Wednesday piece one

hi all,

Michael's piece for workshopping below; Rebecca's is pending...

all formatting strangenesses are blamed on the uni email system...

Jenny

By
Michael Berthelsen.



On Tuesday we
drove to Cowes in Zach’s Subaru listening to music and smoking out the window.
There were thirteen of us and we had been looking forward to this week for
months. There were nine cars, two storeys of house, ten beds, two ounces of
grass and fifteen tabs of acid between us. On Wednesday we’d sparkle.



Tuesday had been
hot but Wednesday was hotter. I remember waking up and looking through my
window across the street. It was eleven in the morning and the tin roof of the
house opposite ours resembled a barbeque hot plate. It caused the air
immediately above it to shimmer like so many horizons on so many rural highways
baked by so many hot summer days. The air inside the house clung to our skin
due to the combined effect of humidity and residual particles of spray-on
sunscreen still wafting through the hallways and rooms. The floor was no better
– its pine boarding sticky with the previous night’s party-jizz; a concoction
of beer, goon, fruit juice, Jack Daniels
and Coke. People had gone down to the
shops to buy breakfast and were now arriving back at the house. Murph was
sitting on the balcony with smoke trailing from the cigarette in his right
hand.



When we arrived there
was no furniture for the balcony. Our solution was a piece of improvisation
which would come to encapsulate the ensuing day. Most tables have four legs and
sport flower-filled vases as their centrepiece. Ours was different; our table
didn’t have four legs and its centrepiece was yellow stained bong filled with
stagnant brown water. Our table wasn’t even a table. It was an ironing board.
Around our centrepiece was a
Manhattan skyline of empty and half empty beer bottles. The board’s floral
cover was marked with streaks of cigarette ash. Perched front and centre
closest to Murph over one of the cover’s most elaborate floral illustrations
was an ashtray shaped like a pair of breasts which came to be known as The Titties.
And coming up to The Titties’ rim was a lake of cigarette
butts and Metcard roaches. The
ultimate Fuck Off to domestication.



This
piece is the beginning of what I intend to submit as part of my folio for end
of semester assessment. It is my own take on a true crime style of writing,
documenting a trip my mates and I made to Phillip Island during the summer
holidays. It will ultimately recount the day we took LSD and take a reflective
stance on what I perceive to be the artificiality of taking acid. The names in
the story are all pseudonyms, and the timeline of events has been collapsed to
accommodate the word constraints which bind the assessment of this subject.