The trials and tribulations of a wannabe rodeo clown from Titahi Bay :: Stuart Parker :: NZ :: New Zealand :: www.stuartparker.com :: Stuart Gordon Parker
Fantastic juxtaposition of articles on the Herald website.
A couple whose bank screwed up and deposited $10m in their account are being hunted by Interpol after fleeing the country with some of the money, while NZ’s power companies face no consequences after fleecing consumers to the tune of $4.3b in just six years.
If you’re going to rob somebody in this country, make sure you wear a tie.
Bwahahahahahaha!
We all saw it coming, but frankly I’m amazed it took so long.
The news media have been circulating the usual clichés from insiders citing external factors such as ‘the current retail environment’. Bullshit. The fact of the matter is, Ferrit never had a viable business model and seemed hell-bent on throwing money at a problem that could only be solved with smarts and balls.
A wee word of advice to any cash-heavy corporates looking to speculate on the next Interweb bubble: if you don’t believe in your product, neither will anyone else.
Pour money into establishing a pretty cool campaign (buy beer and get cheap flights to Oz), using digital and media agencies who are too stupid to insert the destination URL into the banner, and too lazy to test in the live environment (click the banner to see what I mean).
FAIL!
The defeat of Helen Clark at the weekend, and her inevitable resignation, reminded me of a eulogy Hunter Thompson once wrote for Richard Nixon (below). Many of his sentiments ring true for our own fallen leader, and while I’ll always give her credit for getting off her ass and trying to make the world a better place, the same can also be said for Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Adolph Hitler, Fulgencio Batista, Nikolai Chauchesku, Augusto Pinochet… you get the idea.
Evil is as evil does, and I for one am glad to see the back of a government that has enslaved generations to welfare dependancy, driven us to the bottom of the OECD on every important measure, and intruded into the private lives of the people on an unprededented scale. If there is one good thing I can say about the fifth Labour government, it is this: I had never up to this point considered myself a Libertarian, or fully appreciated the necessity of keeping government in check. You opened my eyes, Helen, and for that I thank you.
HE WAS A CROOK
by Hunter S. ThompsonMEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK DATE: MAY 1, 1994 FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER…. HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA…. BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.
“And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”
—Revelation 18:2
Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing — a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that “I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”
I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”
It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he’s gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive — and he was, all the way to the end — we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.
That was Nixon’s style — and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don’t fight fair, bubba. That’s why God made dachshunds.
Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.
These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon’s immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president’s body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.
The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable — some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.
It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man — evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him — except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
It is fitting that Richard Nixon’s final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. “It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard,” said one. “And it fucks up my children’s sense of values.”
Many were incensed about the howitzers — but they knew there was nothing they could do about it — not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon’s last war, and he won.
The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.
Dole’s stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for ‘96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won’t even be re-elected as governor of California in November.
The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments — most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.
Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. “He will dwarf FDR and Truman,” according to one scholar from Duke University.
It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.
Nixon’s meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy “my dog Checkers” speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.
When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise — a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he’d run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.
Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover’s shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon’s downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director’s ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.
Hoover was Nixon’s right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee’s flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.
For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director — who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean’s relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.
That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that’s what Bill Clinton says — and he is, after all, the President of the United States.
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that “if the president does it, it can’t be illegal.”
Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon’s vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.
Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn’t argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn’t bother him.
Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.
It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that — but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.
Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.
Nixon’s spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives — whether you’re me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin’s daughter or your fiancee’s 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
The great triennial lolly scramble is now under way, with the dyke PM once again pinning her hopes on the student vote, this time offering a universal student allowance. She’ll be kicking herself if it works (else I’m sure there are plenty of taxpayers who would happily do it for her), ‘cos the estimated $210 million annual cost (yeah, right!) is a hell of a lot cheaper than the billions in student loan interest write-offs she used to buy the last election.
Great to see the good old Electoral Finance Act earning its keep, hey? The Radio Network is facing prosecution for comments made by two MP’s acting as guest-hosts, and Dominion Breweries has been cautioned over a Tui billboard. Yep, gotta keep that shit in check or the whole democratic process goes out the window. But a blatant $250 million bribe? Nothing wrong with that, mate – par for the course!*
I don’t know what’s more depressing – that we have a PM who deplores freedom of speech and displays open contempt for the electorate, or that a substantial partof the voting public (but hopefully not a majority) is prepared to overlook all this in exchange for a well-timed bribe. Come on, people! Wouldn’t it be nicer just to have a thriving economy? Where we’ve all got well-paying jobs? And we don’t get taxed though the ass to pay for ‘jobs for the boys’, a carbon credit trading program that won’t do a thing to halt global warming**, and an unsustainable welfare system that has condemned generations to dependency on the state?
Party vote NATIONAL on November 8 please!
* I possibly wouldn’t mind so much if it wasn’t my money in play. If you turned up at your favorite restaurant and couldn’t get a table ‘cos someone slipped the maitre d’ a twenty, you’d be pissed off, right? Now imagine he takes that twenty out of your pocket, slips it to the maitre d’ and then takes your table. You’d be set to strangle the bastard! Well this is no different. Government coffers are full of your (our) money!
** First of all, the planet isn’t actually warming. Second, there is zero conculsive evidence to support the myth that global warming is man-made. Now there’s a good reason to cripple business with yet another layer of red tape and compliance costs!
As someone who has submitted and reviewed CV’s on several occasions over the years, one of the major challenges I’ve encountered is in differentiating the great ones (including mine) from the not so great. Buried in any pile of resumés there is always to be found a few rock stars, many Joe Averages, and a depressing number of muppets. It’s normally pretty easy to filter out the muppets, but it’s often hard to discern the rock stars from the Joe Averages – they tend to have the same or similar academic backgrounds and experience, helped in no small part by the fact that Joe Average tends to do a very convincing job of blagging his accomplishments, while rock stars often (foolishly) rely on the facts speaking for themselves.
Some people try and use design to stand out, but sadly that just makes it look like they’re trying too hard. I mean, sure – you don’t want so hand in a CV written in crayon on toilet paper, but once you get past neat and professional it gets a little embarrassing. If you must send in a hard-copy, use only white, A4 paper with a single staple in the top left-hand corner. Do NOT use binders or plastic folders – if your CV is so long that it needs binding, you’re showing your prospective employer that you can’t hold down a job and/or don’t understand brevity. Either way, they won’t want to know about you.
So how do you make sure you stand out?
One trick that’s worked for me is to include a set of professional insights – half a dozen thoughts about the industry you work in, and what you think the next year or so has in store. You don’t have to make out like you’re some kind of oracle, and it really doesn’t matter if your predictions are a little off. Provided you don’t say anything too stupid, it always makes for good conversation in the interview, which you must have if you’re to have any shot at all of being hired. It also shows the employer that you’re not just some clock-punching automaton making a career out of getting by – show ‘em you really get what you do, and the job is yours for the asking.
Anyhoo, while doing some reading yesterday I was reminded of one of the predictions in my current CV, and – sadly for millions of people – it looks like I was bang on the money.
A substantial ‘adjustment’ will take place in tech stocks this year. That’s right people – we’re headed for another crash. Google will take a big hit, down to $400 US or below.
Exhibit A: Call it a ‘global financial crisis’ if you like, but a crash is still a crash
Exhibit B: Google shares are currently trading at $334, down from a 52-week high of $747.24 and $649.25 at the start of the year (when I made the prediction).
I wish I’d managed to predict myself into a new 911, but it’s been a pretty good year for me so I can’t complain. That said, (obligatory dig at the dyke) there are some rough times ahead and we need a firm hand on the tiller. Party vote NATIONAL on 8 November please!
As part of my continuing ‘cyber stalking‘ thread, a few weeks ago I sent a friend request to our soon-to-be leader of the opposition. It’s pretty obvious that she one of her aides had only created a Facebook profile to show the kids what a hip cat she is, and whoever was managing it clearly has no idea what the fuck they’re doing, ‘cos about a week later – and while I was getting a couple hundred views a day to my various anti-Labour rants (we love election years!) – I get this little surprise…
Once behind the velvet rope and into Helen’s inner sanctum (ooh err!), a few startling revelations…
Poking of the PM is encouraged! By men as well!
She is surrounded by ass kissers. Shame on you, Scott Bartlett!
And even more disturbing, I found myself sandwiched between Harry Duynhoven and Trevor Mallard. I could live a long time and never need to repeat that one, I can assure you!
Anyhoo, I laughed my ass off and left it at that, and by the looks of things so did she the aide managing her profile. No updates at all until today, when she announced the date for the general election.
I have the Facebook for BlackBerry app, and found myself reading her wall updates while on the ferry home this evening. It was disgusting – countless sycophants sniffing her throne, wanking on about what a visionary she is [sic]. One schmuck waxed lyrical about how great she was for her ‘the war wouldn’t have happened on Gore’s watch‘ comment.
Yep, even if the statement wasn’t a complete lie*, insulting the world’s most powerful man is a brilliant move for the PM of a tiny agrarian nation with dreams of a US free trade deal. She’s a goddamn vagenius !
The most recent post was from some moron agreeing with a statement the PM had apparently made today, that a change in government would lead to instability and was therefore not in the best interests of the nation**. Get your tongue out of her trousers, mate – these are the 80’s and she’s down with the ladies!
Never one to shy away from a challenge, I contributed a wall post in which I *politely* pointed out to this chap that since more than half of the electorate clearly want Helen and her cronies gone, a change of government is actually in the best interests of the country. I added that instability comes from the suppression of democracy, rather than its application in accordance with the law and the will of the people.
Not exactly the kind of stuff Helen the aide that manages Helen’s profile expects to see I suppose, and probably deserving of a stern rebuke or harsh words. Is that what happened?
Nope.
I have been removed from Helen’s friends list, and all of the posts on her wall have been deleted.
Helen Clark doesn’t believe in free speech. She doesn’t condone or participate in civilized discourse. Cross the line (i.e. fail to kiss her ass) and she’ll have one of her flunkies usher you away and then pretend you were never there.
That, friends, is all you need to know about Helen Clark. VOTE NATIONAL!
*Gore is a lying, self-serving hypocrite. The only way the war might not have happened on his watch would be that he would likely have offered a preemptive surrender. Either that or he would have been too busy inventing man-made global warming to find time for any *pesky* military stuff.
**First the Electoral Finance Act and now this? She sounds more like Robert Mugabe every day! Viva El Presidente!
Mike Catty you’re my hero!
Click here for the full interview. Put the coffee down before reading on…
The media circus arising from allegations that Tony Veitch had assaulted his former partner, Kirsten Dunne Powell, bothered me right from the start. Let me start out by declaring that I fully support the Women’s Refuge position on domestic violence. Not acceptable. All violence is deplorable, and for any man to use his – let’s face it, this is normally the case – superior strength to inflict physical and/or emotional harm on someone he’s supposed to care about is… it’s fucking wrong, no question about it.
But that doesn’t mean our compassion should only be directed towards the woman, and that’s where I start to get antsy. When word of the Veitch allegations broke, people commenting publicly on the issue tended to end up (whether they liked it or not) in one of two camps – you either flat-out condemned him, or you were a fellow lady basher. Is it really so black and white though? Can you (should you be able to) sympathise with an alleged abuser, offer him some degree of compassion and understanding, without you both being tarred and feathered? Apparently not, which is how we ended up with a witch hunt.
A little background…
When I was 19 years old I began a relationship with a woman I’d met at work. She was older than me, pretty close to my height, and while she definitely wasn’t ‘man-ish’, had been a gym-fanatic for many years so was very muscular. She was also a redhead, so I probably should have seen it coming. As relationships often do in one’s late teens, things were great to start with but waned over time. After about ten months I ended the relationship (or so I thought) and moved on (or so I thought). It started with her phoning me out of the blue (‘Hi, just wondering what you are you are up to’), progressed to her turning up on my door step at odd hours (‘Hi, just passing by and thought I’d pop in’), and ended up with her sitting in her car outside my work most nights (we were no longer working together) , watching me finish up in case – God forbid – I went home with a waitress. I tried to be the nice guy, tried to understand that she had had her heart broken and do whatever it took to help her, but after a while it became unbearable. I asked her to leave me alone, without success. I stopped going to my old haunts and hanging out with mutual friends (formerly my friends), I asked the police to intervene, but was dismissed out of hand. Nothing worked – I was being stalked and there was nothing I could do about it. I can honestly say I feared for my life.
One night about four months after the stalking started I went out after work and arrived home with *a guest* at about 1am. I didn’t see her car, but apparently she’d been waiting outside my house for hours. I’d been in bed for maybe five minutes when the front door of my house was kicked in, followed immediately by my bedroom door. The lights came on and there she was – screaming (‘Time to go, bitch!), kicking, and dragging my guest out of the bed by her hair. I jumped up, ran for the door, broke the hold she had on my guest’s hair, and knocked her to the floor with a right-hook.
Next day. Phone rings. All day. Highlights include nearly all of our mutual friends (now her friends) calling to tell me what a scumbag I was. Most of these people have never spoken to me since. I also vividly remember her calling to say she’d laid a complaint with the police (thankfully this turned out to be bullshit) and that I would soon be arrested. She also dropped by that afternoon to show off the black eye I’d given her, just to make sure I knew what she’d shown the cops. I was fucked. The only thing that kept me sane was the fact that the first person to hear about all this was my mother. I had called her in tears, right after the incident, racked with guilt and unable to comprehend how I had managed to do something so totally contrary to the way I had been brought up. Mum’s response?
Next time you see that bitch, smack her again and tell her I said hi!
(Mums are awesome)
Why am I telling you this? Because, as much as I’m not sure I wanted to learn it this way, here’s what it taught me:
(The latter point still doesn’t sit well with me, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true)
Turn your clocks forward a couple of years. I’m now 22, back at varsity and totally loving my life. I start dating a woman I’m working with (a little advice for you, don’t ever dip your pen in the company ink), and we end up living together – we didn’t ‘move in together’ a such, I just ended up spending pretty much every night at her house. We both worked nights (but not the same nights), we both had friends (but not the same friends)… pretty soon we started to drift apart and one of us (her) realised it but the other one (me) didn’t.
To this day I don’t know if this was something I’d subconsciously picked up from my previous relationship (with the stalker) or just a latent trait kicking in when the going got rough, but I didn’t handle the deteriorating relationship well. The more time we spent apart, the more I tried to be with her. Every mention or inference of another man drove me crazy. We argued all the time, said the most hurtful things to each other, and – despite the fact that she started staying out till all hours (I was convinced that this was because of me, as opposed to her simply wanting to spend time with her friends) – I continued to spend every night at her house.
One night things came to a head. We both had the night off work, but when I got home from varsity she wasn’t there. Her mobile was on but went unanswered all night. I sat there waiting by the door until her key hit the lock a little after 3am. All my months of suspicion and insecurity boiled over. On a conscious level I was venting, but on a subconscious level I think I wanted her to feel all the hurt and insecurity I’d been harboring for so long. We argued. We cried. We broke up and I stormed out. But I wasn’t done. When I reached the letterbox I turned on my heel and, when I found the front door locked, kicked it open. I don’t remember what I had to say that was so important, but I said it. And while she was trying – rightfully so – to usher me out of her house I shoved her backwards and into a wall – not very hard, and without causing injury, but how much damage do you have to do for it to be a fucking stupid thing to do? I’ll spare you the details of the aftermath, suffice to say that it turns out this woman had a much kinder soul than I’d given her credit for, and the Student Health counseling services are worth every penny of the extortionate U of A fees I paid borrowed for over the years.
This was a horrible experience and, again, I wish I could have come by the insight some other way. But nobody’s perfect – hell, we’re supposed to make mistakes, provided we learn from them. So here’s one of the things I learned:
There, it’s done – I’ve just openly confessed my two darkest secrets. We all have skeletons in our closets, and I have many more – but none worse than these. I’ve shared them with you for a couple of reasons. First of all, I’m no longer ashamed of them. While I’m far from proud of my actions, if I could go back and undo what I did I’m not sure I would. I actually quite like the man I’ve become, and who am I but the product of my (good and bad) experiences?
Second, I’d like to challenge you all to attempt a similar introspection. All you fine upstanding folks who cried out for Tony Veitch’s head when the rumors first surfaced – have you ever done anything you’re ashamed of? No? In my opinion, anyone who’s never crossed the line between right and wrong most likely has no idea where it is. Do you think Hilter had a guilty conscience? What about Osama Bin Laden? The rest of us sinners hopefully learn one or both of the following from our transgressions:
So I was really vocal in supporting Veitchy when the rumors surfaced, and I still am. And it’s not because I’m ‘a fucking man too’, or ‘a lady basher like him’ – it’s because, regardless of how it came to be, I am a better person than those that wouldn’t.
