Sarcasm Means Rending of the Flesh

Writing therapy — because real therapy’s too expensive:

Writing requires stripping yourself bare, but remember, sarcasm means “tearing of the flesh” so takes things one step further…

Tasmania is beautiful but you wouldn’t want to live there. There are no jobs, and disaffected, disabled young men amble up and down its streets, arm-in-arm with their mothers. I suppose any young person who’s capable of leaving — has.

One time, after dining out solo at the pier, I got lost after dark. I’d texted a friend to ask if he thought, having being a criminal prosecutor and all, there was a greater chance of being raped and murdered (but hopefully not in that order) walking back to my airbnb in the dark, or if I were to catch a taxi. He said to take a taxi.

Men. What do they know anyway.

I walked. Eventually the soreness in my shins won out over any safety concerns. After almost stealing someone else’s taxi pickup I gave up trying to hail one. Which was fine because there it was: a glorious beacon, brighter than the lights in Vegas — a huge Blockbuster. I could hardly believe it, it was like I’d travelled back through time rather than across Bass Strait.

The lady at the counter kindly printed me a map. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get through to her that she needed to print the entire thing off Google Maps. She’d printed the B, but I was still at the A, wherever that was. (When I walk out these doors, do I go north? Do I head south?) I mean, it’s nice to know where your accommodation is, it’s just that it’s nicer to know where it is in relation to you.

A stringy young man with rotted out teeth and his elderly mother waiting in line behind me kept offering to drive me. The sad part is, I’m sixty-six point six per cent certain they would’ve dropped me off unharmed.

I left the Blockbuster with my useless half a map.

What I did like about Tasmania, was Mona — the modern art museum built by that guy who got rich off Blackjack. (What an inspiration.) The rain words installation, to be precise: words forming in mid-air and then shattering wetly onto the concrete below. That was the high-light, if the above is the low-light.

This has all reminded me, somehow, of the most pathetic date I’ve ever been on. Although they were all strange and degrading and debasing in their own unique way. It's like the Tolstoy line — is it Tolstoy? — about all unhappy families being different.

Either my date arrived late, smelling ripe, wearing a rumpled t-shirt, or early, seated primly in a starched business shirt, pointing out in panicked tones that they’d already got a coffee (but they don’t like coffee... then order something else, dipshit) so I should head to the counter to buy my own.

I was gunna.

The verbal diarrhea from the layabout is, "women your age are desperate because they have dried up eggs" (I had explain menopause and his own mutating sperm to him). And from the well-to-do finance guy dribbles out — after I’d paid more for our lunch than he had — "I thought you suggested that café because it was part of a ruse to get a bunch of guys to pay for your coffee every morning". As if free coffee’s worth bad company. So you see it’s different, but it’s all the same.

I sat across from this specimen with the detachment of an anthropologist, or let’s be honest, an entomologist with a magnifying glass. I watched him pull a face at a sprig of parsley as he removed it from his plate. He didn’t believe me when I told him it was edible.

(Eat parsley, print the whole map, don’t hitchhike with toothless strangers or they’ll kidnap you and force you to watch Jim Carrey DVDs with them in the basement for two weeks straight till they realise they’ve racked up $40 in overdue fees and leave the house unguarded, at which point you escape. That much I know.)

Slowly the tale unravelled of a man who eats all his meals downstairs from his penthouse, does bicep curls at the gym attached to his apartment all day, and then retreats to his living quarters to spend the evenings watching free-to-air television — another relic — because there are no Blockbusters left in Victoria. He doesn’t need to go to work, his mother pays him to "stay out of trouble". Which sounds a bit ominous, really.

As long as you’re a good boy and never skip leg day, you’ll get your allowance. My parsley-terrified "date" didn’t understand what was wrong with that sort of arrangement. And probably doesn’t understand why he’s sometimes sad at night. Anyway, I paid for my meal and left him there, so he could contemplate his parsley in peace.

I told this story on the messaging platform of some dating app, to a man who almost seemed possibly normal. He took this opportunity to launch into a rant about the lower classes and women who “make good in divorces”. Not enough to ruin your body and career — marriage should leave women destitute too. Not like both people have a hand in creating those marital assets, is it?

Gold-diggers, gold-diggers everywhere! If you don’t have your wits about you, professional women who far out-earn you will milk you for a free coffee. Though, you know, hopefully there'll be no actual milking.

Anyway, that was his theory on how the mother had enough dosh to cloister her son away, swaddled in a lavish lifestyle where he didn’t need to — and never did — wander beyond a five kilometre radius of his home.

My theory involved the Mokbel crime family and was therefore much better.

My airbnb hosts back in Hobart, whom I never saw or talked to, left me a welcome plate of local delicacies, including Tasmanian smoked salmon, in the fridge. I cracked open the egg eagerly, thinking it was hard-boiled, only to find it hadn’t been cooked. The yolk got everywhere. Online they left me a glowing review praising how “self-reliant” I was.

Just as well that I am — isn’t it?

Angela Volkov writes about the full gamut of human experience, and is the editor of Sike! Psychology for World Domination.