Category: Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures

Crab sex goes on a lot longer than you’d think.

I admit I had no choice but to watch, Officer, but there was no tingle in my trunks this sunny A.M. I felt some objective admiration as those little critters went at it hammer and tongs on the plastic bag isthmus that passes for the Sihanoukville shore. It made a change from enjoying them tossed in a fingerlickin’ Kampot pepper sauce.

All the other crabs sat in a circle around les amoureux with their backs to the surprisingly vigorous action for privacy’s sake. I thought that was lovely of them. But I could only stare with purely scientific interest at those green-shelled hump-meisters – either that or burn my retinas to cinders glued to the exquisite buns of a coyly posturing devotchka trawling up and down the foreshore in a lime thong.

Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate a peachy buttock as robustly as the next human. I myself have bounteous globes – back in my salad days I was a saucy burlesque with a penchant for the pole and my unequivocal rear assets meant a garter belt overflowing by dawn’s rosy crack. But there’s a time and a place for egregious Lycra cleft kecks, and on a public beach chockers with New Year families of every ilk, bending over to beachcomb in a co-polymer stringlet the size of Kaliningrad Oblast was not it.

I don’t want to seem ungrateful for a perfect sunkissed bum, or for nature’s jam packed cornucopia in general. Don’t get jealous, but as we speak I’m writing to you from an over-water cabana down on our patchy old south coast. It’s a breezy overcast morning. There are seafaring butterflies, silver fingerlings skipping away from some inept Korean tourists with half a million dollars worth of fishing equipment, a couple of lolling hornets that I got my one good eye on, and an unfeasibly fit Slavic couple with a rope-and-swing thing hanging from the rafters. I’m assuming it’s some new isometric Pilates workout but it might just be more Russians having sex. It’s always hard to tell. I’m impressed that they brought all their stuff with them though: they probably need to be that pumped to carry it all.

I thought a few days away from CharmingVille’s bustle and grit would help me blow away some life-muffling cobwebs and ponder my Goat Year resolutions with fewer distractions. Being a water rabbit, I love the sea, and Kep was fully booked, so while Hubster just gets on with it with nary a navel gaze, I’m here in this Onassian playground to take a good hard look at myself. I got some serious stuff to work out.

  1. How to be kinder to people. The barking should stop.
  2. Patience. Get me some. Right fucking now.
  3. Perhaps it’s also time to get a proper job – a cube farm with a staff canteen and some kind of health plan that lets me drink the minibar dry in a luxury Bangers condo while I recover from increasingly urgent wattle surgery. Plus one can’t live on the miniscule compensation payout from last Easter’s tragic eyebrow incident forever. I’m down to my last furry 500 riel. Yes. A job might be something to consider.
  4. Also, should I go back to my natural hair colour?

The tropical lullaby whispered by wavelets caressing the giant concrete octopus at the foot of the hotel garden has been most inspirational for these and many other ponderments. But I’ve turned to my internet for some of the answers that can’t be forecast by the intersecting lines of Sergey’s impressive six pack or counting the back hairs of the gold-toothed boozenik lights out and face down on the sand in front.

Apparently, terrariums are going to be super important for me in 2015. I like the look of macramé potholders too. There’ll be plenty of fruits. I’m urged on a couple of sites to curb my control freakery and delegate important tasks, or at least ask for help more often than I do. So instead of googling AskJeeves for a toothpaste recipe that’ll remove unsightly coffee and beetroot stains, I’ve made an appointment with my dental hygienist. I’ve given up on my self-styled exercise regime that counted my trips to the fridge as a “five second fat blaster” and enrolled in rope wars at the local gym. I’ve also enlisted the services of the tuk tuk guy who cleans our gutters. He happens to be a dab hand at wardrobe culling and has promised to do my colours. By June I should have nice white teeth, an even hotter body, and fewer but more important clothes.

The biggest change of the year will be for our pet. Bunster‘s days of squiring the chesterfield are over: he’s scheduled to get his bits done in the first quarter. Hubster’s not too happy about it but we tried a girlfriend and he just ran away. He might be gay, the Rabbit I mean, but I’m over his raiding my wardrobe and chewing the bejesus out of my black t-shirt collection. His hormone-fuelled sofa-rooting shoe-feasting days are so 2014. Like me, he’ll just have to get along without his damn biscuits.

Guilty Pleasures: Sozzled

Call me an alarmist, over-protective broken record but if you’ve had one too many ales at the sushi train or scoffed a bottle of Johnny down The Rock then tottered to yer Dream or that hornet-waisted shag magnet burbling out back, odds are something unpleasant’s going to hit the fan. Make it past the door trogs without being shanked and before you’re even out the bike park you may drive into some delinquent off-duty boy in beige, all tiny finger waggy and equally impaired but, crucially, packing. He may stir your shit until there’s a claret carpet underfoot and the ladyboys are posting your demise on Khmer Hotnews. All over red rover and thank your mother for the rabbits.

If you don’t expire in the carpark, or fall asleep while negotiating Independence Monument – you go around, remember, not up and over – you may well encounter a gang of machete-wielding “playboys” hooning around on those farty-blart KTMs and scaring the crap out of timid old ducks like me minding my own biz in a tuk tuk on my way back from a two pot sherry knees up. They may snatch your purse or your man bag. They may grab the phone right out of your helmet. I guess I should be thankful at least you’re wearing one.

Unlike too many Nutella baguettes, which just make you feel guilty and fat, a skinful of beer can persuade you your closet is the dunny or worse, that your sleeping spouse is. Just yesterday Ricky Gervais off of YouTube told me he’d wee’ed all over Jane one night by accident after a protracted grog fest. I had a serial drunk piddler for a boyfriend once – he saw a man about a dog all over my one good work pantsuit. Another time he tinkled like Seabiscuit on the central heating so for the rest of the winter the whole house stank like the Japanese bridge underpass and I had to sleep under a tarp in the back of our ute. I froze my tits off and admit to a nip or two to keep the rest of my cockles warm. Things went downhill from there relationship-wise, which was probably his plan after all. But still. Smashing my autographed Duran Duran snowdome would have done the trick.

I’m not a blotless seraph in the shitfaced drunk department. I used to drink my weight in screwdrivers. Which made me wear shoulder pads and smoke coloured cocktail cigarettes.  I singed all my eyebrows off once in a Pancake Parlour following that exact sequence of events. I’ve also perpetrated some inappropriate weeing – underground carparks a specialty – woken up with my head in a club dunny more than once, and navigated the Stagger of Shame in the white hot 9am CharmingVille glare, gurning and wincing with every brain-pounding step, under the gaze of a dozen snickering tuk tuk drivers. Sometimes it’s good not to know Khmer. There but for the grace of God, they were probably saying. At least when we walk home our skirts aren’t tucked into our pants.

And did you see that thing on the news with the wasted barang asleep in the aisle of a Kiwi Mart? It wasn’t even phone footage – so some little shit must have rung the TV station and got a crew down there ready to roll when the security guard roused that hammered, now unemployed person. Let that be a lesson to us all. Or something. Anyway.

Far be it from me to advocate you go off the grog completely. For the most part people are just a little bit funnier and a little bit hotter after a couple of pinot grigios, and we all need more funny and hot. Plus it’s nice to clink full glasses occasionally with a bunch of likeminded folks I like to call friends.

But given our town’s constant faux holiday vibe and that booze is cheaper than therapy, it’s easy to forget tomorrow is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and not Cinqo de Mayo or National Fish Week. And I wouldn’t even mind the seven-day sozzlement if you would only take a tuk tuk. Because despite the tragic farrago of booze-fuelled madcappery that preceded CharmingVille’s fabled trouser-snake incident of ’04, the sobering road toll, the recent alcohol ad ban, the new helmet rule and the “Bring Sexy Back” government campaign announcement, there are still plenty of us staggering drunks ready to mount and ride. Think twice, wouldja, in this bright ‘n’ shiny new year. Because even though Buddha really was a terrific bloke, I suspect we only live once.

Guilty Pleasures

Marital HQ is testament to the magnetic power of tat. I’m genetically doomed to pick and hoard thanks to packrat parents who were upcycling and rejigging and making windchimes out of cutlery long before there was medication and reality shows for that kind of thing. Back when I was a mere gosling, they thought nothing of wading the poisonous Torrens River mudflats to salvage a leaf-sprung Ripper-era perambulator when, as part of a notorious serial killer investigation, the council conveniently drained our half-arsed waterway. I can’t imagine what villainy brought the buggy to rest in that noxious mire – one prays without a bawling tot inside – but gussied up it became a fancy hallway table where they still keep a brace of souvenir teaspoons, a selection of Matchbox emergency vehicles and possibly the world’s last faux woodgrain answerphone.

The folks were starving art teachers, most likely because they spent all their pennies on worthless gimcrack and the entrance fee to the tip every weekend. They winnowed beaches for seaglass, curated a sprawling collection of war-era surgical instruments, and wallpapered our whole house with the front covers of 750 Time magazines. During the Cold War, I learned about Vietnam and Watergate over Vegemite sandwiches in our red-quared dining room.

My canny olds weren’t above putting us offspring to good use when they needed extra rummaging time. I was the angelic stool pigeon with the wheaten curls who glamoured the formidable junkyard matron while they poked after-hours for bootscrapers and biscuit tins and “interesting” whisks. One man’s crap is another man’s upcycled wet bar with sugar muzzler and swizzle-stick hutch after all.

Which explains the life-size polystyrene bear head, cat ear muffs, the statue of Chairman Mao waving at a plastic tomato and a wind-up elk, all of whom reside on my BodeSide kitschen shelf. And I’m an equal-opportunity crap collector, so you don’t have to be a glamorous minke foreskin or an exotic pirate leg to get a guernsey on my mantelpiece. I have plenty guernsies. Ditto socks. There’s swarms of them nesting in my armoire, still in packets. If anybody wants any, give me a bell. Some cat T-shirts from Olympic that never fit me and never will. Souvenir mugs? I’m up to my chopstick collection in them. I got sneakers coming out me arse.

So it’s all very odd that I’ve started to question my stuff. Until recently the thought of the National Highway 1 salvage yards made the hairs stand up on my neck. There was almost nothing better than breezing across the river at Chbar Ampoev with a wallet full of Washingtons, a fresh pair of orthotics in my scavenging sneakers and a handy packet of post-ferret moist towelettes. Or so I believed.

Perhaps the years of CharmingVille’s passing monkery have osmotically, ascetically entered the op shop of my id. Maybe it’s the weather that makes you want to get nekkid on your insides as well as your outsides. Whatever new broom I’ve unconsciously brushed up against, the light bulb has clicked on in my slightly musty attic, and boy is it chockers up there.

Even before Santa had a chance to offload his superfluous bounty down my metaphorical chimney this tropical Yule, I felt the need to unstuff, and decided 2015 will be the year I ‘live simple’. In my first act of metaphysical declutteration, I resisted the urge to embellish those two words with a cod-clever full stop in between, artfully design them into a faux handwritten motto board, and then post it on Pinterest. Instead, I went down the Panda Mart for some big black garbage bags.

Poor Hubster. My arbitrary and zealous divestment of 20 things per day has caught him off guard. Yesterday he went looking for 1) His acrylic beetle key-ring, 2) his photo with waxwork Obama and 3) an out-of-date packet of cauliflower seeds from Kew Gardens three years ago. It didn’t go well.

Just today, even before the chicken-in-the-egg man started his trawl up our sleepy street this bright am, I was arse-up fossicking in our sideboard and exorcising all its dusty constituents like a woman possessed: three uncracked Khmer-English Dictionaries, six years’ worth of Door 2 Doors, eight strings of those really uncomfortable earphones, an inexplicable golf ball, and the Bunster-bit remains of a 2007 Ikea catalogue. It was hard to let the first millstone go, but by the time Hubster had thrown on a krama and come out to see what all the fucking noise was about, I’d chucked out a whole box of junk and a bit of baggage with it. Perhaps it’s just pudding-fuelled OCD, but I’m looking for some New Year’s extra-sharp resolution once the dawn-crack thing-flinging is over. Hope you find what you’re looking for, too. Cheers!

Guilty Pleasures: Xmas

Gird your loins, Pleasurers. Just because you’re in CharmingVille for the holidays doesn’t mean you get to miss out on polyester reindeer jumpers and Boney M. You’ve been here long enough to know you’ll take a day off on a boat-top wingding for far flimsier excuses than Lord Jesus’ big day (Paris Peace Accord booze cruise, anyone?). So dig up your dusty tree and sharpen your MasterCard, because it’s robot-snowman-playing-plastic-saxophone-fire-hazard season and there are only so many purple-glitter-pony door chimes that play Away In A Manger to go around.

If you miss out on those actual things, there’s plenty of other heartwarming Xmas-ish memories-in-the-making at this apparently sacred time of year. For sure there’ll be an awkward Secret Santa moment at work, like when you see the driver who got the joke Viagra sharing his blue candy down the car park with his chess buddies. Or that squirrelly chick from Accounts gives you a clock in the shape of a winking teddy bear wearing a festive sombrero that is obviously a regifted Aeon Club present-with-purchase with her phone number taped to the bottom. Just what you’ve always wanted.

Guaranteed there’ll be plenty of parties chockers with backpacking flimpets in babydoll elf drag if that’s your stein of glög. I’ve got a nice brandy ball recipe if you want one. Even you nay-saying Ebenezers grumping home alone will feel your cockles thawing at the sight of a copper in a Santa hat dinking his granny to the chicken shop or a pert-bottomed Wat Phnom temple lion sporting a fancy tinsel merkin. Our tropic hamlet is snowed with twisted Xmas cheer and useless yuletide tat created by those who have no clue for those of us who have everything. If you’re stuck for unique gifts I bet no one does a gold-spraypainted durian-shell manger with upcycled Psy action figure as sweet baby Jesus quite like the folks at Psar Kandal. You can practically taste the nog in the air down there. If you’re a god botherer, or even just a bit of a stickler for tradition, you might balk at IBC’s selection of Mickey-as-Messiah gift cards, but let’s be honest, none of us were there. Along with the shepherds and the donkeys and soforth, who’s to say there weren’t anthropomorphic singing mice?

Many of us either don’t know much or give two shits about Mary’s glabrous boychild, a.k.a. The Son Of God. If you’re a bit shy, cynical, or alternatively faithed, it might seem easiest to avoid the whole shebang. This can work if you’re clinically misanthropic, but anything less and come the 25th you’ll be no-mates sobbing into your yoghurt. Whatever yer ilk, don’t be a stranger to the other things that make this time of year strangely worthwhile, i.e. people. If at first you’re not feeling the twinkly glow of fairy lights and Home Alone marathons, I would still make the effort. My best suggestion is to find some Filipinos.

I know some and those krazy carollers celebrate the shit out of Christmas. If you’re out of luck in the Pinoy department, it won’t hurt to pony up for the turkey buffet brunch or the seafood boat-ride with the odd collection of mates and acquaintances you’ve collated BodeSide. Because, apart from a good reason to skive, making cheery times together is what it’s all about.

Even if it’s a little bit sad that your real kith and kin might be sharing hot toddies and a lame cracker joke 10,000 miles away without you, there’s always Skype. So put down those 27 vodkas, hush those tear-strings. You actually have your own little dysfunctional family of sorts right here in CharmingVille to help you make it through those not so merry FOMO moments. After all, that’s what friends, a felt-covered plastic-reindeer-with-flashing-red-eyes-and-a-peach-on-its-back, and a humongous box of sangria are for. Jingle on.

Guilty Pleasures: Popstars

So Robbie Williams came into my office today. I’d just settled upstairs into my vast corner suite with a bubble tea and a bushel of deep-fried plantains, ready to write the bit in my million-selling erotic novel trilogy where Anya goes on a glamorous date with Crispian, who takes her to his penthouse apartment in his matte-black helicopter. As you do. My farmer sister, in CharmingVille on a three-dollar-mani-pedi bacchanal, having absconded the pastoral yoke and a harebrained project at her local daycare to turn the decrepit family RV into a rescue-chicken petting motel, was downstairs in reception practicing her fruit sculpture.

I heard the front door open, a man’s voice then a squeak of shock and indistinct babble, the latter both from my sis. ‘Zounds!’ I thought. She may be struggling with a) the local firemen demanding money to check our extinguisher for the third time this week, b) that touchy-feely fake Tibetan monk who seems to be everywhere lately luring her with some pretty convincing mala beads or c) a lost French person. Such are the pitfalls awaiting an innocent country girl just trying to make it in the big smoke. Though by now smeared in fragrant banana grease and batter-deep into a particularly lusty ‘ardent manhood’ trope, I thrust my sizzling bestseller aside to pop down and help my hillbilly sibling. As I was going down, she was coming up, almost exactly like a person windmilling away from a fatal wasp attack. “OMG,” she whisper shouted. “What shall we do? It’s Robbie Williams!!!”

Wowser! Robster. The Rob. Mr ‘Angels’ himself slouching cheekily in our very reception. No wonder sister was agog. She’s routinely starstricken at the faintest glimmer of famous person. Once she passed out in the dairy aisle at Big W because she’d so seen Sting buying yoghurt. I also promised her I’d never tell about the time she… Oh, never mind.

You don’t see many A-listers swanning around Riverside glad-handing us little people. Though not long ago, after a few appletinis, I thought I saw that blue-eyed soulster John Newman aka Sam Smith over in Street 308. You never see them in a room together at the same time, right? Anyway. After I said: ‘Oh My God, if I was 20 years younger’ and ‘I love your song how does it go again?’ about 15 times, his mam came over and told us to fuck off. I haven’t seen him lately and I’m over him, frankly. Lovely singing voice but now that he’s climbed aboard the Bob ‘n’ Bono Ebola Train to Patronising Schmalzville… well, I won’t be buying him another passionfruit caipiroska, let me give you the tip.

Ronan Keating crooned at Olympic Stadium in 2007. Then there were some K-Pop D-listers and Stacey Orrico. Pitbull turned up from his non-stop Miami discoke party in the days before he was everybody’s rapping-bit-in-the-middle bitch. CharmingVille isn’t even a whistlestop for tragic troubadours Michael Learns To Rock, and they’ll go anywhere. Jesus. Can you believe they’re still at it? Southeast Asia has a lot to answer for. David Archuleta. Bryan Adams. Limp Bizkit. Don’t even get me started now.

Anyway. My only physical touching of an actual famous person Bodes-side was in 2008 when me and the ever-fragrant Preap Sovath stood in front of Sambo the elephant for a photo op back when you could make her wear fairy lights and satin pants and put your client’s logo all over her saddle. There’s been a Boeung-Kak-size black hole in the starless firmament since, but the turntables they are a-turning now that we have Buth Seyha, our first home-grown reality TV singing superstar. In case you live in an underwater pineapple or you simply don’t give a shit, he’s a beer-garden wedding singer turned winner of Cambodia’s version of The Voice. The one where questionable cultural tastemakers sit with their backs to you in massive vinyl thrones and press the buzzer if they like the sound you’re making. Young Seyha wins 25K, a moto and enough Cambodia Beer to keep us all believing he can actually sing. Given those melodica ‘n’ bontempi hand-dancing shows, he’s a fucking prodigy.

But meantime back at the office I was calm on the outside but inside gagging to throw down some louche banter and swap numbers with Stoke-on-Trent’s Naughtiest Nightingale. I flicked the crispy batter crumblets off my perky rack, hitched up me trews and stepped into reception with what I hoped was a convincing approximation of an appreciative but not desperate resting niceface.

It was immediately clear no one in reception remotely resembled Robbie Williams. It was actually Bon Jovi, with his teeth and everything. Crestfallen, my sister offered him a fried banana. They chatted for a bit. I went back upstairs to write porn. Just another CharmingVille work week. Ho hum.

Guilty Pleasures

This time last week I was at Changi, kipping on a beferned slumberette in ‘The Sanctuary’, otherwise known as the arse-end of gate E5 near where they park the disabled golf carts. It wasn’t my first choice for a seven-hour transit bask waiting for my flight home to Charmingville. In the not-so-distant past, I was a bewheeled corporate hamster gainfully employed by a London consortium of pre-crisis profligates who had us all flying Business or – if you were a skilled lickspittle – First to PowerPoint training sessions in the Algarve. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. These days I kill time airside hoiking my crazed Russian Market wheelie bag round the Duty Free, pilfering eye-cream samples, taste-testing flavoured vodkas or going round and round on the Skytrain just for larfs.

So having scoffed my pocket-linted plane loot of breakfast rolls and mini milks from the last 12 hours aloft, I malingered in an $8 shower at the Traveller’s Lounge, then searched for one of those free foot-massage chairs. But my plans – to doze, earplugged and masked, in a fragrant fug of perfume testers while having my feet shiatsued gratis by a mechanical finger wizard – were thwarted at every turn. Bickering Chinese grannies in rhinestone Christmas knitwear with no socks on and way too much inexplicable hand luggage (salad spinner, jumbo pack of Pampers, beets) hogged every chair in the terminal. I eventually settled for the aforementioned garden nook, which had a view of the control tower framed by a massive moss ‘n’ orchid studded carved styrene sculpture of a glitter-spangled turtle couple holding hands and standing on their hind legs in a bed of weeping fig. Oh, Singapore. Anyway. Two of the contoured recliners were occupied by giggling Indian gents and a third by a ginger woman snoring like a walrus. She was only slightly louder than the tannoyed Kenny G, whose saccharine noodles have had me reaching for my sidearm on more than one occasion. Too jetlagged to give a shit, I settled in despite the aural distraction and the felonious garden art and soon drifted into a perfect, blissful snooze.

It was the best sleep I’d had since undertaking my stint as the only female person on the ill-fated MV Nanjing Pluck. Battered to death by an enraged polar wind, the old girl ran aground on an uncharted igneous atoll. I’m sure you saw it on the news. It was a life-threatening but not unwelcome diversion; every failed Murmansk-Spitsburgen Sturgeon Muster has a silver lining after all. I’m not sure if you’ve ever been stranded for 10 days on a volcanic outcrop surrounded by apocalyptic ocean with a crate of 100-proof aqvavit, 17 thumping great twentysomething Norwegian deckhands and a litre of rubbing alcohol, but there wasn’t much sleep for this little puffin, let me give you the tip.

Meanwhile, back in the Lion City’s vaunted aeronautical hub and coaxed into consciousness by the afternoon glare bouncing off those gigantic loved-up chelonians, I dragged myself and my flabby air-pillow off to the departure gate for the uneventful leg home.

After a rather invasive but not unpleasant Ebola screening at Pochentong, I hauled my souvenir meerschaum collection and vintage Minke harness through Customs to see The Hubster’s beam light up the arrivals breezeway. At first I thought he might be drunk – you’ll know by now he’s not the most demonstrative helpmeet in Love’s collection. But a month is a long time to spend with a relentlessly priapic rabbit and a broken fridge with the instructions in technical Dutch.

“I have a surprise for you, darling,” he gushed as we loaded up the aircon taxi – another first (I usually hail a tuk tuk and get home to find a ‘Gone to Mum’s’ note, which means he’s actually playing boules with a slurry of Phnom Penh’s finest, up to his eyepits in sangria cask). As I dumped my Nordic souvenirs in the hallway, he made me close my eyes and led me into the bedroom. Taking up space once reserved for our ancient round (don’t ask) Ikea nap sack was a brand new, king-sized Sealy Posturepedic. It would’ve cost an arm and a leg. Certainly a round trip to the Algarve flying Club Class. But with a bed like this, who needs lie-flat seats? I’m not going anywhere in the foreseeable future, unless you count the Land of Nod.

Guilty Pleasures

Time to get your fun-pants laundered, as the latest international comedy extravaganza from the smash-hit producers of the Pacific Solution gets set to touch down in wee Cambodia. Fresh from a sold-out tour of guano-groovy Nauru, the Australian Asylum Seeker Policy theatre company this season (or at some vague time soon) is proud to present: ?!

This splendid development might ordinarily provide me with the perfect opportunity to once again repackage the tired and ubiquitous ‘Peculiarities of Phnom Penh’ article from a fizzy fresh angle: a Westerner’s perspective of a Middle Eastern refugee’s perception of the city. What about all those crazy tuk tuk, huh? Allaahul Musta’aan!

But the oppo-pollies here have been leaking like a schooner en route to Oz, and the early word from the world’s richest woman was that the refugees will rather be resettled on some serious WTF island off the coast of Snooky. So without further ado, please allow me to cue the fish-out-of-water reinforcement of cultural stereotypes for comedy kicks rehash instead. Survivor Koh Rong, anyone? With Jeff Probst probing, those voted out of paradise will be forced to go back and live in Adelaide.

Although, ordinary reality television challenges like eating octopus intestines or negotiating a wacky obstacle course won’t really cut it with folk that have in actual reality-reality already voluntarily gobbled goat’s eyeballs and scaled landmine-strewn mountains to score their fifteen minutes. No, the clichéd plate of stomach-clutching worms will be of the hook variety, via those deep-fried Cambodian mystery meat balls served up at the local markets.

And the temporary immunity idol in the form of a single packet of penicillin will have to be earned by downing two-for-one all-day happy-hour Long Island Iced Teas made from backyard bootleg liquor and blindly determining through the veil of burkas who is the last to go legally blind. In the meantime, we’ll all keep schtum on the local Shisha ban.

It seems the Cambodian and Austrayn governments may be a tad confused regarding the variety of barang-asylum required for the Sihanoukville region, political for mental in this case, although it’s an admittedly easy mistake to make. Though on a brief political note, of the asylum-seekers that arrive in Australia by boat, the number found to be genuine refugees is routinely pushing above 90%. The other four people simply got lost on the way to their Agoda-booked chalet retreats in Austria.

And if anyone radicalised did happen to slip through the crab-nets, we can all be well rest-assured that Phnom Penh has absolutely no reasonable high-rise targets for suicide bombing that aren’t already empty shells dotted along Monivong. That is, other than the Japanese Bridge, of which two have been strategically provided just to confuse those crazy martyrs sent on assignment. Otherwise, we have a cheap solution on hand for the slated demolition of Sorya.

Indeed, it’s been alleged that some idealistic rascals have already previously attempted to stir up some local support, but that the Cham really couldn’t be arsed skipping nap-time for a relatively small amount of virgins to cover an entire eternity. And a good thing: could you imagine the amount of explosive ordinance one could pack in a taxi-van with the aid of the
average Khmer?

At this point a brief disclaimer may be due to avoid any conflict of interests, although I’m a nihilistic grump and therefore technically not interested in anything. I’ve just taken on a role as the letter-writing programme coordinator for an asylum-seeker support network. That is all. No punchline. It sometime sucks being stereotyped as a satirist.
But if you want to write a letter to a detainee potentially coming to Cambodia, pre-book
a taxi perhaps, be sure to get in touch. I’ll send it on to Christmas Island, where I hear they serve egg-nog for breakfast every day
of the year.

Guilty Pleasures

My kid brother spat on me the other day. While I briefly contemplated the curious legalities of thwacking a six-year-old sibling, whether it might be considered actual quote ‘child abuse’ or simply my Flying Spaghetti Monster-given right to fraternal roughhousing, the grubby little germ-merchant pleaded his innocence. He was practicing his beatboxing. Really, where do kids learn this shit?

According to my Cambodian counterfeit Britannica, beats were discovered shortly after early hominids invented the stick and combined it with a primitive impulse to hit stuff. Several billion years later, advanced civilisation finally heralded an end to the cruel exploitation of innocent surfaces with the advent of the digitised box – before almost immediately realising we could do that crazy thang with our own gobs all along.

And while ol’ Chomsky would unlikely be impressed with our innate ability to push nonsensical noises past our lips, beatboxing is undoubtedly cool. Just check cadet Larvelle Jones catching crooks with robot-clicks in the Police Academy heptalogy if you have any doubts. Or maybe you caught Khmer beatboxers Chan and Khy bustin’ out the bleeps and boops at the Lightbox in Kampot recently? Yes, Kampot.

Kampot’s a-happenin’. And for those in the know who really want to get noticed getting down with the cool kids in town, the Kampot & Kep Notice Board for Expats and Locals Facebook page is where it’s at. Like those beats that came before it, the forum mimics the rhythms of real life; here, the quaint, binary coded simulacrum of paradisiacal small-town existence where someone has kindly airbrushed out the inconvenient interaction with backpackers.

It’s the perfect tool for keeping in touch with the community during the siesta hours between pub crawls. And with more than 3,000 members, the board has already attracted the attention of digital blow-ins from afar. Don from elsewhere says: ‘When I get on Facebook I rush to the Kampot & Kep Notice Board like people used to flip to the funny pages as soon as the daily paper arrived. Are all you people as mad as this forum suggests?’ Yes, Don. We are.

Mysterious empty Tabasco-bottle call-outs, edifying intercultural discussions on weed-whackers and whipper-snippers, lost hula-hoop reunions and presumably unrelated anti-paedophile petitions, the bewildering distribution of backgammon-porn, and enough tantalising restaurant food-snaps to make an amateur Jamie Oliver cream his cannoli. I let the latter guide my nutritional intake. Fifibraten mit spätzle on special? Sure, my triglyceride-count could probably do with a kaempferol boost.

But it’s not all sunshine and königsberger-klopse on the KAKNFEAL. There was the one heady thread discussing the merits of Vietnamese visa-waivers and Mick Jagger’s post-70 output that got a tad tetchy. And while it mightn’t be the South-Central of Khmer 440, boy-o, beware of a grumpy riposte from our expert rib-peddling unofficial expat-mayor if you plan on sneaking an advertisement flogging ‘business solutions’ past the administrative censors.

If there is the occasional pause in pleasantries, however, I suspect it’s simply a case of mango madness meeting doolally tap, with any notable spikes in communal keyboard angst attributable to the monsoonal wet-season weather lessening the small-town options of already fuck-all to do besides sit around in a pub and talk about the weather. If I cared enough, I could probably cross-reference the data with Stan, the board’s resident meteorologist who posts the daily rainfall stats and saves me from ever having to open the curtains.

And as with any solid close-knit community when things start to go a little awry, we eventually all lovingly band together again by blaming outsiders like Don. That was until I roughly reached this point of the article, ready to wrap it up with some lyrical waxing on why it all works, when the notice board went into complete meltdown and bickered itself out of existence over the course of a couple days. We now talk to each other in person. Turns out we didn’t need a box to do it all along.

Guilty Pleasures

So I’ve been thinking about moving to Mondulkiri. One of those humble, cottage-type set-ups in the forest with a pet goat and freshly planted beer garden. But now I’m wondering if being overwhelmed by mould would be considered a quietly noble death. Not from, like, internal yeast or anything. No, no. Wall mould.

Can you pre-medicate against the threat of fungification? It’s too hot here to be hammock-bound in an ebola-chic hazchem suit, and attempting to scrub at it would be like headbutting a hornets’ nest – all those angry, activated air-borne spores buzzing about, looking for a landing site in my lungs. Safer to just pop down to the friendly Chinese pill emporium and purchase some chemical prophylactics.

The problem is my Mandarin is a little rusty. And the last English-labelled imports I bought had ‘Only to be sold in Cambodia and Bangladesh’ written on the back, which is rather counterproductive for a packet of anti-anxiety drugs. I suppose I could just blind-select a pick ‘n’ mix goodie bag and one of the random meds might keep me mould-safe, while my mouth fills with foamy blood-bubbles from an imploding liver. Surely can’t do any greater hepatic harm than whatever I do to it myself most days of the week.

And while I’m there I can pick up some extra mystery packs to empty into a lucky dip bowl for the guests at my cottage-warming party. The Cialis Dude might fortuitously hit it off with the Rohypnol Chick. Though I can picture it now: the boring guy next to me complaining that his expectorant hasn’t come on, just before Immunosuppressant Girl dampens the vibe by dying on the spot from my unattended black-rot.

It’s easy to forget the pharmaceutical luxuries of life in Cambodia. Australian Customs recently fined me for some un-prescribed sleeping pills stowed away in my luggage. I considered swallowing the evidence, but if those bullied-kid officials are willing to stick a finger up your arse while you’re conscious, image what they might get up to if you were knocked out on a bucketful of benzos. Cambodia, on the other hand, cleverly offers up prescription-free candy shops to counter its incompetent medical care.

But the pharma free-for-all can become a bit of a problem when coupled with an expat paranoia over the exotic third-world pathogens lurking alongside the country’s first-world internet access. Since residing in the Kingdom I’ve been self-diagnosed and do-it-yourself treated for an embarrassing case of restless-leg syndrome, encephalitic West Nile Virus, an anaplastic astrocytoma or two, and a suspected clump of ingrown oesophagus-cilia which was really a soggy grain of basmati that had spelunked its way to that mysterious cavern at the back of the tonsil-flaps before being finally hacked to safety.

I also once symptom-clicked myself to a positive gout verdict after my full-blooded Khmer doctor helpfully diagnosed a steadily ballooning leg as muscle cramp. That imperialistic cankle, however, turned out to be a genuinely life-threatening potential thromboembolism that required urgent staring down with a series of blood-thinning beer towers and a special pair of stockings. My own mini-Oktoberfest.

It also earned me an ultrasound. And naturally, when the sonographer’s back was turned for a sec to fetch me a lollipop, I of course rubbed my belly in lube to take a peek at my inner pulp-mass of post-masticated Mr Potato Chips. That’s when I met Patrick, the Postcolonial Tape-worm. The internet suggests Patrick’s ammonia-laced effluent may be causing my paranoia, while in the very same breath stating that he’s almost certainly been laying little egg sacs in my neo-cortex.

But the biggest issue with self-diagnostic websites is that I always fit the profile, no matter what I type in; smoking contributes to absolutely every conceivable ailment, while irritability and irregular bowel movements are almost universal symptoms. One second I’m annoyed that I can’t take a shit, and a few key-strokes later, all signs point to sudden infant death syndrome.

Stress is another all-too-common factor. Smoking and stress. Causes everything. But one can’t help getting worked up reading such scaremongering and so you light up to deal with the tension and sure enough you’re soon coughing away in confirmation of that suspected tuberculosis contraction. You just can’t escape the self-fulfilling psychosomatic suggestiveness of it all. Are you suffering from uterus pain? Gee, digital doc, now that you mention it…

According to the Victims of Mould Support Group on Facebook, exposure can lead to suicidal thoughts. But it’s not like my musings on succumbing to wall-scum mean I plan on feeding myself to the stuff for the sake of some aesthetically fatalistic Shakespearian departure. Then I wonder if such a death has ever been recorded among the many trillions to date. I could invent a new death. They would have to pick ‘other’ on the computer at the morgue until IT came by. Sacrificing my life in the name of invention sounds quietly noble.

Guilty Pleasures

By the time you read this, I won’t be here. Hush now. I’m not ‘going to Belgium’. This Pchum Ben I’ve booked three weeks of Me-Time aboard a Liberia-registered beam trawler to join the infamous Murmansk-Spitsbergen sturgeon muster. It’s a notion I’ve been woolgathering since childhood: the sting of gale-smacked salt on my cheeks as I stuff them with snus. A hearty cod mulligan at the end of a long haul, whipped up by an avuncular yet somehow sexy ex-legionnaire with an uncanny resemblance to Jean Reno. Sat round the wireless whittling scrimshaw and listening to the shipping news with Ronnie, the bosun’s cat. Chunky cream cable knits. Lashings of rum. From the brochure I understand that my real-life shipboard adventure will be somewhat more taxing. On the MV Nanjing Pluck there’ll be just me, the doomcrack of icebergs calving as the polar caps melt us all to hell, and 18 trainee deckhands from Norway wearing thigh-high rubber wellingtons. So not much Me-Time, then.

In an effort to outfox impending midlife entropy I’ve embarked on a personal rewilding project that includes this jaunt to points North: I’m thrilled to my Stubings to be setting sail for the high seas. But my Life Partner isn’t as ecstatic about his first mate leaving CharmingVille for so long just to chow down on puffin or circumnavigate icy bollards or some such with a bunch of steam-breathing Yngwes. For the seven years we’ve been together, we’ve spent just two days apart. Actually I was watching TV and he was sleeping off a rice-wine bender in the next room and time got away from us.  But we’re having to think for three now that we’re saddled with our partially-abled furry albatross, The Bunster. So mainly because I’m bigger than him, my heart’s captain gets the short straw and stays behind to tend the needy Long John lagomorph. To help them make it through I’ve been up till sparrow’s, freezing 21 days worth of microwaveable casseroles, grown a pot of dill and there’s a case of Bombay Sapphire chilling in the vegetable crisper. Odds on neither will notice I’m gone till I’m back and unpacking 30 kilos of salted Minke cheeks on the lounge-room floor.

Hubster’s the strong silent type, with a romantic bone not instantly visible to the naked eye. I’ve come to accept empty vases on Valentine’s Day, though he does take out the bins every Tuesday night and I can’t say fairer than that. But I know my upcoming absence must be sinking in somewhat because for the very first time he suggested we overnight at Kep together. He even organised the car. Maybe I watch too much Law & Order – and I do; don’t judge me – but the suggestion of a romantic trip away was so out of character I looked for any concealed weaponry and/or the scent of bitter almonds in the curried-egg sandwiches he made for the trip down. All clear. Miracolo. So last weekend we left our furry faux child thrusting manfully at the chesterfield and eating his own poo and went to Kep for 24 hours.

Our driver, Lot, put up with an unacceptable number of shit jokes about his name once the license-plate game had palled. We managed the journey without hitting anything. Excellent. And then, voila, we’re there. The weather was rather dramatic, so we repaired to the relative shelter of a seaside crab temple.

Have you ever seen a windspoon? I never had until then. As my burly hammocked arse gently grazed the floorboards in a post-prandial nap-fest, I lapped in and out of a warm Angkor reverie, listening to the ardent bicker of two rambunctious geckos getting on each other’s tit-end in the palm-thicket roof above. Considering they’re really just tiny flesh tubes with no teeth (though admittedly supernatural suckery feet), those little buggers can wake a person right up. I was about to launch an immaculately Hoovered crab shell in their direction when I noticed a dirty old rice spoon tied to a bit of string under the eaves on the sea side.

We were all stumped, including Hubster, my erstwhile oracle of Cambodian-ness. The waitress said they protected against storms and calmed the wind. I don’t believe in that stuff, but admit it was quite blustery out – enough to blow the White Lady’s skirt right off her dimpled bum. In our little sea shanty, we remained fully clothed and unruffled. A while later we hauled ourselves into the Camry and headed for the hotel. Tucked away in my overnighter was my own personal windspoon, gifted me by the crab lady: a humble plastic talisman to protect me from whatever the Barents might have on its briny mind.

All aboard and see you soon, me hearties.