The Real Straight Edge

I am never fully prepared for how straight people are. After nearly 17 years of living on the coast, I suppose I have developed a fairly warped sense of 'normal'. Apparently we aren't. Normal that is. We are bent. Thank God, Shiva, Shakti, Allah and every deity in every pantheon. As I approach the sweet sanctuary of forty I am at peace with my one true learning on this planet. Straights are scary. Straight people are dangerous and straight people should never be trusted. These days I consider myself pretty middle of the road. I no longer claim social security, I pay tax, I am married, I don't drink or smoke pop pills or indulge in bizarre group sex rituals. I have never put a foreign object up my bum...although I have thought about it from time to time. I brush my hair, I wear a bra, and shoes. Sometimes I even bathe like that. I clean my nails. I delouse my kids and no longer get them to duck when the cops drive past. I recycle, I vote, I consume. I am a good little piggy. I always feel like I'm pretending to be an adult. Like a kid in dressups wandering around in oversized shoes. Being an adult always seems slightly fraudulent, like at some point an alarm will sound and I'll be punished for the failure to fulfill my assigned role by being sent to bed without supper. I've just come back from a weeks holiday in Noosa with my husband and kids. It's true, unlike Byron, Noosa hasn't let herself go. The streets are well landscaped, the architecture is swankier, and they have luxuries like bins and parks. But it's so straight. Everyone is so frightfully well behaved, that I found it hard to resist flashing my right tit at a retired couple or mooning the 5 star diners in Hastings Street. It seems my family is poorly behaved. A Byron family is like an unmedicated ADHD child unrestrained in a lolly shop. I was sitting poolside with my children watching them play piggy in the middle. This is a wonderful game about exclusion and pork. An elderly granny seated a few deck chairs away gathered up her witless brood and hissed 'Lets go inside away from these noisy rude children.' I was incensed. That's just the sound of joy. I'm shocked that unrestrained happiness could be offensive. But I suppose, it is Queensland, the poor buggers have only just got necks and the capacity for critical thinking is still a few generations away. (I can say that because I am a Queenslander. It's not interstate bigotry, it's reality...why do you think they choose to have Big Brother there?) I sat in a restaurant with my family. In the car we'd covered several topics of conversation including: is Dad a lesbian? Who goes to Hooters, and why women haven't demanded their beverages be served by large balled men in tight shorts at an establishment named 'Scoters'. My kids were the loudest in the restaurant. They dominated the conversation. They complained, they laughed, they fought and they demanded ice-cream. I noticed the other families. Nice quiet families with nice quiet children. Children who sat obediently at the table with daggy haircuts, tucked in shirts and broken spirits. Children who would one day have to agonise about coming out as gay, or who ended up fucked up as junkies or accountants. I guessed their car conversation would have been more in line with 'Would Jesus have got the carpentry badge in boy scouts' and 'What a jolly good chap Mr Howard is for taking booze off the blacks.' I couldn't stop staring at them. They were everywhere. Rigid straight people thinking nice neat thoughts inside nice neat lives. It was with an enormous relief that our tyres rolled onto the soft freaky bitumen of the North Coast. Weird roads. Chaotic roads. Fucked up roads full of gloriously fucked up people. Home!