*simulcast at www.darkris.com*

Now that everyone is up-to-date on my status (for reference please click here) I can fill you in on what has happened since.

The Preamble

On December 29, 2006 Chief and I went to the Melbourne Central Lion, which was our custom on a Friday night, and as it turns out nearly every second day of our holidays. Usually we are met by a bit of mock warmth from the bar staff (which is standard procedure with most pub staff and their regulars) and maybe a little bit of eye-contact play with some of our fellow patrons.

I wouldn't attribute our play to the fact that we are overly attractive no that I'm saying we aren't, but it probably has more to do with nearly a foot of height difference between Chief's imposing 6'5" frame and my somewhat diminutive 5'6 7/8" stature.

However, this night was slightly different. I seemed to notice a little more play than usual, and had my attention divided between a couple of 'prospects'. God I sound like such a player. As is my technique, I waited for one of them to make an absolute move before deciding which was a better horse to back. In other words I'm a coward that needs the chick to make the first move in order to reveal that they are fact interested in me. Saves confusion I think, you just can't be too careful these days :P

Anyway, it wasn't until much later in the night that such a situation presented itself. I was dancing on the dancefloor in close proximity to one of the marks in question when I noticed she was being hassled by some dude that was dancing like a possessed evangelist and was trying his guts out to woo said mark.

I let this continue for sometime, being slightly amused by his antics and making myself seem much more attractive by comparison, before eventually perking up enough courage to ask the girl if she needed rescuing. For me, this scene was very reminiscent of an episode of The Secret Life of Nick, and funnily enough she did have a slight vampire look to her teeth.

We did the whole generic dance thing until before she and her friend (a stock, standard D.U.F.F.) were going to leave. Seizing my opportunity I asked her for her number at which point she snatched my phone out of my hand and put entered the data herself.

Copious amounts of messaging ensues of the following day where we are able to establish a time and date to meet up. Unfortunately (this is the due to the unfortunate phenomena commonly referred to as hindsight) it turned out that she was able to catch up on New Year's Eve. At the time I was excited that I had a follow-up meeting planned, and didn't give thought to what the night would actually bring.

The Main Event

Chief and I planned what we would do New Year's Eve and it was established that we would arrive early in the evening in order to cement ourselves as features of the bar and slowly prepare ourselves for what was to be a rollercoaster of a night.

I was aware that my 'date' was most likely still out of credit, so whatever message I sent to her was one that didn't require a reply. The message that was composed was thus:

"We are heading to the Lion. I will be looking for you from 8 til 9. See you soon"

Without a word of a lie, her and the D.U.F.F. arrived at 5 past 8! This made the night a little awkward as we were expecting a few friends (George, Chad and his girlfriend Jess, Lukey, James, Raph and Ohnhai) and now had to entertain these girls before they arrived.

The conversation was excruciatingly painful. I swear the D.U.F.F. was my Date's attorney, as she answered most of her questions for her. All of the questions she answered herself were in the form of one-word responses; few things annoy me as much as one-word or one-line responses. Chief and I had to take the reigns of the conversation and in the space of an hour and a half had covered everything and had almost totally exhausted all of our material.

The night was destined to drag on from here on in, so I took the initiative to my Date away and talk to her privately as I thought this would garner more success than the group 'interrogation'. This is the part of the night where I chose the wrong path. While I had fun with the Date that night, I missed out on having fun with my friends (don't get me wrong, I did have fun with them at times, but my attention was divided and again, in hindsight, I feel I neglected them a little).

But yeah, copious amounts of alcohol were consumed and a good time was had by all as far as I know. Lukey arrived later because he had to work late, but he more than made up for it.

As it was Chief's birthday, we went up to the bar determined to get him one hell of a birthday beverage. We asked the barchick (her name is Jess and she was dressed as a cop in tiny, little, skin-tight hot-pants, CFM boots and a tight, low-cut top as all the barstaff were allowed to wear fancy dress on the night) what their strongest drink was. She told us it was the Melbourne Central Devil and she went to ask the manager (George) if she could dispense one to Chief. He was denied.

I can't remember what we got him in lieu of the Devil, but needless to say, after hearing about it, whatever we ended up getting him was a disappointment.

Our disappointment was short-lived. After we told Lukey about the Devil shortly after his arrival, he had to have one. Now, the reason Chief was denied was because he had consumed far too much alcohol already, and the manager had learned his lesson the week before by letting another regular (Jason, who looks like Gorgeous George from Snatch) have one after drinking a lot already. This reduced him to a feral like state where he needed to be confined to a cubicle in the men's toilets where he proceeded to spew up the entire contents of his stomach while he battered in the walls of his enclosure. He stayed in there for the remainder of the night, like a caged animal, under the watchful eye of the security staff.

Anyway, Lukey told Jess that he had just arrived from work (which was a true statement about 30 minutes prior to his claim) and that the only way he had any hope of catching up to us was to have a fabled Melbourne Central Devil. His ploy worked and soon the manager himself was concocting his beverage. Usually this drink is 'brewed' in a martini glass, but due to the frequency of Strawberry Daiquiris that were being sold, they were out of glasses, so Lukey had to settle for a Scotch glass instead.

The glass is filled three quarters full with several different spirits with no mixer and on the left sits a shot glass filled with red liquor, while on the right is sat a shot glass filled with blue liquor. The central glass then has two straws placed in it and the subject is instructed to drink. Lukey does so.

He proceeds to nearly empty the glass with incredible pace when the manager suddenly pours the contents of both shots into the mix. Lukey continues to imbibe the sickly brown fluid. Finishing with a fire in his throat and belly, Lukey lets out a victorious roar and Chief and I are instructed to not let him drink for the remainder of the night.

Lukey didn't need another drink for the night. 30 minutes and as many dollars later for the Devil, Lukey was busting moves on the dancefloor that would have made John Travolta blush with shame in his prime.

The night came to a close with Chief and I indulging in our post evening custom, being a healthy dose of Hungry Jacks. We, by some miracle, were able to hail a cab (a maxi-taxi no less!) and we did a deal with the cabbie to drop the girls (my Date and the D.U.F.F. who were tagging along) at their place on Flinders Street where he would then proceed to drop us at Crown Casino, because apparently Kensington is too far away from the City.

We drop the girls off and head towards Crown. As we are pulling up to the taxi rank (which was totally full and would have taken an hour and a half by my most modest estimates to reach the front, and being 3:30 in the morning and already in a cab, I didn't feel like waiting for another one) I leaned forward to the cabbie and told him that there would be $10 cash just for him if he were able to just drive us straight home (on top of the money for the fare that I was going to pay on my card).

After some umming and arring and angry faces in the crowd and security telling the cabbie to move over to let other cabs through, he angrily agreed and Chief and I settled back for the 8 minute drive home.

The Turn

Looking forward to some sleep to end what I saw to be a terrific New Year's Eve, I stumbled into Chief's spare room. As I was about to lie down, Chief asked me to accompany him on the balcony. This is where the night took a twist. As we are standing there we hear a woman shouting, Chief being Chief, he yells out to her to shut the fuck up and go to bed. She yells back a little bit and we proceed to laugh at her. She stumbles to under our balcony and as if forgetting the slanging match we were just engaged in, asks us if we have a lighter. Chief says yes and before I know it we are on the stairs on our way down to give it to her.

It didn't take us long to ascertain that this bird is a total crackpot as she regales us with a patchy tale of friend betrayal, violence, tears and an all-round shit-storm of a New Year's Eve. This crazy bitch is wearing only a skirt and a bikini top with some lace top tied around her waist. No shoes either.

She tells us how she stormed out of the party she was at because all her friends told her they hated her because she kicked rubbish onto the road. Chief and I exchanged bemused glances at this point and urged her to continue. She told us she had been strolling the streets when she had accepted a ride from 2 African guys in their car. A young girl, accepting a ride from 2 strangers at 4am. Did I mention nutcase?

Anyway, after she gets in the car, she realises she could be in some serious danger and jumps out of the car as it is moving. She then asks us where she is, and we tell her and she seems genuinely surprised and a little annoyed that she is still in Kensington.

After we deduce where her friend's party is, we offer to escort her back there. Don't ask me why, but we think that it's because our super-hero complexes kick in and we can't let her walk there by herself.

We begin the hike to her friend's party (about 20 minutes according to my estimate) and Chief, being grumpy, begins baiting her. He first tells me that we are too nice and 'safe looking' and the asks the girl, who told us to call her Jim, what was different about us and the African guys in the car.

She replies that the guys in the car could have easily raped her. Chief retorts with so could we. This is where the conversation takes a turn and I decide it is good policy to just continue to stroll alongside without saying anything. She tells him the difference being is that before she was trapped in a car and now if anything happened she could easily run away from us.

Chief continues with his game, letting her know that no matter how fast she could run, either of us could catch her. This is when she decided to demonstrate her Plan B. Out of the corner of my eye, I see something hurtling towards my head. Despite flinching, her elbow still glances my cheekbone, narrowly missing my eye-socket. I lost it a call her a crazy bitch and punch a chemist roller-door making a loud bang and setting the alarm off.

My outburst has the desired effect as she is scared and runs off across and down the road. I hurl some obscenities after her before I hurl my fist into a pizza shop window as I am storming past (on my trip to investigate my potential damage in the light of day, I was disheartened to see that the only mark I left on the street was a slight smudge of blood on the pizza shop window).

So I have been dealing with a self-inflicted injury so far this year. Not to mention many revelations about my Date from New Year's Eve that made the decision to not pursue anything sit very comfortably with me. The poor little dear has some major issues she needs to sort out before being unleashed on an unsuspecting world again.

So now I'm back to square-one and am glad to be back at work if only for the structure my life gains when I'm here. I also went to Queensland with Maddy during my holiday. There's not really much to tell so I may as well include it in this post. It was a comfortable, dry heat and I only got a little burned. When we left Coolangatta Airport at 7:30pm last Wednesday it was 28 degrees. When we arrived in Melbourne at 10:45pm it was a sweltering 32 degrees and humid as a sauna!

I might be going out on Friday (if Chief recovers from being sick in time, which is unlikely) and Saturday night so maybe I will have some more material to post about next week.

Until then, stay cool!