Summer is acting like a seductress - the great undresser of people of all shapes and sizes. As summer settles across the land, a certain wistfulness invades the mind. A longing for other times, a sweet nostalgia both melancholy and pleasurable, like the takes of a biscuit recalled across the decades: a remembrance of things past.
Well, am in a confessional mood. Women have nice friends. They listen to each other. They empathize and weep for each other’s woes. They talk honestly about sex. They do not, for example, lie to each other about how big their clitorises are or pretend to have lost their virginity to the au pair when they were 12 or so as to make their friends feel small and miserable and childlike. Men’s mates, on the other hand, just talk. They don’t listen. They wait for you to finish talking so they can say something better. This is because men are boring. Men talk about football and beer. They are interested only in cars and tits and…no, just cars and tits.
Men compete. Men tell jokes to make themselves feel good, not to make you laugh. With mates you spar and occasionally giggle at shallow things. You argue about ideology and international politics if you are educated, and about 4-4-2 (football) if you’re not. But the level of human interaction is the same. Women I have met three times know me better than men I’ve known since I was ten. When things go wrong in your life you go out with your mates and you get wasted. You get wankered, fucked up, mullered, caned, schindlered, shindered and shitfaced and then you have another drink and you think of more words for the only thing you ever do together. But you don’t share feelings. And they don’t give a toss, really. Hence, cherish the mates you have and try to grasp the joys of life with both hands.
‘The horse of time is galloping fast: let us see where he halts.
Neither is the hand on the reins nor the foot in the stirrup.’
PS. Am part on a infamous statistic which one would have loved to avoid. Despite the 'Beach Closed' signs at the Tamarama Beach, yours truly dived in and headed straight into the rip. To put it straight the Surf live savers' were to the rescue. Am embarrassed as hell to confess. That moment stuck in the rip, was life supposed to flash in front of my eyes - because the salt water made visibility quiet difficult. Aah well, yet another tale to an eventful summer.
