Perth, Part The First

Last weekend I went to Perth for my district conference. Perth is such an exciting and well known vacation destination that when I told my Scottish friends that I was going there for the weekend they were all really surprised that I was going all the way to Australia. That’s right; Scottish people are more likely to fly to Australia for the weekend than they are to drive an hour up the duel carriageway (which is what Scottish people call divided highways) to go to friggin’ Perth. So, as you can imagine Perth is not exactly a hopping place. In fact, the tourism board has a sign out front that says ‘closed due to lack of interest’.

I arrived at the hotel with the American who was still trying desperately to cleave to me. I felt a bit like Luke Skywalker with Yoda holding onto my back. In fact, the American sounds a bit like Yoda when he speaks, only the American sounds a bit more pretentious. The American had been assigned to a nice double room and I was down the hall in a broom closet. I felt like Harry Potter, the analogy only intensified when I discovered that the heat in my closet didn’t work. When the American came into my room, because he does not seem to be able to stay away from me for more then 10 minuets, he told me that my room was really cold (because I had not noticed) and he offered to let me sleep in his double room because he didn’t have a roommate. As you can imagine, this sent a shiver down my spine.

Now, for those non-Rotary people out there, allow me to explain what a district conference entails. Representatives from all of the Rotary clubs in the district (between 300 and 600 of them) descend upon one small town to discuss their plans for the year. Saturday and Sunday consist of two ‘plenary sessions’ each morning. I made this mistake of thinking that these were some sort of plenary sessions wherein qualified members of the group would come together to plan the year. This assumption proved to be incorrect. These sessions were not about making plans, or looking into the future; these sessions were literally about nothing. I am not exaggerating. There were 12 speakers in total and none of them actually said anything. They were basically a the gibbering pack of tree apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing, and said it loud, loud, loud.

I have come to expect this sort of behaviour from Rotarians and for me, the real surprise came in the bathroom whist I was urinating in the urinal. I have done this many times before. As many of you know, I am a frequenter of public toilets and when I am not on my knees; I am often using the urinal. But this urinal was unlike any I had ever seen before; this was an apocalyptic urinal of the future. Above the urine receptacle was a flat screen TV and I am not making this up: on the screen was the computer generated image of an overweight black man wearing jeans and a wife-beater waking around a barren desert wasteland. He didn’t seem to have any real goal; he was just walking around towards nothing. I found myself entranced, fondling my penis in an attempt to make it appear as though I was stilling making pee pee so that any Rotarians who happened upon me wouldn’t think I was strange. In retrospect, might have appeared odd; but I was transfixed by the TV and I could not imagine what it was doing in the convention’s toilet. After a few minutes of my mock urination (mock urination, by the way, would be a really cool name for a rock band) the man reached a cliff where he stopped and looked out over the abyss. He looked like a fat black Hank Rearden. When the future had nothing left to tell me, I zipped up my trousers and left the toilet. It was a vision of the future I will not soon forget.

Later days,