Tuesday 3 April 2012

could this actually be happening?

Remember when you were young and someone would say 'oh you're just like your father'? Well not if you're a girl, I mean, sure you could take on some of his traits but you're never really going to be like you dad unless you go in for some extensive surgery, but you know what I mean, we've all heard it, right? You're just like your parents. 
As a kid, you'd laugh that shit off, smile, and say 'nah, no way, I don't wanna be like them!' as if it were a bad thing. 
But lets face it, we all look up to our parents, we all secretly wanted to be like them, although to this day if you asked me that I would vehemently deny it, especially if my old man was within ear shot. Stupid old bastard. 

But as you get older, you catch yourself saying things that your parents said to you and you almost tell yourself off, 'Oh my god I sound just like dad', you know the stuff they'd ram down your throat just suddenly burble to the surface of your conscious "CUT IT OUT OR I'LL KICK YOUR ARSE TILL YA BACK TEETH RATTLE!"
Ok, so maybe I deserved to get yelled at like that, but damn it stuck with me. 

The definitive proof of this evolving transition into my old man hit me a couple of weeks back. 

See, my old man and his piss head mates like to go to the Melbourne F1 GP on the Friday each year. It's a practise day, the crowds are smaller, but there's still plenty of action going on, they get together and pretend they're 30 years younger than they really, inhaling large quantities of booze, bless their zimmer framed days. 

Me and the old fart get along great, we're mates, we went to Bali together twice last year, he's good to travel with, we're very much alike, in fact he's like an older version of me. 
Now some may argue that I'm contradicting what this whole blog is about about, and some may argue that, by definition, I would be a younger version of him. uh uh. 

See, he's a 67 year old bloke trying to be 37, it's not the other way around. He's bloody hopeless like that. What it makes realise however (here comes the contradiction again) is that I have at least another 30 years of drinking and acting like a dickhead if I am like him. 

But I digress

On the Friday of the GP, I missed two friends going away drinks because as the day went on,I stayed in touch with the old bastard as he got more and more pissed. Now, we both live out in the suburbs, and I offered to give him a lift home at the end of the day. 

By the time I was finished in the studios, I called him, and the human on the other end of the phone was, fair to say, a dribbling mess. I was both proud, and as you can imagine, concerned for his drunken old soul. 

I finally figured out where he was from his incoherent directions "I don't know where I am, I'm walking towards traffic lights", the roles were certainly reversed from 20 years ago. 

As we were driving home, him silent in the passenger seat like a petulant child caught drinking, me concentrating on the road, of course I gave it a bit of 'look at this fuckin idiot, get out of the right lane dickhead, it's 80 you fuckwit, EIGHTY!'

My pissed passenger just started to giggle as I got angry, he sighed and said 'ohh god, you're exactly like me, ha ha, you're stuck with that for the rest of your life, have fun, ha ha'

What a prick.