One Angry Monkey

For those of you who may have noticed a certain amount of quietness (I’m looking at you, Young Boobs), you need a hobby. No, I’m kidding. Mostly.

But I have been quiet, and here’s why. I’m moving on, with a shiny new look and a shiny new address to go with it. From now until whenever I decide to let the domain name expire, angry monkeys dot net will be an archive, shelves lined with my gabble but slowly gathering dust.

Feel free to pop by and have a look at the new home. Promise I won’t bite.

If you’re not a plumber but think you might like to be one, this cautionary tale is for you. Plumbing isn’t all glamour, “tradies’ crack” and fixing taps for lonely housewives. Sometimes the job can get unpleasant. Like today, for example.

As it turned out, even the “mad plunging skillz” of the Man of the House were insufficient for the blockage in our pipes. To my surprise (but not the Matriarch whose area of expertise is “poos and wees and water”) the problem wasn’t caused by my chronic intestinal distress. No, it was caused by the trees around us. Damn you, Nature, you rooted my piping.

That’s a specialty which requires special tools, not just a giant suction cup and a bit of elbow grease. Fortunately our property is managed by the Best Agent Ever. BAE, bless her massively tall and kind of scary heart, sent out a pair of specialists just as quick as she could. Why bless her heart? They were the prettiest pair of specialists I ever did see.

*ahem*

They took their cutter around the back and got to work. This is where the chronic intestinal distress really came into its own. I can’t imagine anyone’s waste water smells appetising but the odour filtering in through the back door (open because they needed a power point) was… Let’s call it educational.

Remember that next time you’re thinking you’ve got a shitty job.

The Man of the House has gone all alpha-male on me. I’m not quite sure what to do with him. I’ve never really been that great a fan of being bossed about by the male of the species. Conveniently, he’s never had bossy tendencies. But something has changed all of that.

What cataclysm could have brought about such a polar shift in MotH’s behaviour? I’m so glad you asked. You see, this evening every drain in our house simultaneously clogged.

When someone in the house suffers from chronic intestinal distress that sort of thing is almost inevitable. I’m kind of shocked it’s taken this long, but this is pretty much the longest we’ve been in one place. Now I find myself envisioning us leaving a trail of rental properties with time-bomb toilets across Adelaide as we move about from place to place, using up the plumbing and leaving like the back end of a swarm of locusts. That’s on me. I admit that.

So when the drains clogged, discovered when MotH tried to flush the toilet (it always starts in the toilet, doesn’t it?) I sent him out to buy our very first plunger. Thus began his downward spiral. He found me a plunger worthy of Mordor and returned to unclog my drains. We believed the problem existed solely in the bathroom. So he unclogged the drains through there and all seemed well in the world. I opened a new bottle of wine to celebrate.

A few mouthfuls of that and I realised I had made a grave error in judgment. The wine tasted vile. So I did what any good connoisseur would do and poured it down the drain in the kitchen. At least, I tried to. It just kind of sat there, taunting me. You won’t get rid of me that easily, it said. I’m here for the long haul, baby. I summoned MotH through to see if he could hear the taunts as well. Apparently he could, because he went straight for the plunger.

I wanted to do it myself. I’m not helpless, nor am I frail. I have some experience of my own with plungers courtesy of the stupormarket. MotH wasn’t content with that resume and thus wrestled the plunger from my grasp and proceeded to unclog the kitchen drain “properly”. Once he was done doing that, he went back to the bathroom and attacked the toilet with renewed vigour.
The poor thing may never recover.

I’ve created a monster.

There’s one key issue which dungeon-masters everywhere seem unable to agree on — the use of profanity in fantasy novels. For some reason people like to think of medieval society as this pristine environment where the innocent inhabitants are unsullied by the concept of swearing, let alone the reality of it.

Uh. WTF?

This has to be influenced, at least in part, by Lord of the Rings. Tolkein created this world where people just didn’t seem to swear. Hell, some of them randomly burst out into cheerful, life-affirming song whether you wanted them to or not. And to some extent that was a valid approach. I mean, come on. Gandalf stands defiant before the balrog. He raises his staff above his head then then slams it down, screaming, “Get fucked!” It would detract a little from the mood.

There were places where it may have been more fitting. If I, like Frodo, had some little freak bite my finger off, I’d be swearing at it even as it fell to its death in a pit of lava. Later on, as I lay dying on the side of Mount Doom, I’d probably turn to my faithful companion and say, “Jeez, we’re kind of fucked now aren’t we?” Yeah, I’d make a bad hobbit.

I am human though, so I might be a bit more qualified to comment on the siege of Minas Tirith. Huge orc army coming. Elephants (oliphaunts, whatever) with big spiky things attached to their already spiky tusks stomping along, decimating all the little horse riders who keep coming for whatever reason. “Fuck that,” I’d say, and find myself a softer target. I’m in the city. Chunks of stone the size of the elephants’ heads are raining down on me. “Oh, shit.” Apparently I’m not a good human either. What can you do?

People seem to have developed this unrealistic idea of what people spoke like in the past. The reality is, our current profanities are some of the oldest words in our language. Society has developed this pathological fear of swearing and the political-correctness revolution has only made matters worse. There are so many words we just can’t use these days. It’s now the f-word (or f-bomb if you’re American and have a yearning to make yourself sound like a complete and utter dipshit to the rest of the world), the other f-word, the n-word, the s-word, the b-word and the c-word. There are more than that of course but I’m getting tired of typing *-word.

Funnier still are the people who just kind of jumble up the letters. I saw a sentence including the word cnut. At first I assumed it was a typo. Apparently not. Apparently swapping 2 letters makes a word acceptable to the puritanical censors out there. Fair enough. But I’m calling people who p-word me off sea-nuts from now on.

The whole idea is ridiculous. Singling out fantasy as the one genre where swearing should never happen? Why not censor everyone, I say. Someone should go and tell Stephen King not to use swear words in his books. Sell tickets — I think that’d be a conversation worth watching.

Making a blanket rule that swearing shouldn’t be used at all in a particular genre is just not realistic. I’ll take my swearing out if artists who focus on fantasy images stop drawing female elf-warriors in revealing armour with their tits half popping out, how’s that?

What a fucking lot of bullshit.

The ability to see causes serious side-effects in certain people. The government should pass a law; all glasses should be labeled. “Warning: May cause compulsive throwing-out of stuff.”

Why is that bad? I like all my stuff, damn it. I don’t want to throw it out. I emptied out half of my kitchen yesterday. Sure, it’s tidier. It’s a small space so sure, maybe it frees up room for me to, you know, cook and stuff. I don’t care about having room to cook. I care about having my stuff. Were it not for my natural and entirely understandable reticence to fossick through my rubbish bin, I’d take it all back in a second. In fact I might even go so far as to beg my poor, discarded stuff for its forgiveness.

Today it’s the bedroom. That’s a way bigger task than the kitchen. Why? Because I hoard clothing, and so does the Man of the House. The greatest crime (other than the sheer ugliness of some of it) revolves around my pants. Most of them were a gift from a friend who had outgrown them after a couple of pregnancies. Most of these pants lacked the catches which hold them closed. A year and a half later I still never wear them, but I still have them. I think I have a problem.

So anyway, I’m tossing out the wrecked stuff and I’m going to donate the rest of it because sure, maybe I think they’re ugly as sin but obviously somebody liked them enough to buy them, right? It’s a huge task. I’ve already filled one box and three-quarters of a rubbish bag. My closet and drawers are looking a bit pathetic.

Time to go shopping!