by David Thorne
Somewhere along the line, Christopher gained 300 pounds in body mass and a girlfriend named Joylene of similar dimension.
I visited the flat they rented together once but twenty minutes of sitting on a dog's beanbag within touching distance of a kitty litter tray that hadn't been changed in months while watching the movie White Chicks was pretty much it for me. I can’t recall what excuse I gave to leave but I’m fairly sure it was more polite than "Your dog is eating poo from the kitty litter and no, helping you install a stolen Audio4 stereo in your car after the movie does not sound... fuck this, I'm going." Before I left, Chris used my phone to order pizza because his was out of credit and, as I was leaving, asked for pizza money and didn't have change for a fifty.
I only heard from Christopher three times in the years following. Once to decline helping him torch his Ford Falcon on a quiet country road in the middle of the night to claim the insurance money, once to store a wooden boat in my shed, and once when he needed somewhere to stay due to Joylene discovering several terrabytes of teen art on his computer.
After living alone for several years, I was hesitant to let anyone stay in my apartment, let alone Christopher, but after being assured it would only be “for a few days at the most,” I reluctantly agreed.
Six weeks later, returning home from work early one afternoon, I walked into my kitchen to discover Christopher dressed in women's lingerie and a curly blonde wig, mounted on the handle of a toilet plunger suctioned securely to the floor. He looked like a huge albino frog lolipop. A K-Mart brochure lay open between his knees advertising children's swimwear.
As Christopher leapt up in surprise, the plunger handle exited and, like a trebuchet, flung a combination of butter and faeces across the kitchen cabinets. My first reaction was to stand there in shock. Christopher’s first reaction was to grab a Wiltshire® steak knife from the kitchen counter top and plunge it four inches into my stomach. He then ran up the stairs as I slid slowly down the refrigerator door to the floor.
Descending a few minutes later, with his bags hurriedly packed, Christopher said "That will teach you not to give away people’s rowboats" and left. On the way out, he stole my wallet from the hallway table and scratched a deep groove down the side of my car with a key.
For some reason, I will put it down to shock, I edged my way up from the floor, with the knife handle still protruding from my abdomen, made it into the lounge area and watched a re-run of MASH. It was the episode where Klinger tried to eat a Jeep. Attempting several times to slowly remove the serated blade, and almost blacking out from the pain each time, I decided to drive to the hospital.
I was approximately two blocks from the hospital when a police car pulled me over for not wearing my seatbelt. Explaining to the officer that I was unable to secure the seatbelt due to the knife handle protruding from my stomach and stating “No, I don’t need an ambulance, the hospital is just around the corner,” I had my keys taken from me and was forced to wait almost an hour for an ambulance to arrive.
While we were waiting, the officer asked me what had happened and I told him that I had slipped on butter on the kitchen floor and fell onto the open dishwasher door which had a steak knife facing up in the thing that holds cutlery. I have no idea why I made up this story as I certainly felt no need to protect Chris but part of my brain seems hard-wired to always automatically lie to police and at the time it seemed a more viable scenario than the tuth.
‘Kitchen accident’ was listed on the hospital report and I was in surgery for less than hour, receiving only five stitches. Apparently the knife had missed my lung by two centimetres and no major organs had been damaged.
Returning home later that night, I cleaned both the kitchen and the room Chris had been staying in and found my son's Starwars® light-sabre, the missing rubber duck from the bathroom, and a pair of size 20 women's blue satin panties under the bed, coated in the same concoction as the plunger.
Not knowing what other items had been included in Christopher’s activities meant I had to throw out every item in the house that could theoretically fit inside a human bottom. I told my son that I'd given all his toys to a poor family and had to take him to Toys'R'Us to buy replacements.
Hello, my name is Chris and I have lots of girlfriends who I kiss
While it has been suggested that I never leave the house and spend my life playing World of Warcraft, these photos of me at the beach are evidence that I lead a healthy outdoor lifestyle and have a lot of girlfriends who I kiss. None of these photos are photoshopped.
My girlfriend Tammy and I swimming at the beach.
Sometimes we splash each other and laugh but most of the time we just kiss. I love the beach and was probably a jellyfish in a past life. Even though Tammy is scared of sharks, she knows that if a shark attacked us, I would fight it and win because I have arms and sharks don't.
Tammy tells me all the time that she would rather have her arms tied to two cars driving in opposite directions, both doing 60mph, and be ripped in half than live without me. I tell her that she would probably survive this and that it would just rip her arms off and they could stitch them back on at the hospital. There would probably be some permanent nerve damage though.
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My girlfriend Ping Ping and I relaxing on the beach.
Ping Ping and I get along very well as we both love Pokemon. Once, when I was attacked by the sword of unworldly fire, I counter attacked with a pond demon and Ping Ping said it was the bravest thing she had ever seen. She wants to get married but I have seen what Asian women look like when they get older.
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My girlfriend Susan and I riding floating motorbikes.
Susan and I share a love of all things fast and have watched the director’s cut of Days of Thunder together over six hundred times. It is the greatest movie ever made and Susan says that I look a lot like Tom Cruise, who is the best actor in the world and was also in the second greatest movie of all time, Top Gun. I have the Karaoke soundtrack from Top Gun on cassette and often sing Danger Zone for Susan when we are not kissing. Kenny Loggins is without doubt the greatest musician of all time. One day, I want to drive Nascars. If I was a bartender like Tom Cruise in the movie Cocktail, the third best movie ever, I would spend a lot more time throwing bottles in the air as customers prefer this to being served.
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My girlfriend Candy and I playing volleyball
Candy is extremely athletic and it is this common factor that makes us so compatible. Every day I go for a two hundred kilometre jog along the beach and then swim back. I have been asked many times to do male modeling but am too busy jogging, swimming and having lots of girlfriends who I kiss. Also, I would not want to be responsible for some girl buying the magazine and having her boyfriend see the photos of me and then break her heart due to turning into a homosexual. Love is a precious gift. Like an iPod or sheepskin car-seat covers.
Candy tells me everyday that she loves me more than Demi Moore loved Patrick Swayze in the movie Ghost. When we are not busy playing volleyball or kissing, she makes clay sculptures of me and currently has 370 in her home with almost half at 1:1 scale. Candy says that I look a lot like Patrick Swayze and am a better dancer which is ridiculous as nobody is a better dancer than Patrick Swayze.
Girls like telephones and apps. It isn't rocket science.
I wasn't expecting Kevin to actually send the client a proof but it will be interesting to see how this pans out.
Despite the fact that most agency account reps have never worked in, or have the vaguest idea about, the industry they represent, I like working with Kevin for exactly this reason.
In the past year, he has asked me to courier him "a portable document disk", promised a client a new logo in exchange for 50% off the price of laying floor boards in his home, and once fell asleep during a client meeting. Whe
n I startled him awake by nudging him, he yelled "the sprinklers are on" but refused to go into further detail.
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From: Kevin Eastwood
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 10.04am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Kotex artwork
Hi David,
I just tried emailing Jodie but got an auto responder that she is away. The client was happy with the last magazine ad layout and wants to place another in the February issue. Same info but different image. I said I would get a proof to them by tomorrow. Can you have a look at this for me?
Kevin
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From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 10.32am
To: Kevin Eastwood
Subject: Re: Kotex artwork
Hello Kevin,
Jodie is currently away on stress leave but will be returning on the 23rd. Workload related stress is a leading cause of poor office productivity and a daily schedule of harvesting Farmville crops while eating cake and emailing people images of a cat wearing a tie saying "I need everyone to stay late tonight, we really need to catch that red dot" apparently falls under this description.
While I would love to help you out, unfortunately I am unable to make amendments to Jodie's projects in her absense. This is partly due to not being the designer who undertook the brief, research, direction and development of the project, and partly due to Jodie password-protecting her computer after I changed her open Facebook page status to "Renting the Die Hard quadrilogy tonight. Yippee kayak, motherfuckers" while she was at a funeral.
In my defense, I thought she said she was going to a "Food Mall." Just last week Mellissa stated there was cake in the kitchen and I heard a popping noise as air entered the vacuum Jodie's mass had occupied at her desk a nanosecond before.
Though I know her password, (it is always her cat's name), there is little point using it. As Jodie has modeled her filing system on the Mandelbrot Set, with files named qwedqwyer.fmx and asdasydfg.psd several thousand folders deep, she will probably be back at work well before I manage to locate the file.
I can leave a sticky note on her desk though if that helps.
Regards, David.
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From: Kevin Eastwood
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 10.46am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Kotex artwork
Not really. You don't have to search for the file it is 0396_kotex_click_advert_01.pdf. It has the black panel at the bottom with the Kotex logo and info and the picture of the girls at the beach splashing each other. The picture and the quote just needs to be changed, keep the rest.
I fully realize Jodie worked on the account but when she is away other designers should have access to the files If someone needs them. Standard operating procedure. I guess having some kind of system in this place is too much to hope for.
Kevin
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From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 11.01am
To: Kevin Eastwood
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Kotex artwork
Kevin,
We do have some kind of system and it is entirely hope based. Standard operating procedures consist of hoping nobody notices, hoping someone else gets blamed, and hoping account managers make promises only after checking the availability of sources to fulfill those promises.
Last month, while a file was in pre-press after a two day photo-shoot featuring five babies for a Kimberly Clarke advertisement and a week of design, you asked if it was too late to "make the text bigger and one of the babies an Asian."
If you expect me to make amendments to the Kotex layout, I am hoping that you have either a budget allocated for sourcing a replacement image that represents the confidence and resulting lifestyle benefits gained by using a particular brand of tampon, or have an existing 'rights free' replacement image in mind.
Regards, David.
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From: Kevin Eastwood
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 11.09am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Kotex artwork
Budget for what? It is one photo change. It really isn't that complicated. Instead of girls at the beach, just change it to girls riding bikes or something and change the quote to something about being confident.
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From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 12.16pm
To: Kevin Eastwood
Subject: Requested amendment.
Attached file 0396_kotex_click_advert_01B.pdf
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From: Kevin Eastwood
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 12.33pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Requested amendment.
Ok. The photo is nice but it doesn't have anything to do with tampons and the copy doesn't make any sense. You cant even tell if it is a girl or guy and I didn't say motorbikes.
I said bikes. If it was a cute girl smiling and hugging a guy on the back of a moped or something that might work but not doing jumps
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From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 12.51pm
To: Kevin Eastwood
Subject: Re: Re: Requested amendment.
Attached file 0396_kotex_click_advert_01C.pdf
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From: Kevin Eastwood
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 1.19pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Requested amendment.
I liked the first one better. That's not a moped and I meant parked or something not riding. How is that image meant to appeal to anyone? They look like idiots and the bike is too old. Girls like modern technology like telephones and apps. It isn't rocket science.
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From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 1.46pm
To: Kevin Eastwood
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Requested amendment.
Attached file 0396_kotex_click_advert_01D.pdf
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From: Kevin Eastwood
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 2.46pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Requested amendment.
I will just send them the first one of the girl doing a jump and get back to you if they have changes. Thanks.
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From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 2.51pm
To: Kevin Eastwood
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Requested amendment.
No problem. You may want to CC Jodie in on that as I intend to be away next week.
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From: Kevin Eastwood
Date: Thursday 19 January 2012 2.57pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Requested amendment.
Will do.
Ten reasons I probably shouldn’t be alive: the beach
I don’t like the beach. I especially dislike busy beaches and having to navigate through eight thousand people to find a metre squared plot in which to take my top off in front of eight thousand people before venturing into a body of water with eight thousand people. Brochures always show beaches deserted, possibly with a footprint in the sand, but they are never like that.
I would probably quite like the beach if there wasn’t any people. Or sharks. A priv
ate beach would be quite nice, one a few steps down from a mansion of something. I probably wouldn’t actually go swimming but I might sit on the bottom step eating a sandwich while looking out at the water. Probably wondering how many sharks are just below the surface and what type. Then I would go back up to my mansion and read a newspaper or something while wearing one of those white bath-robes.
Once, while at the beach with my offspring, I swam out past eight thousand people and waved. Interpreting my waving for drowning, two huge men, wearing red shorts and carrying surfboards, bolted down the beach, dove in and swam towards me.
To escape, I dove as they approached but one reached under the surface and grabbed my foot - causing me to hang upside down and swallow water. Gasping to the surface, I was met by the other man pushing a surfboard towards me, which hit me in the side of the head. While the next few moments were a semi-concious blur of waves crashing and losing my shorts while being pulled over a surfboard, I recovered lying on the beach in the centre of an applauding crowd with my genitals covered by an old lady's sun hat.
