Now is the Winter of our discount tent.

Hello and howdy, pull up a chaise lounge, help yourself to the muffins etc.

Winter!
Yup...there's no escaping it. Sure..... we're technically in Autumn and yes... I know the skidoo doesn't crank over until the 1st of June but I'm just not the sort that says a blow job isn't cheating and that Gorillas shouldn't get the dole on a technicality.

As far as I'm concerned Winter starts when you wake up in the morning and run series of brainiac ruses and strategies worthy of The Great Escape that would allow you to stay in bed all day without losing your job or being carted to crematorium when your bladder explodes.

Winter is here when the day starts with 15 to 20 minutes of eyebrow smouldering schemes, involving Hawking like calculations where Y= sick days x gas bills + needing to do a wee and you make small sketches on the pillow case deviously connecting a name change in Thailand and a hose that could possibly drain out of the window before it becomes horribly apparent that you will have to take part in the day and thus leave your magnificently warm bed.

You girdle your loins (or line up your girdles) and leap into action, sprinting like a fat panther with a pace maker to the bathroom.
A heater is smashed on with a desperate fist and razzed up to the point where you could smelt copper.

You then perform the legendary Nudie Doodle Dance (or the Crispy Nipple Strut as other's would have it) as you shamelessly (some would say indulgently) expose frosted body parts to to the heater (which is pumping out so much blast furnace warmth scientists in Madrid are tapping on barometers and making phone calls to Presidents) as you hop from foot to foot like a naked, desperate line dancing Gibbon with hot sauce on it's doobries, while the shower performs whatever mad magic is involved to heat water.

You leap in, your skin jazzed and fried by the delightful drops. You are Mawson on Elephant Island.
You perform ablutions worthy of a Hindu Priest with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Every part of you is burnished with five flavours of unguent and defoliant.
Dark thoughts of drought cross your mind as the midday news comes on and your are scaldingly reminded you've been in the shower for some five hours.
You don't care. So what if the water bill is equivalent to the national debt? It's sooooo nice in here.
You wash your arse again for the 26th time. One can't be too careful.........

You steel yourself again and contemplate going back to bed.
You think of St Caffeine and the miracle of the Big Cup.
A burst of heroic joy comes over you and you stand in the shower for another half hour congratulating yourself on what a wonderful person you are. Evolution was on fire that day it came up with you allright!
You turn the shower off and try not to electrocute yourself on the heater which is now causing atoms to split near the medicine cupboard.

A towels fluffs hope into you.
The ghost of Herb Elliot spurs you on as you run around the house, the furniture waving brightly colored pennants at your buttocks and watching you with cushion-like joy, as you try to get as many warm clothes on as you possibly can before your desperate cotton layering makes you look like an opp shop golliwog.
(Or in my case a sort of Bedouin hobo drawn by a crayon wielding Gorilla trying to fill in it's dole from).

This is the true start of Winter I tells ya.
Stuff your gilded leafery, pungent marsupials rooting around the clock and your smug isobar pointing weather folk.

Winter starts for me when you look around (with your fuzzy sloping brow and animal hide tea towels) for some cave to crawl into.
(Assuming of course you can afford a three chambered cave for $560 a week with cold and colder running water and a delightful creaking noise that suggests you could be crushed into a squeaking paste by 20,000 tonnes of unstable rock just as you've got the coat hanger antenna in the right spot to watch the spatula gannets on Masterchef make Anzac bikkies and Turkish delight on National Cross Demographic Day.)

Winter is here when you emerge from your domicile with your padded pantery tucked into your Velcro dungarees, your personal person carefully sealed up like a snappy Tupperware bowl of downy fashion, only to be thwarted by trenchant Wind of the Antichrist which still manages to find the gap between your sleeved doona and your thermo-reactic pinafore and blows, with NASA like accuracy, straight up the crack of your arse, leaving you gasping in crystallised ring horror, bleating for mercy at the bus stop and performing a strange (yet very amusing) Shamanic dance that implores the eternal spirits of the Blue Sky to pour hot coffee over your harassed Siberian crack.

(While we are on the subject of dressing up to leave the house, why do people working at home dress up for work? What is it about snapping on bright new elastic underpants and a crisp lettuce pressed shirt that makes us feel as if we can go like the wonderful clappers? Is there a correlation between trakky daks and interest rates? Would the Dow Jones collapse if we just showed up in a saggy T-shirt with some Milo stains on the front? What part does ironing play in world commerce? Maybe we should organise World Shithouse Outfit day where you just show up at work in baggy comfortable flannels, drink cuppa soups all day and politely lose the remote to see if a Volcano explodes or if the Sea turns purple)

Anyway.....I've lived here in Ballafornia, home of the impertinent and impotent alike, enduring the long slow Senate session of Winter more times than I can remember.
Although far from the World's most icy eyeball popping Hell , Ballarat's Winter just sinks your soul (like an old cowboy's even older horse) into a quicksandy mire of grey, uncomfortable mither where the town's inhabitants become clag goldfish in a gelatinous tank of lethargy and beanies.

Thoughts become long exhalations of smoggy repetition, movement becomes a dire, muscle grinding imposition, joy gets put in a tinder box full of shredded Christmas cracker gags with stalwart families appointing someone (usually a gifted child or a ribald uncle) to gently blow on the smouldering embers of happiness through the long dark months, listening tensely to the wet creaking of the heathens who burn cheap scotch in lonely underpants fires by the letter box, until their souls can afford sunny kindling again and we can light the bonfires of giggle again.

We (The Ballafornians) become penniless, gout ridden, rubes huddling around bank accounts, people at the End of the Days, building our strange Mad Max 2 style relationships in our skidding deserts of Blue Bland ice, pumping the precious bill paying cash juice from our snake eating jobs at the Gyrocopter factories, painting "Ohm's not Bombs" on our battered buses of love and pretending that activity will save us from the Humungous and his Dainty Ice Wolves who now have one of those annoyingly catchy Top Ten hits out that gets flogged to death after it wins the "Are you Gunna Be My Girl?" award for most overplayed song in history.

We sprint hopelessly around, workaday squirrels in a nut barren muesli town, fluffily hopping hither and thither, planning, crafting, not talking to much in fear of our words will freeze like cheap cochineal colored icing and drop from out lips in snarly gobs to shatter like pungent gossip and thus stain the parquetry with petty allegations that no spraying or wiping can ever remove.

Those horrible monsters of the Anglophile Boomer People (often in the form of sexless lesbian Aunty types or elder Gents who seem to eat tweed and expel model airplanes) start strutting about in shorts, loudly decrying the joys of having your tits shatter of a morning, talking about "best time of year" and the like, dragging fat Labrador dogs (whose hearts are full of happy panting and whose bowels full of terrible Pal) down frost smattered nature strips, both of them snuffling around and laying steaming piles of modern art about the place with both their hardy opinions and shaggy bums alike.

(Not being a violent man, I would gladly do hard time in order to ram their cheery, cold loving bespectacled heads through a Mr Whippy van window and choke them with amusing ice creams. Their horrible Winterphile opinions grind at my Summery soul. It's like being sprayed with a snow maker that squirts cold nylon casseroles in your face)

I despise Winter.
My arse aches, my opinions rust and my slim reserve of tolerance evaporates like an asthmatic child's breath on the eyeballs of a rat.
I have three to four filthy months in which I turn from an ebullient bon vivant and glittering raconteur into a sour monster who shamelessly dry humps heaters and skulks about looking for chocatley treats in order to make the damnable cold go away.

I adore Summer. I'm always sad when she sets off on the Northern hemisphere tour with her warm woodeny guitar and her songs about thongs.
I miss her. I miss my raggedy shorts and swimming in Pine smelling lakes. I miss intravenous beer. I miss being unthoughtfully warm.

Goddamn Norwegians. Goddamn Hemispheres. Goddamn Cycle of Life. You'll all pay.


Till next time,

Mick "I wish they made electric plug in trousers" Dog.