Trifecta

 For 3 weeks in a row, each Saturday night I’ve been out to has involved violence.

3 weeks ago, my Nightride bus was held up by a fight happening in the back few rows.  We had to wait for the cops to arrive, in which time the Nightride bus behind it turned up so I could get on it and leave.  Fights aren’t interesting when you’re just waiting for the cops, and I don’t like to be around when they’re there.

2 weeks ago, I was sitting up the back when some dopey cunt complained he didn’t have enough room on his seat.   He seemed a bit slow, possibly Asperger’s.  During the trip home, he managed to insult all the lad’s friends around him with racial and sexist epithets.  He called one of them a wog, to the lad responded that he was actually half Lebanese, half Aboriginal.  So Gump called him a sand nigger and a coon.  The whole thing was too long to recount here, but hilarious enough to rouse me from playing Sudoku on my mobile.  I think Forrest Gump was the first one to promise a fight, and kept promising it up until Pymble, where he suddenly apologised.  

They were promising to bash him the whole way home, so I waited on 2 extra stops to Hornsby to see if it would happen.  It did, but instead of finding it funny I was suddenly sickened by it.  I walked home with this whole "I’m a terrible person" thing going on that I was going to write an entry about and baaaaaaaw over, but I decided that would just be pathetic pandering for reassurance from others, so… yeah…      

Oh, they didn’t really hurt him much.  Despite all them promising all kinds of shit, including the lad’s sister who was going to knock his teeth out, and despite them saying "Hey, look, we’re at your house now" when we pulled up outside the funeral home at Gordon, only one of them did anything, and it was just a punch, a few kicks and some shoving.

Anyway, this Saturday, the Nightride bus was quiet, but it was my train ride in that had the violence.  I wasn’t even on my way to the city yet, just on one of the suburban lines.  When we pulled up at Beecroft, there was already a fight happening.  Some guys from my carriage got excited and went up the platform to watch.  I was too busy trying to solve another bloody Sudoku until I realised the delay was going to make me miss my bus.  I walked up the platform to see what was happening.  The fight wasn’t there anymore, so I was wondering why we were still stopped.

I jumped back on the train, and suddenly had to hold on to a pole as 20 angry guys came rushing through.  Apparently the blokes who went to egg the fight on had pissed them off, and they were coming to bash them.  The fight had been continuing in the carriage, and the driver was waiting for the cops to arrive.  It was basically a mini-brawl.  Every time it stopped, someone else would get aggro and their friends would be trying to hold them back.

I’ll admit it:  I don’t hate the weekend violence.  Sometimes it’s the only interesting thing that happens on Saturday night.  It does annoy me that it shows the stupid fucking measures they put in place to keep us all under the rule of thumb – the pub curfews, the sniffer dogs – they do nothing to make people more civilised.  I hate a lot more about Sydney than people fighting.  I abhor the senseless violence of some coked up or drunk guido smashing an innocent bystander for absolutely no reason.   But between consenting adults who are equally angry, equally eager to fight, I find it invigorating.

Normally, everyone’s so complacent, so distracted by bullshit.  At least seeing people fighting reminds me that they’re not robots, they do have emotions, and they might one day give a shit about something more than just whether a retarded guy on a bus calls them a boong.  I see them as more human than when they’re sitting at MacDonalds reading the Telegraph in a suit, clucking their tongues at migrant workers or something like that.  And I like that a lot of the people who walk around in suits during the day are just as likely to be fighting on a Saturday night as the chavs in their polo shirts and baseball caps.   It shows who they really are.

  I didn’t see the Mardi Gras parade, but I did go to a friend’s gig where there was jelly wrestling.  I’m waiting for Omar to send me the photos of it so I can post about it here.