her Mum/Dad: Watch out for those foreign monkeys; they�ve all got rabies! And AIDS too probably!!!!!!

Sunday:

I�m absolutely shattered and thankful that I didn�t write this whilst drunk on the weekend. Sometimes I see beer-soaked e-mails that I forgot I�d written (and about 1/3 of my Diaryland notes left for other members) and can�t, for the life of me, remember what the hell I was thinking when I wrote that.

And today(?) I think I�m supposed to be interviewed for my friend�s documentary about Danny Elfman, so I�d best go watch some old Simpsons episodes for the sake of research.

12:00 p.m. - 2004-11-28

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