Being Arrested

A short guide to the worst day of your life

They will show up at your door, and they will tell you that you are under arrest for <insert charge here>. They’ll just give you the name of the charge: they won’t tell you what you’re actually supposed to have done, and if you ask they’ll play dumb.

Make sure you don’t talk back, use sarcasm, or in any way disagree with them. Because if you do, the man with the gun and the taser will declare that he considers himself at physical risk from you, and he will spin you around and put the cuffs on.

On the other hand, you might decide that you would like to get a drink from the fridge, in which case every officer present will jump on you and twist your arm and force you to the ground. If you ask for a drink, or to take your medication, they will tell you no.

If you are lucky, they will lead you out of the house in the cuffs, and put you in the back of a police car. If you’re unlucky, they will decide that because you were not polite, you are too dangerous to be in the back of a car, and they will call for a van. They will make you sit on the nature strip in cuffs for half an hour or more, waiting for the van. You can ask them to please not make you sit in the back of the van, because you know it’s tiny and airless and every time you round a corner you will slide and bang against the sides. You can tell them you have an anxiety disorder and please please PLEASE don’t put you in the van because it’ll cause a panic attack and you’re scared of what will happen.

But you’d be better off saving your breath, because they will ignore you entirely.

After the ride to the station, they will put you in what might be called a “cell”, but which is nowhere near as roomy and luxurious as that sounds. What it is is a metal bench, with a perspex door that closes about six inches in front of your knees when you’re sitting down. If you ask for a cup of water they’ll give it to you. If you ask for a newspaper to read they won’t. They will keep you shut behind that door for as long as it takes for someone to be bothered to interview you: probably a few hours, if you’re lucky again. Or more than a few.

After you’re interviewed they’ll decide whether to charge you. If they do, you’ll go behind the door again while they draw up the paperwork. This takes a really long time, and they will explain every detail while you agree that you understand everything they’re saying. You can say you don’t understand everything they’re saying, but it’ll just make your stay in the station longer. In fact doing almost anything will make your stay longer. If you argue with them, if you refuse to answer questions, if you ask for a lawyer, if you want to go to the toilet…doing anything except agreeing to absolutely everything is going to get you a longer stay. So it’s best to play nice really.

Afterwards you will relive the experience every day for the rest of your life, and know that forevermore you are officially a criminal. So the system works.

The Weekly Fury

“I love Jesus. I love any man who can get nailed for three days straight and come back for more.”

This is the joke that comedian Reuben Kaye told on The Project last week, which the hosts of the show apologised for the following night, which a bunch of weirdos protested in the street about, and which caused the Archbishop of Sydney to ask the show’s cast and crew to Mass so they could better understand the “hurt” they had caused by by “flagrantly mocking the beliefs of more than half of all Australians”.

Just to repeat, that joke was:

“I love Jesus. I love any man who can get nailed for three days straight and come back for more.”

Now, I am happy to nail my colours to the mast here: the “Christian Lives Matter” freaks who actually rallied against this joke are incredibly stupid. The Archbishop of Sydney seems incredibly stupid, but is more likely just a disingenuous creep, like most archbishops. And Waleed Aly and Sarah Harris, who made the snivelling apology the night after the joke went to air, have behaved with revolting cowardice. I recently wrote a piece saying that The Project has become bland, but I didn’t realise they’d also abandoned even the pretence of having a spine.

I mean, it’s not like hosting The Project requires a LOT of courage. Ninety-five percent of occupations in the world require more bravery on a daily basis than any Project panellist will ever have to display. And yet, even with the lowest of low bars to clear, when asked to show the slightest whiff of intestinal fortitude by simply taking the mild and reasonable position that they would stand by their guests’ right to make jokes about whatever they felt like, they failed that test. It was pathetic.

Of course, any well-adjusted human would recognise that Kaye was not, as the archbishop claimed, mocking anyone’s beliefs. In fact, what he was doing was making a pun on the double meaning of the word “nailed”. The resulting joke, of course, did refer to homosexual intercourse, but that’s not a mockery of people’s beliefs, it’s just a reference to something that makes some people feel uncomfortable. And to coin a phrase, so nailing what?

But I have to go further, and say, even if Kaye HAD been mocking people’s beliefs, even if he’d been cackling his head off at how dumb Christians were, even if he’d said, “Christianity is a symptom of your mother smoking crack while pregnant”…

Big frigging deal!

Because you do not have any right to not have your beliefs mocked. There is no reason for anyone to not mock your beliefs. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to suck it up and live with it, because in this world everyone has beliefs that other people think are silly, and a world in which those other people have to pretend they don’t think your beliefs are silly is a much worse world than one in which they can say that they do.

A throwaway line on The Project - and remember, that line was:

“I love Jesus. I love any man who can get nailed for three days straight and come back for more.”

- is not The Life of Brian, but it requires just as much apologising to the offended as that movie did: i.e. none.

I have never been a huge advocate of offending just for the sake of offending, but I’m coming around to the idea. Not just because of the hysterical overreaction to, and contemptible apology for, Kaye’s joke, but because of far more serious occurrences such as that at Wakefield in the UK, where four students received threats and were actually suspended from school for “slightly damaging” a Quran.

Frankly, we need to do the religious a favour by mocking and deriding their beliefs as much as possible, so they can harden up and lead happier, less uptight lives. Make jokes about Jesus’s sex life, draw rude pictures in the margins of the Quran, watch Mel Brooks movies…whatever it takes for them to get a grip.

They’ll thank us in the long run.

The Weekly Creativity

The Casebook Of Caligula Coleridge, Undercover Poet

Case 1: The Mysterious Greystoke Caper

Saturday, 19^th January, 1952

            Today started languorously. I woke in my office, the stale smell of banana smoke in the air. I blinked, once, twice, thrice, but no good; I was still in my office. My back was stiff, as stiff as a post office manager, from sleeping in my swivel chair. A couple of isometric exercises later, and I was ready to face the day. Faithful Selfridge buzzed in my latest client, an intriguing young lady by the name of Boots Greystoke. She was blonde, and may have been attractive under the custom-made tarpaulin she chose to wear. After crashing several times into my furniture, she sat down and lit a cigarette. Smiling coquettishly, she stubbed the cigarette out on my arm, causing me to scream not a little. ‘Alright, enough small talk,’ I snapped in my most elegiac manner. ‘What’ll it be?’

            She smiled even more coquettishly and vomited in my bin. ‘I hear you’re an undercover poet.’

            ‘That’s right,’ I grunted, disgusted by her thick Bulgarian accent. ‘What’s it to you?’

            ‘I hear you’re the best.’

            ‘Quit stalling!’ I screamed, overcome by the build-up of emotions that had been crawling all over me ever since the bright April morning when my own father had been brutally crushed to death by the very set of encyclopaedias he had been selling. It had been a dark time, but I had sworn to myself never to let my emotions get the better of me again. That’s why I had gone into the undercover poetry game in the first place. And dammit, here she was, making me lose my cool.

‘Before I give you my business, Mr Coleridge, I’d like some proof of your credentials.’ She leaned back in her chair, which fell over backwards. Dusting herself off, she gave me a long, cool, contemptuous look, like she was the queen bee, and I was a deformed baby moth. I gritted my teeth.

            ‘You want proof?’ I drawled, cleverly. ‘Hold onto your tarp.’

            I gave her one of my best, Hamble Snitt and the Woman:

Hamble Hamble Hamble, screamed the mystery Woman,
Wake up and face your demons, lest they all go home.
Woman, woman, woman, burped Hamble full of whalemeat,
Shut your stinked lint-trap, lest I slit your filthy throat.

            It’s a work in progress, but good to use on prospective clients, and I think Miss Greystoke was suitably impressed. She sat there, hair sticking straight up, a frozen smile on her face, her clothes visibly smoking, for well over an hour, during which time I slunk out with Selfridge to buy more Scotch. We couldn’t find any scotch, so we bought a box of wheat instead, and ate it raw, like real men do in the old country.

            On my return to the office, Boots Greystoke was rearranging herself into the vision of je ne sais quoi I had first encountered.

            ‘So what’s the job?’ I barked, like the sea lion I often wished I could have been. Her delaying tactics were getting on my nerves, in a wonderful, wonderful way.

            She laughed, a silvery laugh that made me think of Leslie Caron naked in my bed, bleeding profusely. ‘I want you to find my father,’ she said, lighting another cigarette and eating it smugly.

            ‘OK, what’s his address?’ I asked, not unreasonably, and suddenly thinking of a great idea for a poem about a man who lives in a house all his life and is eaten by the bear he had raised from childhood.

            ‘It won’t do you any good, Mr Coleridge,’ said Boots in that way I had come to love over the last decade and a half. ‘He disappeared in the Indian jungle three months ago. He was searching for the Lost Limerick of Taga-Phou. We think he has been taken prisoner by Poetical Tribesmen, but the government won’t do anything.’

            ‘Why not?’ I asked, thinking of a new poem I could write about the way fish feel when you melt them in your hair.

            ‘They say there is no conclusive proof I ever had a father, and I’m trying to rort the system.’ Boots broke down and cried for the next week, after which I said:

‘Surely you know that India is not even in this country. My expenses will be huge, besides which, nobody has ever searched for the Taga-Phou Limerick and survived. Is this not madness?’

            ‘I will pay whatever it takes, Mr Coleridge. He wasn’t just my father, we were more like sisters. I must have him back, if only for the footrubs. Please Mr Coleridge.’

            I paused, fist in mouth. Could I? Did I dare? What? How? Which? Where? This pungent young beauty was hard to resist, and her story heartbreaking, but...did I have the courage, even armed with my most resilient poems, to venture into the heart of darkness...the heart of MADNESS...and come out alive? What was I to do?

The Weekly Plugs

A Plug for Myself: Please sign this petition to make me a game show host.

A Plug for Someone Else: Probably the funniest writer on the internet is Seanbaby: the latest piece of his that made me gasp with laughter was this one, about a vampire joke book.