Thursday, Thursday - 12:31 p.m.

Cabs

Mr. Oaf is always taking cabs on account of the fact that TEZNEZCO! won’t let him drive a car (apparently something to do with his temperament not being ‘suited’ to vehicular transport). Thus Mr. Oaf has come to think that his lifestyle as something akin to that of a radio DJ or a newspaper columnist or anyone else with severely limited exposure to the real world.

For Mr. Oaf, there is the daily ritual of walking down stairs to the shop to see if his manuscript has been returned by Bernard. Always disappointed, Mr. Oaf then buys a newspaper, says hello to Frances - the old lady who runs the shop – and then returns back upstairs to wrestle with the computer. Unless there is some sort of chance encounter with the outside world – perhaps the Old man with the Dog, the hoity-toity Real Estate Agent or perhaps a telephone call offering carpet cleaning, Mr. Oaf is approaching the status of a shut in. So for Mr. Oaf, one of his few chances to interact with the common or ordinary folk of this world is talking to cab drivers on the way to Woy Woy.

Cab drivers sometimes have amusing stories to tell, or intelligent observations on the weather (“It started out dull but now it’s nice” or “It’s cold today”) or they just offer uncomplaining companionship for the 30 minutes it takes to drive to the train station

We do know of course that is complete nonsense. Cab drivers are by definition the last place you want to go for anything other than rude entertainment, their opinions being, by definition, slightly or completely crazed by the slow boil of sitting in the sun all day long with nothing to do but watch traffic and listen to the bzzz-bzzz-bzzz of the radio calling out jobs. When someone gets in the car, it’s their chance to hold forth.

Recently Mr. Oaf had the startling experience of having a cab driver tell him the abridged version of his marriage:

His name was Ian and he’d just got word that his missus was coming back from holidays. She rang and left a message on the answering machine and Ian was pretty pissed off about the whole thing. His wife had gone on holidays to the Gold Coast without him because Ian had refused to go if the wife’s mother went too. That seemed pretty reasonable, he said, I told her, ‘your mum’s ok but I just don’t get along with her and is it too much to ask that we just go on holiday, you and me, and just enjoy ourselves?’.

It seemed OK but there was more to the story and Ian held back until the cab go to about the half way point. It turned out that this was Ian’s second marriage. He’d got married the first time, he said, for sex. His first wife was great chick and was pretty hot, but he’d been into drinking and smoking grass and he fucked around a lot and even slept with his first wife’s sister. He decided his first wife was just too lenient on him and let him do whatever he wanted and what he really needed was a woman who’d keep him on the straight and narrow and so he got divorced. He said he’d been honest at the end with his first wife and told her everything, even that he’d fucked her sister. She didn’t believe him. “Too lenient, see?” Ian said, waving his arm about in the air.

So he’d left the fist wife and spent the next few years alone until he met Helen, the second wife, at the Ettalong RSL. She was a nurse and no nonsense. They went home together one night after a game of pool, had great sex, and Ian thought, ‘well, that’s that’. He left his number but never expected to hear from her – except about two weeks later Helen rang out of the blue to say she was pregnant and what did he want to do about it? They ended up getting together and, although she lost the baby in a pretty harrowing story of a bloody miscarriage misdiagnosed by some quack at a fuckin’ medical centre in Woy Woy, they were together through thick and thin. What’s more, Helen was a tough nut who wasn’t too lenient and cracked down on Ian’s drinking, smoking and whoring.

So Ian had stayed faithful and things were pretty good. Then, a few weeks ago, Ian gets a shock phone call from his first wife, some seventeen years after he last spoke to her to tell her they were getting a divorce. She rang him up one night while he was getting ready to go out driving and said “You really did fuck my sister didn’t you?” And Ian said, yeah, I told you that seventeen friggin’ years ago!

But she was a good chick, Ian said, and he started wondering if maybe he’d made a mistake leaving her. He got into a bit of a mood for a few days and when Helen wanted to talk about the Gold Coast holiday he’d just go, yeah, yeah, later will ya? He was just doing his shifts, coming home and going out to the car port to do weights (he said he likes to keep his arms and shoulders pretty fit although he did admit the old waistline had started to get a bit on the flabby side). Then one night, it was last Wednesday, Helen comes out to he car port and goes – ‘we need to talk’ – but they don’t say anything, just stand there staring at each other and then, suddenly, Helen goes fucking berko and lashes out at Ian and scratches up his face, starts crying and then runs into the house. They don’t speak at all for the next few days. Ian wakes up on Saturday morning and she’s gone on holidays without him.

So, to get back to where we started, Helen rang to say she was coming back. The cab driver turned to Mr. Oaf. “So what do you reckon? Seems like the marriage is over, hey?”

bears in history - future bears

“This diary cracked me up, completely, perhaps the oddest diary I have ever read. I'm not sure if it's a takeoff on something or someone that I have somehow missed. Regardless, TEZNEZCO! chronicles the adventures of two bears and describe them as if they are a minority of some sort. The writing is disturbingly matter-of-fact as if it is perfectly normal to be writing about these bears as people. I like it; it's pleasantly novel" - Diaryreview

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