Heart: What About Love?

This bombastic proclamation of concern by these Canadian Hair-metal vixens is the perfect choice for Brenda, fresh from her entanglement with Geoffrey. A beer-gutted fellow who 'plays by his own rules', and is also an IT consultant for a large Insurgence company. And indeed, is a man who saw employment as a means to an end to subsidize his true passion: The collecting of broadswords, maces and armour from that golden age of chivalry: the Tudor period.

At first she found this an oddly charming, if expensive hobby, augmented by the fact he referred to her as 'mu' lady', and once quite unnecessarily threw his coat into a puddle so that she could walk across it.

But then it began to become irksome, that look on butcher's faces when he asked for a leg of mutton, and the horrible taste of instant coffee when served in a pewter tankard, particularly when he referred to it as mead. The sprinkling of rose petals upon her bed was nice: until she realized that the florist was being paid from her credit card, a fandango she hitherto wasn't aware of, courtesy of his mad computer skillz.

She found hearing about the crusades interesting, at first. Also watching Excalibur lost some of its luster after about the 30th viewing. Ditto his constant referring to his grubby, one bedroom apartment as "Camelot'. 

So where was all the armour? I hear you ask. In a shed at his parent's house, like some ultimate ebay folly gathering dust, like a collection of the most expensive lobster shells in history, albeit with ornate, and frankly over ambitious cod pieces.

The final straw was when he insisted that she wear a chastity belt, and she actually agreed! trying to fit the thing on over her burgeoning thighs like a sort of steel nappy, it was most uncomfortable...with all sorts of nooks and crannies and key locks...the opening and closing of which he held in his possession: a brass key, that he kept in a vial about his neck on a leather string, sequestered under the neckline of his Marillion Tshirt.

          

Juice Newton: Angel Of The Morning

Ah! What complex souls find themselves weaving their way into the SGWB: like Myrtle, the 65 year old permed temporary ceramics teacher at St Albans High School, who indeed chose this country weepy by Juice Newton only because the more emotionally abstruse Stay With me Till Dawn by Judy Tzuke wasn't on the duke box...in fact ideally she'd like to combine the 2 songs into an amalgam called Angel Of The Dawn by an unlikely named singer called Juice Tzuke: but this will have to suffice.

For this is a tale spanning continents and decades, beginning on a kibbutz in 1973, which is where she met the main protagonist: Gideon Leaf ( real name Gregg Belcher) which is fair enough as at the time her assumed name was Willow. Their eyes, and destinies, locked while they were assigned to fix a tractor together, but just got high, and talked about Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet instead.

And thus began a sort of world poverty tour as they aligned themselves with different cults: The Children of God, Shiva Lila, Jonestown ( leaving, luckily, before that whole Kool-Aid 'thing') swamped in enough peyote and LSD infused mantra to drown a herd of nipple time share confused pachyderms.

The exact number of offspring she had sired throughout these experiments is vague: between 3 and 7...maybe 9...the spermicidal causalities are even vaguer: At least 4 gurus for sure (who all seemed  weirdly obsessed with golf) Gregg 2 definitely (maybe?) The Jesus-looking dude with the bent cock, and maybe that ginger-haired guy who lived in a tree?

Whatever, many a volunteer orphan/originator agency case worker was kept busy with the paperwork over the ensuing years. And she regularly revived confirmation or denial documents as regular as tax returns. 

In the meantime Gregg and her had come back to Oz and opened one of those shitty, sort of dusty, sort of really shitty B&B-cum-backpackers-cum-lodge-cum-whatevers in Warburton. One of those multilevel disappointments, that don't quite meet anyone's requirements vis a vis comfort and/or spiritual nourishment. Imagine the Great Northern in The Shining: but without the grandeur, just with the empty spookiness. 

Wherein enters the second protagonist: William ( Gregg's brother) a no-nonsense salt of the earth type, who just tucked in to get this travesty of a business into some sort of reasonable order, and almost immediately found himself (despite being married with children of his own) also tucking in to Myrtle's own ravaged version of Noah's Arc. 

Complicated? wait, it gets better: Enter the 3rd protagonist: Miriam (her 22 year old daughter by bent cock guy) who also rocks up, and proceeds to have an affair with...yes!...her step father!

In Short: Myrtle is now at the centre of the sort of novel Peter Carey used to write when he actually wrote good ones. The host of a vagina with the complications inherent visited back upon it.

How will it all end? Well according to Carey, when he was good: horribly, obviously.                      
 

  

Bonnie Tyler: Total Eclipse Of The Heart

Heavily tattooed 19 year old Rhiannon (thanks Fleetwood Mac loving mum and dad) discovered this Wagnerian piece of non sequitur longing in one of her older cousin's CD collections, and it has annoyingly taken up residence in her memory: like the name of a tropical fish she has no interest in, or the Mohs scale of hardness rating of granite.

And has floated to the surface as an unexpected consequence of her recent breakup with Milean; aka, The Cooch, a similarly inked lad of the same age, who is as thin as a lamb carcass hanging in a butcher's window. 

They discovered their mutual amorous attraction at her friend Sarah's party, deep in the K-hole, which, for the uninitiated, in a state of body and mind bought on by imbibing horse tranquilizes.

And celebrated their new found love by getting their genitals pierced. Leading to the sticky situation of his cock ring becoming enmeshed in her labial jewelry...the disentanglement of which was rather like the delicate operation of removing surgical objects from an oyster.

The Cooch was all about skateboarding, and getting wasted, and banana sandwiches, and wearing his jeans so low that his boxers puffed above them like a Shakespearean ruffle. On his stomach was an intricately inked image of a skeleton holding 2 hot dogs, with the words Be Reel in a copperplate font above them in a banner. How could she not love this man!

But he was reticent when it came to commitment. Reckoning that 'bitchez is hella' but that no one was going to 'slow his jam'. When she inquired what this actual 'jam' entailed, he responded by breaking a jar of peanut butter with his head, and spray painting Madd Stylz on the fridge: which was unfortunate, as all this occurred in her parent's house, and it was a new fridge.



  



    

ABBA: The Winner Takes It All

It is easily forgotten that among the multitude of fluff in their back catalogue, that these Scandinavian song-smiths did occasionally pack an emotional wallop: and none more so than this love-as-a-poker game analogy.

And so the perfect choice for Meredith, still reeling from the aftershocks of the agonizingly long dissolution of her relationship with bearded pool accessory salesman Thomas.

The trouble was they broke up and got back together so often, that it had become difficult to actually take the breakups seriously. It was a boy and girl who cried wolf scenario: with bags packed and unpacked with such regularity that their bedroom began to resemble an airport terminal.

But it was really over this time. The straw that broke the camel's back was a can opener. She said it was in the bottom drawer, when in fact it was still in the dishwasher. He then questioned why a can opener needed to be washed in the first place? She asked him if he'd ever heard of food poisoning? Suggesting that he then 'look it up in the fukn dictionary yu fukn idiot!'

To which he responded with 'how'd yu get fukn food poisoning opnin a fukn cano tomato fukn soup!' said from the bedroom, where he had retreated with lightning speed, and was packing his suitcase with the expediency and experience of a sock rolling ninja. 

The reality did not dawn on her for about a week, after her numerous texts and phone messages went unanswered. Her immediate fear was that he had met with foul play...until a photo of him showed up at a barbecue on his brother's facebook, wielding tongs, and wearing an apron that said Nice Tits!!! 

So that's it then? she figured. Both saddened and relieved, sort of like finally getting rid of a case of the measles, but also missing the familiarity of the symptoms. 

An so let herself drown in the catharsis of this song, stirring her black russian with a straw, while also eyeing up the taxi driver playing snooker in the corner.  



    

    

 

Barbra Streisand: Send In The Clowns

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Enigma: Sadness

Sometimes at the SGWB it's time to bring out the big guns. Like this abstruse piece of backbeat ambient perv.

And the song of choice for Stephanie, using it as a complex water torture, bringing to mind as it does her recent breakup with hedge fund broker and abseiling aficionado Adrian. Indeed, she had spent many a weekend having him dangle her down a perilous cliff face while he yelled instructions from above.

But it was in the boudoir where Adrian really went to town: no rough and tumble quickie for him, but elaborately orchestrated marathons of Dionysian dysfunction, which more often than not were soundtracked by this song.

And involved enough props to embark on an amateur production of Phantom Of The Opera...beginning when he appeared naked except for the sort of cape favored by 18th Century Highwaymen, wearing a bird mask, and she was bound and costumed like a kidnapped schoolgirl.

Before getting down to business, he would perform an interpretative dance at the foot of the bed, his signature move was to mime scurrying up a rock, using the imaginary suckers on his fingertips like some kind of sex gecko, before wavering in an imaginary wind like a soft length of licorice.

Next he would gravely intone his own made up Latin commandments in a stentorian voice:

Ipso facto desirato! Embarkadum sensalos headjobudum!

Before inserting a lit candle in her anus, and burning pages torn from a copy of The Da Vinci Code, and using the ashes to finger paint what he thought was 'behold the sun dragon as she writhes in ecstasy' on her back in Japanese calligraphy, but which actually translated as 'orange car very nice diarrhea worm'.

      

Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive

Oddly enough this quintessential encapsulation of female post breakup emancipation is listened to exclusively by male homosexuals.

So a good thing then that when off duty drag queen Daniel (Diamond) wandered into the SGWB he found this on the duke box, and then headed to the bar where he proceeded to get absolutely hammered on vodka tonics.

The cause of his distress? Steve, a married parking inspector he had been hooking up with. He gave Daniel a ticket, and Daniel gave him his heart...plus lashings of clandestine rumpy-pumpy behind various public monuments throughout the city.

And thought things were getting serious when Steve was eventually coerced into having dinner at his  apartment, an event Daniel prepared for lavishly with Duck a l' orange, expensive French wine, and enough candles to illuminate a cathedral. But got so drunk waiting for him to arrive that when he eventually did he threw the duck at him and tried to stab him with the broken neck of a bottle.

But the straw that broke the camel's back was when Steve, faced with the choice of going on holiday with his family to Florida, or flying with Daniel to Sydney to see Danni Minogue, chose the former. Thus ending the greatest love story never told.