The Dandy Arsehole

I am caught in two minds here.

Coffee in one hand and my egg and bacon roll within reach of the other, I have found just about the only unoccupied seat left at the Qantas domestic terminal.

But the neighbours….

As in is my wont I have given myself about 45 minutes too much waiting time. It’s simply that I hate missing planes. Well that’s not true; I hate worrying about missing planes when I am just about to. And even that’s not true. Once I know I am going to miss a plane I stop worrying altogether. What I hate is thinking about it all, more than I hate getting up early.

So I needed to find a seat; it’s too long a wait to consider standing, eating and drinking.

Back to the business of the neighbours. Next to me at the solely unoccupied table is two persons. My guess is that they are government employees of the state variety. Maybe upper middlish managers in State Rail. Or something like that.

She, who doesn’t figure in this story, is a middle aged Indian woman of a totally nondescript nature. She hardly says a word. Nods a lot though, like one of those dogs on a dashboard.

He is about 40.

Probably a tad over-dressed for State Rail. The suit is too sharpish with its pin stripes contrasting with the over-contrasting shirt. He has a pocket kercheiffy thing going down as well. Pocket squares, I seem to recall, is what they are called.

Not unexpectedly he looks prematurely out of condition. But he has had plenty of practice in talking about himself, that is for sure.

[Switching to past tense; 15 minutes have gone by dear reader and the pair of nuggets have gone now]

I just got his whole life story in ten minutes in an annoyingly high-pitched first generation accent. Having gone to a multi-cultural school I would guess his parents were Yugoslavian of one sort or another. And I can say that because they were born in Yugoslavia, and when they left it was still Yugoslavia and not the current collection of seething pocket squares.

His mother was a saint that died young, at 72. Worked hard, raised all the kids, went to church and imparted all her wisdom on the kids (including my confessor) which seems to have boiled down to this; work hard, be entirely self focused and die shortly after you retire. Oh, and be as banal as you possibly can be.

The rest of the conversation was broken up into lectures on work and real estate.

Work was just a series of brain dribbles masquerading as management activities. Dribble, dribble, dribble. He even said at one point; “we need to do something new or innovative”. I would have loved to a have asked the difference.

Real estate was all about the value of his house, then the value of the one next door which didn’t even have an en suite and sold on the weekend for one point five millions dollars, and then the one he almost went deep into debt for last year which is on a thousand square meter block and is now worth half a million more than he would have paid for it.

Finally he got onto his vision for his life. At forty years of age he is fixated on retiring young and enjoying his retirement with plenty of cash and no anxiety. At some point, he said, he might even travel somewhere.

About here I couldn’t take it any more, the headphones went in; The Dandy Warhols to the rescue.