Snakes On An Everything

I actually haven't seen Snakes On A Plane. It's not that I wasn't interested. It's just that I saw a lot of the meme action leading up to it and by the time the movie came out, I felt like I'd pretty much seen it already.

To be honest, the idea of snakes on a plane isn't the most bone-chilling plane scenario I can think of. I quite like snakes. Even when I was a kid, trips to the Reptile Park were the highlight of any holiday period. Personally, I've always found the idea of Outbreak of Gastroenteritis On A Plane to be a whole lot more terrifying. What would you do?? There's only those two tiny little cubes of bathroom space for the whole plane. There would be bodily emissions going everywhere. And not in a good way.

ANYWAY. Snakes.

Liking snakes in Australia is probably not the most intuitive thing. If you see a snake in your backyard, you're not really supposed to want to touch it. You're basically supposed to get as far away from it as possible, because that bitch can and will straight up murder you and then slither home to laugh about it with its little snake friends.

One of the best news stories I can remember happening in my home town took place in our local David Jones. It was unfortunately timed; the store was located on a strip of mall where all the shops were closing down and being replaced by crackheads dragging their girlfriends along the ground by their hair. The council had this big campaign to try and encourage people back into the CBD. I remember writing a bunch of letters to the editor trying to explain how putting more meter parking on the street (without any parking garage options apart from the David Jones carpark) while at the same time talking about cutting the public transport options really isn't the best way to attract people to any given area. Unfortunately, it is against the law for a local council to do anything that falls under the categories of 'logical' or 'productive' so the CBD was in pretty bad shape.

It was around this time that they had to temporarily shut down the David Jones unexpectedly one day. Because there was a brown snake hanging out (literally) in the automatic door. Just dangling there, setting off the sensors, preventing anyone who wanted to continue living from shopping for perfumes and such. In the end they had to get animal control in to remove it, where they discovered that a family of the bastards was living in the roof. Not the best for business.

But still, I love snakes. The venomous ones aren't so much my favourites, but that doesn't mean I can't have a soft spot for the ones who don't do all the killing. My old friend, who I have referred to in this blog as 'Binny' on the insistence of my housemates, had a snake in his care for some time. It wasn't his; his old housemate had absconded to Queensland for a job, but had left a great majority of his things in Binny's house. Including his pet snake, Precious.

I loved that snake. I can't count the number of times Binny and I came home drunk and decided to get the snake out to play. I also can't count the number of times I said that to people who asked what I'd done the night before and then refused to believe that it wasn't an innuendo.

Precious did bite me once. Apparently she was a bit temperamental that day. When I reached into the tank, she reared up and fanged me. I showed off that wound for as long as it lasted.

"Oh what's that? Oh, just a snake bite. Venomous? Well technically yes, but I'm so naturally hardcore that I already have venom running through my veins instead of blood and it doesn't have any effect on me."*

Precious was not venomous. Sadly, I am not really that hardcore. I am not even a little bit hardcore. But Meattrain, if you will recall, is made of nothing but steel and brawn and testosterone. He is part Dr House, part Indiana Jones, part guy from one of those CSI shows that I have never watched and thus cannot efficiently reference. As part of his big fancy job, he had to do a component of 'snake awareness' training, which turned out to have nothing to do with how to pick your hookers in Bangkok, as I first assumed.

He recently undertook a series of tests out in the outback which I believe also included driving cars off cliffs. I'm assuming, as with all of these tests, it was considered a pass if he was still alive at the end. The snake test also sounded pretty intense. Basically, my understanding of what happened is they gathered a bunch of Australia's Most Venomous (including one pissed off python they'd simply found on the road on the way to the test) in a small room and threw them at my housemate. They chucked a bunch of snakes at him, and he had to deal with them without dying.

I'm assuming he passed.

-Smackie Onassis

*Disclaimer: this is not true in any way, not by any definition of the word 'true'. Except perhaps where 'true' is defined to mean 'false'.

Bonus Image

Smackie Onassis: Friendship Origin Stories

Sometimes I become friends with people in pretty amazing ways. You have already heard my origin story for my friend Bones, which is one of my favourites. But I do have a lot of other pretty great ones.

I have mentioned my friend Binny a couple of times. He was one of my best friends back in Newcastle, and his was one of the most important friendships of my life. How did we meet though? I'm glad you ask. I'd be more than willing to discuss it at length. Seeing as you asked and all.

We met when we were both at the housewarming party of a mutual friend of ours. She was the trumpet player of the band I was in, I'm not sure how she knew Binny. I approached him and started talking to him solely on the basis that he was wearing a Decemberists t-shirt. Yeah, that's just what I'm like. We realised that we had a lot of common ground and exchanged phone numbers, promising to hang out sometime soon. We were both in relationships at the time, so it wasn't anything romantic. Unfortunately at the time I was always either at uni, or at work, or riding my bicycle from uni to work. I didn't have a lot of free time and as a result we kept missing each other. Our potential friendship seemed doomed.

Until one Monday morning. I hadn't seen him since the party, so I was a bit surprised to see his name come up on my phone. I answered and he explained that he was pretty cut up because his girlfriend had left him that weekend.

"It's funny you should say that," I replied, "My boyfriend left me on the weekend, and as a result my parents had me put in the psych ward at [name of hospital]"

"You know," he muttered, "That hospital is about 100 metres from my front door."

As a result, we spent a lot of time together over the ensuing weeks. Once I was allowed to go for walks I would head over to his house for beers and guitar hero on a nightly basis, despite the hospital's zero tolerance alcohol policy. I didn't really care, and neither did the nurses who apparently once saw me at the pub with him when I was supposed to be in my room*. They didn't dob on me and I respect that.

From there our friendship was well cemented, to the point that even when I was allowed back into society and started working again, I still spent the majority of my free afternoons at his house.

I think that's a pretty good friendship origin story, but don't think there's not more where that came from.

You may have noticed that the manboy referred to by the name Vegatrain (which is what he insisted on being called, by the way) is a fairly significant part of my life. But how did we actually meet? Well, my origin story for Vegatrain is tied into the origin story for some of the other totally excellent people in my life, namely Buglustre and Harrison.

Imagine this scenario: a lonely 21 year old is bored and on the internet. Her days of playing music to not-always-embarrassingly-small crowds are long over. While she is pretty lonesome, the last thing she is looking for is love. On a whim, she signs up to an internet forum. I'm not going to go into detail about how I announced my presence, but let's just say I entered with a bang. I wasn't taking the whole 'internet' thing at all seriously. But then, on an unimportant thread about Christmas presents, I mentioned that I had got my tiny hands on 'Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers' by the National and I was loving it sick. This got the attention of a young man on the other side of the country. He commented how much he liked the National and replied by quoting a Belle and Sebastian song with reference to my username. I responded by saying that my name had absolutely been inspired by the song in question and that I had actually seen Belle and Sebastian last time they were in Australia, even though it meant leaving a university exam early so I could get to the venue on time. He responded simply by saying 'Let's be friends.' At this point I feel like I should thank every band I listen to for forming so many of my most important relationships.

So, anyway, flash forward a few weeks and under strange circumstances I am spontaneously buying a plane ticket at 1.30am on a Wednesday to fly to the other side of the country solely to meet a guy I have been talking to on the internet for approximately 3 weeks. It sounds exactly like a summary of things you are not supposed to do if you want to be responsible, but it was amazing. We got drunk at midday and had our first kiss to Debaser by the Pixies, which we had put on the pub jukebox. A month later I moved here. I am always of the opinion that this isn't exactly how normal people go about things, but have you even read my blog? I am not normal people.

Buglustre and Harrison are both people I met through that same website, along with Sally-Tsar in Melbourne. I haven't been to the site itself in a long time, but that's probably because I actually see the best people I met there in my day to day existence. Buglustre enjoys telling the story of how she wore her 'killing boots' the night she met me 'just in case'**. Of course, she turned out to be about a foot taller than me so she probably could have crushed me between her thumb and forefinger if she had so desired. Luckily, that wasn't necessary. Harrison tells me that he didn't like me at all at first, but was pretty quickly won over by my breasts. This is despite the fact that the pillar of sexual attractiveness for Harrison is Josh Thomas.


-Smackie Onassis

*why is smackie not in her room she's supposed to be in her room why is she out of her room

**Every time I say these words, I can't help myself from wondering what would happen if Neko Case ever had a brother/son named Justin. I know it's stupid, but I honestly can't help it. Every time.

Warning: This Story Is Pretty Depressing

You may have noted that a lot of crazy things seem to happen to me. It might be that crazy things happen to everyone and I'm the only one who notices. I have wondered briefly if my entire life has not just been some kind of long drawn-out acid trip. As you have seen, a lot of my stories are very light and whimsical. But there have been a lot that are much less fun and games, and more of the inevitable eye loss. The story I am going to tell you now is, well, a bit dramatic. Any story that ends with the protagonist sitting alone late on a Friday night in the gutter outside an emergency room, wearing a formal dress and crying really usually only has it's place as the music video for a bad emo song. Yet, I once found myself in this exact position.

It was the night of my oldest friend's 21st birthday party. I went to her house all dolled up with a bottle of wine in my hands, ready for a night of fun and nostalgia. But as the evening went on I found myself more and more depressed. I kept trying to talk to people I had known for years and finding that I had nothing to say to them, or they to me. We'd grown up into very different people. They responded to this by talking around me as if I weren't actually there. I responded by sitting by myself, not having a good time at all. I didn't want to bring everyone down, so I slipped away unnoticed.

There was one friend I had at the time to whom I actually could relate, and who even made the time to see me reasonably often. He may not have been big on talking things over, but when I was upset he was always there with a beer and a guitar hero controller, sometimes even a remote controlled tank that shot actual tiny bullets. That was enough for me.

The codename that my housemates have insisted on for this guy is Binny, due to the fact that a lot of my stories involve him and they are a bit convinced that he doesn't actually exist. For the last year or so I spent in Newcastle, he and I spent most of our time together. We were both social outcasts who needed each other for our minimum daily requirement of human interaction. All of my other friends hated him for the way he jerked me around, but I needed him. My life had reached a point where I didn't really have anyone else that I could rely on, even if he wasn't the most emotionally stable of people.

When I left the party I found myself unsurprisingly heading towards his house. I arrived just in time to see him crash his motorcycle. He had only been wearing shorts and a t-shirt, with no helmet. Apparently he had been drinking alone before I'd arrived. I don't think he hit his head, but his leg was cut up pretty badly. I freaked out and grabbed my phone to call an ambulance, but he yelled me down and told me to leave him alone for just a minute. He didn't want an ambulance. I don't know why, but he didn't. When he went into shock, he conceded to let me call a cab to take us to the hospital.

I paid for the cab and helped him to the ER. I bought him a bottle of coke, thinking he could really stand to keep his fluids up. I sat down next to him, freaking out for the safety of one of the few remaining people in the world that I actually really cared about. It was then that he turned to me and told me he would prefer it if I left. He told me flat out that he didn't want me to be there.

I stormed out of the ER frustrated, alone and trying not to make a scene. Unfortunately the situation was well past the point of not turning into a scene. And, well, if you are going to make a scene an ER is probably a pretty reasonable place for it. They'd be used to it, if nothing else. Once outside, I collapsed in the gutter and started bawling my eyes out. I don't know how long I was there, sobbing, still wearing the cocktail dress from the party. No-one from that party ever asked me where I'd disappeared to that night. I assumed that my absence hadn't really been noticed.

I eventually managed to compose myself enough to arrange for someone to come drive me home. To add insult to injury, when I got home I realised I'd left my wallet on the footpath outside the hospital.

I did get my wallet back, though. And Binny did apologise to me for the way he'd acted. He admitted his pride had got the better of him. Apparently after I left he started bleeding quite profusely and had to be rushed to surgery. He admitted that my actions had saved his leg, maybe even his life. I had sworn to myself that I wouldn't forgive him, not this time, but we somehow found ourselves slipping back into the way things had always been. It was as if the whole thing had never happened.

It wasn't long after that night that I left Newcastle for good. It's now been more than a year since I've been back to my hometown and I'm kind of hoping that I can continue to make excuses to avoid going back for as long as humanly possible. People are always saying that running from your problems is not the best solution, but sometimes it's pretty much the only option.

-Smackie Onassis