He states, “What’s so bloody hard to understand? Break the cock. It’s a feminist message. Women should be loving it”.

Len Lye could not be reached for comment.

*Disclaimer: This is shit news*

She never received a damn thing.
When I first heard this story, I leapt out of my seat in anger. “What do you mean you didn’t receive anything!?” Mum replied, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe it got lost in the mail.”
Lost in the mail? God bless my sweet mother’s soul.

She still can’t bear to face the ugliness of a 30-year-old truth: she got ripped off by some 80s pop freaks. After I heard the story, I decided to do a little digging on Katango. I poured every ounce of my research skills into chasing this thing. To say I had a personal investment was an understatement. I had a vendetta. A vendetta against the bastards who robbed my 13-year-old mother of five dollars. I decided that I wouldn’t rest without getting her money back. Adjusting for inflation, I was going after $12.35NZD.
Like any researcher worth their salt, I started with Google. Google turned up an app called Katango which uses social algorithms to sort your friends list into people that share in your ideology. Google bought the technology in 2011 and utilised it along with leaked White House information sourced through Russian spies to secure Trump the US presidency.

Unfortunately nothing to do the NZ pop band.

Scrolling further I turned up an article on Audioculture, a website for jaded old musicians to relive their glory days by writing lengthy esoteric articles about bygone eras. The article contained several key pieces of information that both intrigued and incensed me. One was a magazine advertisement for “Club Katango”. The ad promised; posters, autographed photos, badges, and t-shirts to anyone with five dollars and a rudimentary understanding of the New Zealand postal system. Near this image was a quote from Katango’s lead singer Phil Eversden candidly mentioning that “doing a school show was a quick way to make some cash”.

I bet it was, you slimy fucking rat.
This new information changed the game. This was no accidental forgetting to send a fan package. This was an organised con job.

I started trying to locate the members of the band. All I had to work with was their names. Luckily this cyber-centric information whirlpool we live in is a stalker’s paradise. I started with the drummer Nick Ferneyhough, as he had the weirdest name. Google turned up an article from 2006 NZ Herald’s lifestyle section, in which Nick waxes lyrical about the simple pleasures of having both a house in Remuera and a Chateau in France. Such luxury, possibly aided by savvy investment of my mother’s five dollars. I punched his name into Facebook, sourced his email, and sent him a message. Not wanting to let on that a 30-year cold case was coming back to bite him, I couched my questions in an unassuming discussion of the music scene of the 1980s.
When I mentioned the fan club, he said, “I’d forgotten about that. I think one of the fans actually set it up”.
This would not be the last I would hear of this mysterious fan. Nick went on, “We really didn’t interact with the fans much at all as far as I remember… I think there were just a few cheesy signed photos given away to club members”.
I find it hard to believe that if Katango gave away anything, they would do so for free.
After locating one member, it was relatively easy to find the rest. Facebook has the delightfully creepy feature of being able to search within other people’s friends lists. It was through this method that I found Katango’s bass player, Carl Robinson. Carl is currently a fine wine importer living in Japan. Even with the time difference, he kindly scheduled a Skype call so that I could ask him a few questions.
I started off easy, knowing that with a click of a button he could leave both the call, and me in the dark, forevermore. Carl seemed to know a lot more about the fan club than Nick. He stated that the club grew quickly, a couple thousand members joining in the first few months. 2000 x $5 = $10,000 — adjusting for inflation that is $31,812.81. If Carl was the mastermind behind the scheme, then converting it into yen would make the amount ¥2,339,449.92 — enough for a house in central Auckland.
As I began to ask direct questions about the fan club, I found the plot thickened more than I could have ever dreamed. Carl told me that Katango the band didn’t actually have anything to do with the fan club, and they certainly didn’t see any money from it. Carl didn’t even know that there was a fee to join.
Upon learning this information, all my attention focused on this mysterious fan club president.
Carl had mentioned her name was Kirsten. He couldn’t recall a last name. I doubt one was ever given. Apparently, this enterprising teeny bopper had contacted the band and asked if she could make a fan club for them. Carl said that she “wrote, published, and sent it out. She was in high school, sixteen at the time I suppose”.
I suddenly realised that all my anger towards Katango had been misdirected. They themselves had been duped, by a conniving young lady with a penchant for financial misdemeanour. I made it my objective to find this Kirsten and confront her with her crime. I finished the Skype call with the request that Carl send a bunch of Katango fan paraphernalia to my mother. Carl promised that after 35 years, my mum would finally get her fan package.

Securing the goods, I next sought vengeance.
After googling the name Kirsten turned up over 100 million results, I decided a more direct approach would be needed. I went back to the basics. Scouring Katango’s Youtube videos for comments. Failing this I searched the name both on Carl and Nick’s Facebook accounts. No dice.

Then I remembered my original source: The Audioculture article on Katango. That single article had more information on the band than anywhere else on the internet. I began to scrutinise every line. The article mentioned band managers, venue owners, and local scenesters all by name, but for fan club presidents I was coming up dry. I thought that perhaps the writer of the article, Jon Chapman, possessed the information but didn’t realise the weight of it. I would have to talk to him directly and find out what he knew.
Finding him was not so easy. Like myself, Jon Chapman has been cursed by mediocre Anglo-Saxon nomenclature that makes him very hard to find. Linkedin turned up zilch. Facebook had far too many options to go sending out Katango-themed interrogations at random. When I returned to Audioculture, I realised that I had somehow missed the writers section. On it I found Jon Chapman, there was a bio but no links. However, the bio mentioned that he was currently playing in a Dunedin psychedelic rock band called Eye. I found the band on Facebook, chucked them a message, and within a week I was speaking to New Zealand’s foremost authority on 80s teen pop.
I could feel the story going cold as I typed the words.
Begging Jon Chapman to put me in contact with the people who ran the Katango fan club.
His response; “I’m happy to send your email address to Carl (main band member and also fan club runner) … He’s a really nice guy.”
I was confused to say the least. I had already spoken to Carl and he had denied all knowledge of the fan club, putting the blame on this mysterious Kirsten.
To this, Jon said, “Ah, Paul Eversden told me that Carl ran it with his girlfriend of the time, so that must be Kirsten I suppose”.
My jaw dropped. Had Carl lied to me? He certainly knew more about the fan club than anyone else. He certainly had access to the fan club paraphernalia. Did he know I was onto him? Was he trying to cover his tracks? Had I spoken directly to the man who thieved from my mother, and not known it?
I pulled myself together for one last question to Jon. I knew that talking to New Zealand’s foremost Katango expert was a one-time opportunity, and I had questions that needed answers. I laid it all on the line, telling Jon about my mother’s five dollars, the adjustments in inflation, the conversation with Nick, my confrontation with Carl, the thousands of people in the fan club all paying 5 dollars, the yen conversion, the mysterious Kirsten who has never been seen or mentioned in the online records…
Then it struck me: Maybe that’s how they paid for their insanely expensive gear.”
I have tried on numerous occasions to get in contact with Carl for a final round of questioning, but he has been dodging my Facebook messages, emails, and Skype calls. In my opinion he is probably hurriedly checking New Zealand’s statute of limitations and extradition agreements with Japan.

I called my mum.
I was dejected that I hadn’t been able to get her what she was owed; A Katango fan pack, and Justice. Both of these things will remain out of reach as long as Carl Robinson stays hidden. My mum lost five dollars. She will never get that (inflation adjusted) $12.35NZD back. But what I hope this story has given her is a sense of closure. No longer will she spend sleepless nights tossing and turning, wondering if her package is at the bottom of a slosh pile of 1980s mail that never got delivered.

She will at least know the truth.
That her five dollars was thieved by some of the most heartless and conniving bastards to lay their hands upon a synthesiser.

The crowd was not into it.
The venue was pretty full, but the front rows had backed away fearfully from the stage to compress along the rear wall, leaving a couple metres of open concrete floor between us. Somehow, I got it into my ethanol addled head that to further the joke the set was becoming, I would need to up the ante. That ante was my performance. It was upped by my dolphin diving straight into the concrete floor. I managed to do it about 3 times before I landed on my head and cracked it open. I remember standing up and falling over again. Someone must have taken me outside for some fresh air, because next thing I remember I am sitting on the curb, looking at a street light thinking, wow this is a pretty weird part of Avondale.
The second serious head injury occurred when we were staying in a dirtbag hotel located on the old Vegas strip that has been dead for like 30 years, although the nauseating neon lights don’t know it. Old Vegas is just as greasy as the new one, except a little less effort has gone into covering up the sleaze. We were running around the strip, jacked up on the last of the cocaine as well as a few 1-gallon cans of vodka and strawberry RTDs called Strawberitas. Slimy old men with swollen eyes stood on the sidewalks in gangs of twos and threes dressed as babies, pirates, medieval knights, or other such schtick, waiting for a wayward tourist to get too close to them so they could grab them, gruffly force them to take a photo, and extort the unlucky passerby for money. Stages lined the streets where Elvis, Eagles, and Smashmouth tribute acts played loudly to crowds of people trying to dance away the fact that they lost a small fortune in the slots. Instead of a sky, the entire street is covered in a gigantic canopy, onto which is projected the lyrics to whatever trashy pop classic is being blasted at any given moment, karaoke style, in case anyone wants to sing along.

Because this is the greasy end of Vegas, casinos have to do more to try and pull in cash-fodder. Our casino’s advertising gimmick was for the gambling tables to be topped with women dancing either naked or getting pretty close to it. We drank another Strawberita and thought that it would be a good idea to put the entire tour’s profits so far ($42 USD) on the slots. We lost. Another thing I had lost at that point in time was my brother Lachie. I was vaguely concerned because last thing I remembered was that he was talking about going to a 24 hour tattoo parlour to get some flash done. I also realised that I had lost my friend Cam. I figured those two would be together and keeping each other out of as much trouble as is possible.

Blink. I’m back in the hotel room.
I was inside, and Reuben was on the outside of the room wanting to get in. I had the bright idea to lock him out of the room and goad him with calls of “what’s the password”.
The hyperactivity of the narcotics made me quickly tire of the tease, but they also made Rueben extremely quick to anger. Just as I was opening the door for him he let loose a mighty kick that swung the door back and hit me full on the face. I fell back on the stained carpet and lay there for a full twenty seconds before attempting to get up. Immediately a Cronenberg-esque lump started swelling out of my head, bleeding. Reuben, immediately converted back into the sweetheart he is when he isn’t locked out of rooms, was all over me with hugs and kisses and “I’m sorry”s. The chemicals in my body meant that I didn’t feel much pain at the time. I kept saying, “I’m not crying because of this, it’s just the shock”.
Later that night it all hit me at once; the coke, 3 gallons of Strawberitas, too many menthol cigarettes, and the second serious head injury in one week. I needed to throw up. I climbed out of bed as quietly as my inebriated body would allow, trying not to wake Lawree who was in the bed next to me. The toilet was lit by a red bulb that accentuated seeping wet grime spots on the walls and ceiling. The floor was filthy with other people’s scum. My knees crunched as I knelt in front toilet bowl. The vomit was so red from the light and Strawberitas that I first thought it was blood, but blood doesn’t contain pieces of the burger you ate 4 hours prior.
(Unnecessary Narrative Digression: I brought this burger with Cam from a place called “The Heart Attack Grill” and the experience deserves a few notes: you have to sign a form before you enter that waives your right to sue them. The waitresses are dressed in what a uber-horny sexually-pent-up porn-obsessed fourteen-year-old male might imagine nurses wear, and they taunt you into ordering much more than you can eat [although as shrewd operators, Cam and I did not fall for this]. The waitress/nurse’s reasons for trying to tempt customers becomes apparent when someone doesn’t finish their meal and a ritual ensues. The man is brought to a stage at the centre of the restaurant where he is bent over a leather and metal contraption, his hands cuffed to the floor and his ass up in the air. The waitress/nurse who was waiting on his table then steps up to the platform with a red paddle and spanks his ass five times, while the rest of the diners count down the smacks. One particularly brazen customer, upon being spanked, started tauntingly rolling his eyes shouting, “is that all you got?” His waitress/nurse/dominatrix was so enraged by this haughty arrogance that she wound the paddle up behind her head and swung a brutally hard spank on this guy’s ass. No word of a lie the paddle broke in two, one end flying across the room to land on some other table with a smash. The crowd applauded.)
Looking shamefaced at the discharge, I immediately wanted to dispose of the evidence. I stood up and tried to flush but I didn’t hear a sound. I reopened the toilet lid, saw my vomit and gagged hard. I grabbed the lever on the side of the cistern that controlled the flush and tried pulling, pushing, lifting, cranking, slamming, slapping, but nothing could engage the action which would dispose of my vomit. I decided that a broken toilet in Las Vegas was no match for a bit of Kiwi ingenuity and I lifted up the ceramic lid of the cistern. Smash.

Fuck.
I thought I had balanced the heavy lid on the edge of the toilet, but it had slipped off, shattered on the floor, white shards cascaded across tiles to the dripping shower cubicle.
From the bedroom I hear Lawree shout, “Hey man, you all good in there?”

“Yep, all good!”

“You sure? What was that smash.”

“Uh, I think I broke the toilet.”

“Stop stressing man, we can fix it in the morning.”
We didn’t fix it in the morning.

After we hear the rules, Kevin sneaks off to cut the lights and lock the front doors, so that no unwanted souls can get in (or out). Kathy then runs the group through all the ways that ghosts can make contact: noise, smell, touch, or sight.
As Kathy is speaking a lady in the group shouts out, “ORBS!” Kathy says that orbs are not usually related to paranormal activity. The woman is unrelenting in her belief in floating orbs and this leads to a long argument between her and Kathy as to what classifies as a “proper investigation”. The argument ends on an awkward note, with neither side relenting their position on orbs.
Kathy moves on with her advice on how to interview ghosts; pause between questions, let your energy go out of your body to meet them, and ask the ghosts if they want to be photographed before you take any photos. Some guy in the back wants to know what ghosts like to talk about, but this is shrugged off as too obvious to warrant explanation.
Kathy ends her advice on the tip to be as specific as possible, citing a moment when she was cruelly pranked by a ghost she asked to touch her, who then gave her a hard whack on the back of the head. She says it is of the utmost importance to ask the ghosts to be “touched appropriately”.
Kevin gets back from darkening the halls and sealing the exits, and helps Kathy to run through the technological equipment we will be utilising on the investigation. The equipment is spread out on a table, and consists of a vast array of gadgets in varying colours and sizes. As Kathy runs through the function of each piece, Kevin picks it up to give us a demonstration.

In addition to these electronic gadgets, Kevin has set up, at varying points around the hospital, a number of hanging bells and tennis balls to detect ghosts in the old-fashioned way. Some people have come prepared with a phone app called Ghost Radar, which can apparently translate ghost-speak (read: silence) into English. I curse my ineptitude for not having the app, but resolve to make up for it with a combination of the three other devices and plain old human vigilance.

We call on God/Allah/Yahweh/Jehovah/Krishna to grant us a bubble of white light as protection from evil beings, and are finally off. The tour begins with Kathy showing us around the hospital as a group. Seconds into it and a ghost is already touching the back of Kathy’s neck. Whether this touching was appropriate or inappropriate is unknown to your humble correspondent.
Our first stop is the corridor, a creepy old thing lined with windows looking out onto the storm-shaken trees. Kathy says to keep an eye out in this area for such paranormal attractions as children screaming, nurses shuffling, the ghost of the creepy old caretaker who growls in your ear, and the infamous Sister Slippers (an aggressive night matron who apparently wanders the halls at night with hot water bottles attached to her feet. The people who named the ghost really missed a trick when they didn’t call her Sister Squelcher).
The next stop is the caretaker’s quarters. The story is that the caretaker was constantly tormented by the ghosts, who made him feel that the floor was rolling like the sea until he eventually hung himself. Kathy warns that this area has been known to make people feel dizzy or unsettled. As soon as she says this, several of the investigators immediately react, swaying and stumbling, holding onto the walls for balance, groaning in discomfort. Their reaction makes me check in with a strange feeling I have in my gut, but after a while I put it down to the fact that I haven’t had dinner yet.
The next stop is The Ward, a huge room where next to nothing can be seen in the pervading darkness.

We stand in the centre of the black abyss while Kathy spooks us with stories of children singing, and angry ghosts throwing towels about the room. Suddenly, the lights come on and everyone looks around at the large well painted, well-lit, and very unscary room around them. The culprit was Kevin, who gets growled at by Kathy as he hurriedly tries to turn the lights off again.
Next is what Kathy calls The Isolation Corridor. This is apparently the most haunted area of the entire building, with upwards of three ghosts at once having been sighted there at once. Kathy’s plan is for each of us at one point in the night to walk down the corridor alone, but she warns us that if she says run, “it means RUN!”
The last stop is the Sun Room, a little conservatory that is apparently very active and offers a vantage point through which several sightings of Sister Slippers have been made.
I ask Kathy if we would be going into the cordoned off Nurses Quarters, a spot that had come up many times in my research as being a very haunted location.
Kathy was very unchill when I brought this up and cited that the previous occupants of the building were satanic devil worshippers who had performed various demonic rituals as the reason why we would not be going into that building. This sounds like a much better location to look for ghosts than the offices of the SPCA at night, but I keep this to myself.
Before everyone goes their separate ways, there is a scramble at the equipment table. I had picked up an EMF reader and was about to put it in my pocket, when a lady with the facial expression of a pouty child suddenly snatches it straight from my hands and storms off. I shrug my shoulders and pick up another one, which was readily available on the table.
Cam and I move off to the break room, pool our coinage to get some snacks from the vending machine, and make use of the SPCA’s huge tin of instant coffee. While we tank up on junk food and caffeine, Kevin hangs about nearby watching us eagle-eyed, either suspicious or hungry. After a minute or so of eyeballing, Kevin explains that he is on security detail tonight, and vehemently insists that he is not scared of ghosts.
We finish our snacks and move to the Sun Room, which was completely empty due to every other amateur paranormal investigator heading straight for the Isolation Corridor. We set up the EVP, EMP, and temperature readers and begin trying to attract a ghost with our interviewing skills.
Cam speaks in a low voice, “If there is a presence here please make yourself known.”

We wait. Nothing.
I give it a try, “If there is a… uhh… like a ghost or… like a- an- anybody here- like to speak to us or-something, fuck I don’t know.” Cam shakes his head at me. My skills in interviewing living human beings are of no use here. I decide to leave all future ghostly communications to my acquaintance.

After about ten minutes we get a spook. Unfortunately the paranormal had nothing to do with it. Another pair of paranormal investigators have bumbled in and started flashing their lights in our eyes.
We decide to try another area. We go into the bathroom, which at the outset is a lot spookier because it has the original hospital tiling and grout work. This is the place that the caretaker is meant to follow you into, growling in your ear, tickling and slapping you. I walk slowly to the outer wall holding my EMF reader, while Cam holds the EVP kit. Suddenly, near the mirrors and the wash basin, both devices go off at the same time. I start to freak out, as this could be the caretaker washing his hands after taking a ghost dump. Remembering that Kathy had said that ghosts could communicate through smells I sniff all the stalls, but find that the toilet smells are unfortunately all too human. The gadgets are still beeping, and I am still freaking out. Cam, the voice of reason, figures out that there is a fuse box in the wall that could explain setting off both machines. This quells my fear and allows me to leave the bathroom at a calm pace that is definitely not a run.
Kathy brings the group back together for a meeting about what everyone has seen so far. Reading the room, the spook levels seems pretty low. A few people claim to have heard screams or seen shadows, but the only guy truly convinced he saw something is the dude who was eating from the bag of McDonalds. He finishes his claim by saying he has been seeing crazy shit since he was a kid, so who knows who to trust. The pouty faced lady who snatched my EMF reader is even more pouty than before, because the gadget she snatched from me turned out to have dead batteries. As soon as I notice this, I make a big thing of walking around the room clicking the button on the side of the EMF reader that produced a loud beep and nodding to myself, showing everyone that my device is in perfect working order.

As the second meeting adjourns, Kathy tells me that it is my turn to walk down the Isolation Corridor. Although it has an impressive name, the Isolation Corridor is just a long dark corridor. It isn’t even that dark; there’s a glow from the snoozing computers in the offices on the left of the hall, as well as light from the streetlamps at the other side.
I would be lying if I said that when I walked down it alone, I didn’t see a dark shape move out the window out of the corner of my eye. I would also be lying if I didn’t mention that it was now 1 am, I hadn’t eaten since 11am, and I was bored to a point where I wouldn’t put it past my brain to make something up for a brief moment of entertainment. I tell Kathy what I had seen. She looks thoughtful, “That would make sense, because the spot you saw the shadows move was where they took the bodies to be cremated.”

Hmm.
After several other people yielded rather questionable experiences in the Isolation Corridor, Kathy brings us back to the Sun Room to show us another way to contact the spirit world: Table Tipping. She moves a table to the centre of the room and along with three other women. They sit down séance style with her eyes closed and palms flat on the tabletop.
Kathy speaks. “I call on any spirit in this room. If you are there, show us your presence by moving this table.” There is a brief moment of silence before one of the other ladies decides that this is a good photo opportunity, her camera flash goes off right in Kathy’s face.
Kathy opens her eyes. “Could you please not shine those lights in my eyes!”

“Oops sorry,” replies the guilty woman. Kathy tries again to contact a spirit. “Please anybody, could you please help us move this table.”
Silence.
“We are only a bunch of weak old women and we can’t move this table by ourselves, could you please help us?”
The silence in the room is again disrupted by the same woman, who has stomped across creaking floorboards to try and get a better angle for her now flashless camera.
Kathy opens her eyes. “Could you please keep quiet!”
“…sorry.”
A woman at the table puts on an affected damsel in distress voice, trying to use her womanly wiles to bait a ghost into moving the table. “Oooooh spirits, it is so so hard for us poor poor ladies to move this table by ourselves. We would be ever so grateful if you helped us to move it.”
There is a longer silence before the camera lady, who has given up on getting a picture, leans against the wall, inadvertently causing a loud creak.
Kathy, who has been made sensitive by the previous two interruptions, opens her eyes and emits a loud, “SHHHH!”
It is at this point that fatigue and hunger tell me that this is a good cue to leave. I say a final goodbye and thank you to Kathy, and leave the rest of the group to their attempts of convincing a ghost to aid them in bettering the feng shui of the Fever Hospital.

Epilogue

As I am about to jump in the car I realise that I have accidentally pocketed the EMF reader. As much as I want a device whose only purpose is to beep abrasively, I thought I better return it. I go around to the front door and realise that Kevin had locked it earlier in the night. Not about to give up so easily, I start pounding on the door as loud as I can, trying to get the attention of people on the other side of the hospital. I get no response, so I bang louder and louder, shaking the heavy wooden door in its frame. After five or so minutes of banging I hear muttering on the other side of the door. To show them that there is someone outside I flash my light through the small window at the side of the door. Someone on inside shouts, “ORBS!”
“Nope it’s just me, can you open the door I’m getting wet out here.” The door swings open to reveal a crowd of paranormal investigators frozen stiff with fear.
Their eyes are wide, and their faces drained of all colour. Some have broken out in a sweat, and others are shivering. My knocking on the door had brought the possibility of a real haunting to these guys, and it scared the shit out of them.
The biggest spook of the night turned out to be me.

This internet phenomenon has taken a strangle-hold upon the sincere jugular of western humanity, and we currently lie, bug eyed and choking out, under its dank weight.
By and large, the currency in which memes exchange with is irony. Their humour rises from a presumed context, the expectation of which is then slightly altered to a humorous effect. This alteration is a widely varying spectrum from the mundane surprise of a “doggo”, to the mind boggling visual intensity of a danked out, “who up click like?”. The humour occurs when the viewer is a part of a group that understands the context of the joke, and so can recognize the equation; context + alteration = ironic humour. This ironic platform allows memes to present information in a way that is quite troubling.

For an example let me turn to the wildly popular depression meme. Like a lot of memes this comes in many varieties, but all largely revolving around drawing humour from the fact that many people can relate to symptoms of depression. Now, I have heard arguments from some edgy hip liberal academics who say that these memes are facilitating discussion about mental illness and should be encouraged. I would argue that what is more important than the quantity of the discussion, is the way in which the topic is handled. By using irony and sarcasm to approach issues of mental illness, the topic is approached with humour and an ironic distance. Those who participate in these discussions, though they may feel that they are engaging in a healthy, relatable discourse, may really be furthering themselves from their feelings, and genuinely helpful discussions.
But Daniel, isn’t it better to laugh at something, then to allow it to crush you with the weight of its seriousness? Well, yes and no. A joke makes people laugh. An ironic joke makes light of its own context, so that you are not laughing at a humorous situation within the context, but at the context itself. This is an important distinction especially w/r/t the depression meme, as the joke is squarely aimed at the mental illness and its symptoms. This possibly allows those who suffer from depression a brief reprieve, as they recognise and relate to the context, but a secondary element is that it causes one to treat the serious element if their mental health as a joke, and discussion of it to be that of laughter, or none at all. Depression needs to be talked about, and humour probably has some part to play in the discussion, but to turn the issue into an ironic joke separates the discussion from any help it may play in aiding the sufferer.
This use of irony to approach heavy topics is prevalent as fuck in meme culture.
9/11, mass shootings, ISIS, institutionalised racism, sexual abuse, police brutality, are all represented in ironic memes. However, ironic humour that promotes inaction towards an issue is not simply confined to memes. (Is John Oliver helping or hindering the lives of Mexican families living in the US when he makes his white liberal crowds laugh at Trump?) Memes, as they are on the forefront of the way modern youth communicate with the world, have a vast influence on the way that people think, act, and feel.

And this scares the shit outta me.
The solution to this is pretty simple I reckon. If you wanna talk about something, then just fucking talk about it. Don’t masquerade behind a costume of irony. Be sincere with your feelings and yourself. If your friend is joking about something like depression, ask them about it with a straight face.

Irony can only get you so far. Sincerity and openness are much more powerful weapons for dealing with this vapid plane of guilt and turmoil we call a life.
So use it wisely.

Two hours and 10 km away from the Moa Point Wastewater Treatment Plant and I keep getting whiffs of that smell. I’ve washed my hands twice, given my clothes a thorough sniffing, checked my notebook and backpack for rogue splatterings, and have come up with nothing. There is no reason for me to be smelling of anything other than myself. But every so often I will turn my head and a whiff will take me back. Back to standing in the centre of a room surrounded by the seething slosh-piles of Wellington’s bodily refuse. I have an intense headache and my stomach is hurting. At the time of my visit my nose was pretty blocked in one nostril and well on its way in the other. But since the student media had put their trust in me as correspondent, I leaned wide over the protective banister, sniffing loud breathy inhalations to be able to faithfully report the stench. I leant over stool and slime, the gas hitting a primo sour tartness at the back of my throat.

In hindsight this may not have been the wisest move.

The MPWTP crouches sinisterly atop a hill overlooking both Lyall Bay and the Airport. The industrial structures look like a nuclear/chemical weapons plant one would expect to see in an evil villain’s lair. The only villain to be found in this wasteworks is the strange stench which hangs like a grim spectre over the plant.

I am greeted by the friendly staff who allow me to sit in the conference room while I wait for the Salient photographer and eat a peanut butter and feijoa jam sandwich (I can understand how certain readers may be revolted by this combination but I was hurried for time in the morning and didn’t have a lot of spreads to choose from. I also think the reader’s understanding of the contents of my stomach, as I spent 2 hours looking at what was previously in other people’s stomachs, is an integral element of the narrative). As I waited for my guide, who another employee had referred to as “Frank the Tank”, I read the various infographics that lined the walls, trying to get a grip on the wastewater treatment process.

Disclaimer: The following paragraph is the result of my reading of the above-mentioned infographics, Frank (the Tank)’s explanation, and a perusal through the M.P.W.T.P. employee handout courtesy of VeoliaTM. Having read all this information, I still am very confused as to how the process truly works, so please take my amateur explanation with a generous pinch of salt.

Raw sewage enters the plant through the Inlet Pumping station at a rate of about 750 litres per second. Sewage is described by the Wellington City Council website as “waste from all sinks, toilets, laundries, kitchens and bathrooms”, but is probably more aptly put as everyone in Wellington’s shit, piss, vomit, cum, and greywater all mixed into one juicy concoction. The sewage is first filtered through a series of step screens where the grit (or to use Frank’s much more emotive term, “ragging”), which consists of the largest inorganic matter, is removed from the slosh. The sewage is then moved into the primary settlement tank. This is an Olympic sized swimming pool of bodily waste where for some reason the sludge, (aka “non-liquid effluent”, defined into two types; 1. Primary (scum, fat) and 2. Biomass  (faecal matter, vomit, bodily discharge)) must be separated into floatables and sinkables. The sludge is then pumped 9 km away to a de-watering station in Carey’s Gully, where the liquid is pumped back to Moa Point and the sludge is buried god knows where. The sewage is now effluent (non-solid wastewater) and is pumped to biological treatment tanks where micro-organisms Frank calls “tulips” remove the contaminants left in the solution. These tulips are already present in your shit when it is squeezed out of your ass, and are merely encouraged by the pumping of oxygen into the waste to do their god-given duty of getting the nasty stuff out. If I have this right, your shit pretty much cleans itself (shame to all those people wasting their time wiping their ass).

From there the effluent is pumped through clarifiers, which are tanks where solids (or “activated sludge” – what a name) settle out from the final effluent. The last stage is that the effluent is blasted by UV light, which kills the microorganisms, before being jettisoned out into the ocean, 1.8 km into Cook’s Strait. The MPWTP handout claims that the discharged effluent meets the standards for swimming beaches, which says more about the standards than anything else. The whole process is largely automated and takes about 2 hours.

Back in the conference room, I did not even have the tentative grasp on the process that I have now and sat blank-eyed and confused staring at a poster of a gigantic wave (possibly of treated sewage) with the caption, “clean effluent, clean ocean, clean environment”. Because I was so lost I was forced to put complete and total trust in my tour guide, Frank the Tank. (Disclaimer: Frank never referred to himself as Frank the Tank, I heard it from another employee and thought it was too good not to put in the article. I hope to god that Frank doesn’t mind the name because I would be very upset if I was inadvertently hurting his feelings by using it, on second thought maybe I will hereby just call him Frank.)

Frank is somebody who you can’t help but have the utmost respect for. He is an expert in his field and has an impressive breadth of knowledge about everything to do with the plant. He has a great sense of humour and was an incredible tour guide. I could gush about the man for hours.
Frank suited me and Benji (the Salient photographer) up in a hi-vis vest, powder-free disposable gloves, and wrap-around splatter-protection shades. With a final instruction not to touch your face inside the plant, we were off.

The tour started at the Lab, where currently absent scientists did mysterious tests on things. The most notable part of the room was not science related at all. It was a series of photos on the back wall of days back in the 90s before there was a pipeline taking the sludge to landfill and the job had to be done by truck. One day an absent-minded truck driver had forgotten to properly secure his load and had driven off, causing a literal truckload of semi-dehydrated shit to fall on the driveway. The photos were quite detailed, and the shit reminded me a lot of the dinosaur poo that Jeff Goldblum sticks his hand into in Jurassic Park 2. From the Lab we enter through caution marked doors, up some stairs, through a death-star-esque control room, and into the plant proper. The first room is a gigantic steel warehouse that smells like shit. Frank takes me over to a large steel box and lifts open a panel and we take a look at the step screens.

Have you ever seen an escalator? Okay, cool, same. Now imagine that same escalator covered in everything that you have ever flushed down a toilet. Alright, so we are looking at quite a lot of shit and piss, a bit of vomit, some snotty tissues, and the odd used condom. Now, times that by 100,000, cuz that’s the amount of people’s waste that the MPWTP caters for at any given second of the day. Let me tell you the image is striking. Stools big and small, healthy and doctor’s appointment inducing, line the screens, and they are janked up the conveyor belt in sharp “steps”. The stools and other bio-waste get carted off to the primary settlement tanks, while the non-biological stuff (like trash, toilet paper, semen-filled latex, lolly pop sticks), called “ragging”, is separated, cleaned, and sent dumpward. The main take from a solid minute of my face within an arm’s reach of this ragging is that it’s a no-brainer that corn is in season. The next room we head into is the primary settlement tanks. Frank prefaces our entrance with a warning that the smell there is as bad as it gets in the plant.

If they weren’t filled with shit, the tanks would be awe inspiring. The size of an Olympic pool and divided into lanes. We walk out onto a steel walkway and out over the open tank to get a better view of the sewage. You would be hard pressed to find a worse spot to be in when an earthquake happened. Although the tank is only 1m deep, you can’t see the bottom through the gloopy liquid that sloshes in the lanes. It is here that biomass sludge (shit) is divided into floatables and sinkables. From our point of view I could only observe the floatables. There were many stools floating languidly in the filth, remarkably held together through the rigmarole of the step screens. There was a thick yellowy white layer of unknown substance coating the surface of half of one channel — it could either be semen, fat, pus, or more likely an unholy combination of all. I asked Frank what the craziest thing he had found in the tanks was, and he told me that one time he found 10 bucks. And apparently that same Kate Sheppard currently hangs in the break room for anyone brave (or desperate) enough to put the shit stained tenner back into circulation.

It would be disrespectful to the smell to use a single catch-all word such as “pungent” as a description. The smell was such a myriad of differing scents and stenches in constant kaleidoscope, creating an olfactory sensory onslaught. The smell of one end of the platform was a mix of syrupy sweet-smelling diarrhoea, while the other of thick alcoholic booze poos. Along the intervening spectrum I smelt off-milk, undercooked sausages, monster energy drinks, Cheezels, imitation crab meat, cool ranch doritos, McD’s Filet’o’fish, salsa, garlic yogurt, flat Fanta, and eggs, lots of eggs. I left the room light-headed and dazed. I told Frank how I was feeling and he laughed, saying that we were here at the quietest time of day and that we should smell it at peak flow (morning, which makes a lot of sense in coffee-obsessed Wellington).

As we are walking from industrial cesspit to industrial cesspit, Frank pointed out that in every room we were in, large green pipes lined the walls. These pipes varied in size but were seen snaking along in every room that smelt bad. Frank said that the pipes are called scrubbers, and their role is to remove odour from the plant. One of the council appointed concessions that the MPWTP must abide by is that no discernible odour is to be smelt at the plant boundary. Not even the whiff of a stray fart is allowed. How the scrubbers achieve this is rather interesting. First, all the stank air is collected by the green pipes in every room and moved to the odour treatment area. This is the deepest point of the plant, some 20m below ground level. There the stank air is passed through three sets of chemical showers. Firstly, sulphuric acid is used to remove amine and ammonia-based compounds (the fishy smells). Secondly, sodium hypochlorite is used to remove acid-based gases such as hydrogen sulphide (rotten egg, fart smells). Lastly, the sodium hydroxide removes the chlorine smell, before the treated air is discharged from a tall stack to be dispersed by the Wellington wind straight into your lungs.

The final stop of the effluent’s journey before it is launched out to sea is the Ultra Violet Disinfection chamber. This room is small in comparison to the cavernous chambers seen in other parts of the plant, and it houses a large sci-fi like contraption that hums aggressively. Underneath the hum is that sound of a large waterfall. This sound gets a visual counterpart when Frank removes a steel panel from the platform we stand on and we both peer down into the gaping maw of thundering whirlpool. This is the treated effluent, all 750 litres per second of it, cascading toward the pipe that will take it to sea. The water is glowing green from the UV light being blasted at it.

I asked Frank, “Why is the water green?” Frank said, “It’s cuz a couple years back when they were filming the Green Lantern at Weta Workshops the cast and crew had a day off so they came here to the plant to have a look around, and to impress them when they came, and to commemorate the occasion, we changed the water to green”.
“Really?”
Frank just laughed at me, and I knew I had been duped by a master trickster.
Frank then attaches a small plastic container to the end of a rod, dunks it into the water and pulls it out. It is clear/ish. About as clear as a public pool water, water that you know has probably been pissed in but are okay with jumping in because at least it smells like chlorine instead of urine.

I ask Frank if you could drink that water. Frank says, “I could, but you couldn’t”.
“How’s that?”
Frank thinks for a second before responding with, “I’m immune to the stuff, you get sick once in this place and then you are good”.
Somewhere in this statement is the key to all that is reportable in the MPWTP. We have Frank, an image of human decency, braving things that few people would dare to for his daily work. He, and people like him carry the weight of our whole society on their shoulders. So often people just flush the toilet without sparing a thought for the tireless workforce that make the safe disposal of waste possible. So, next time you are hunched sourly over the porcelain throne, spare a thought for Frank and the team at the MPWTP. Those silent heroes working at the centre of societal filth, making sure no one has to see your disgusting stomach bacteria but you and the depths of Cook’s Strait.

There is nothing funny on their minds.

Contrary to this, I sit across from a man with nothing but funny on his mind. Joel Wood is as close to a comedy mogul as it is possible to get in Wellington. He runs Dank Comedy, a comedic upstart taking the scene by storm. Last year saw them win best show at the Fringe festival, and they have a lot planned for this week to attempt to hold that title.

Dank was started by Joel and comedian Jundas Capone in 2015 as a response to the needs of youth audiences, and presented itself as a more alternative brand of stand up. Joel had moved to Wellington from Invercargill for the DIY music scene. But by the time he arrived the cooler venues had shut down and most of the scene with it. In response he turned to comedy — “I definitely see comedy filling a void in youth expression. Dank is definitely modelled on this DIY attitude of the music scene.”

Steady success has seen them grow, as Joel says: “At the start this was just a group of mates putting on a comedy show, which it still is just the shows are much bigger. We can now do things like fly people down from Auckland, and the spots are much more sought after.” Even though things are getting bigger for Dank, the focus is still very much on building the profiles of young comics: “We are trying to use Dank to launch careers. All our bookings are strategic, all our shows have the focus of getting the comedian’s name out.”

I am about to spend a week immersing myself in the strange and hopefully funny world of the Wellington comedy scene.

NIGHT 1: Raw Meat Monday

It’s 8:25 pm and I’m already faded as fuck because I spent way too much time with my cat Cheeseburger today and have started to take on her cat mentality. I am having cat hallucinations. Out of the corner of my eye I see a man licking his arm, and in front of me a woman coughs up a hairball into her glass. I make a mental note to kill my cat before they completely take over my mind. Pop punk is blasting out of the house speakers as the Fringe bar team bring half-hearted punters to the front rows. I am crouched in a corner, head hung low curled over the single beer that the Salient feature writers budget affords me. I hope it will last the night.
The room is fairly full, considering this is a night for fresh and seasoned comics to try out new material, and can often go awry.
The lights go down and the MC walks out. He tries his hand at warming up the crowd, but he is either drunk or just naturally disinterested. The crowd gives him a cold response, which causes him to give up on warming the room and he flees off stage, throwing the comedians headfirst into the drink.
The thing about Raw Meat Mondays is that what you are watching is not so much comedy as performed self-mutilation. The comics come out and are not giving you their material honed to guarantee laughs. No, they are trying out the dreaded “New Jokes”, ideas half-concocted and half-baked. Some land, but most fall flat on their faces.
It is incredibly commendable to watch a human being elect to walk on stage and be burnt alive by a group of their peers. These comedians are ripping their guts out trying to make the audience laugh. Although most fail, they fail graciously, bombing so hard it is not something at all to pity, but to marvel at in awe and respect.
In my opinion the jokes that seemed most susceptible to bombing were the edgy ones: school shootings, child castration, graphic sexual content, brutal self-deprecation. The audience is much more likely to withhold their laughter if the content is more shocking than funny. The jokes that worked were the simple observations that everyone could relate to. My favourite joke of the evening came from comedian Jundas Capone who said through a pronounced nervous jitter, “So, uh, first-years are back in town now…,” a pause before he erupts with, “FUCK!”
The night was to witness comedy, raw, unaltered, and unpractised.

NIGHT 2: Jerome Chandrahasen

Jerome and I sit in the back corner of Fringe bar, facing away from the pokies. Jerome has a friendly face half covered by a thick salt and pepper beard and talks excitedly with passion about comedy in Wellington. Jerome is a comedian and the president of the Wellington based Humourous Arts Trust, a charity organisation set up in 2010 to be able to more professionally foster the Wellington Comedy scene. It is the Humourous Arts Trust that set up the Raw Meat show last night, but this is just one of the many things that they do. In giving me the elevator pitch of the group Jerome says their aims are three-fold: 1. Create financial capital 2. Create social capital 3. Create creative capital.
He says that basically, he just wants to “make fun stuff”. Jerome sees the “success of wellington comedy is seen in the relationships between comedians”. Over the years there has been a marked shift in the direction of Wellington comedy. Previous eras have seen a far larger student base for comedy with now-household names of Flight of the Conchords, Taika Waititi, Dai Henwood, and Ben Hurley all cutting their comedic teeth while students in Wellington.
Since those days, the increase of money that comics can get has seen a wider range of people get on the mic: “more money has meant more diversity, people who are working full time now have the incentive to drive out from the Hutt to perform a set.”
Jerome finishes his drink and imparts a final wisdom to me, summing up a lot about what he has learnt from many hard yards working in the comedy scene.
“Laughter is hard, that’s why you pay for it.”

NIGHT 3: Dank Chilli Night

The heat is in the air Wednesday night at Fringe bar. Comedians and punters alike pace nervously around the bar, drinking as much liquid as they can because however hot it feels at present, it is only going to get hotter. The name of the game is chillies, and the aims of the game are sadism and masochism. The sadism of a crowd of punters who payed to watch people destroy their mouths for a joke, and masochism for the comedians willing to do it. Earlier in the week Joel told me that he enticed punters into attending the show with the line: “It’s gonna get fucked.”
In my opinion the show starts off pretty fucked with the wild-eyed crazy MC David Correos leaping onto the stage with an unhinged energy that leaves one laughing in fear of what this man might do. David plays his cards with an open hand and a naked body, immediately stripping down to his jockeys. The crowd laughs but this is not enough for Correos he grabs the mic and starts screaming, “Who wants me to take them off!? Who wants to see me take them off!?”—  confused cheering from the audience — “Alright I’m gonna do it!” and in one fell swoop he rips off his jockeys to reveal a smaller pair of colourful women’s underwear.
When the comedians came on stage I quickly realised that the chilli element of the show was not just a gag or a bit, but something much more real. The comics were absolutely destroying themselves on chilli. It was not just a single pepper they were eating either, they were grabbing handfuls of the stuff chewing, crunching, and then washing the hot mess down their throats with shots of hot sauce. Red spice and saliva rolled down chins and tears flowed freely from the pain. Some jokes were told in the midst of all of this, although more vomiting than punchlines were seen. It was like watching JACKASS: Live on Stage. The final comic was a young man named Joel Hansby. It was his job to eat a single California Reaper, the hottest chilli in the world. Joel’s reaction to the chilli was not only to sweat and cry like the others. He also lost his goddamned mind. He was as great a comic as you can be when your brain is being fried by the heat of a pepper that is 600x hotter than a Subway Jalapeno. After the show I sought him out to give him a hug as he sweated through his shirt, pupils dilated to differing degrees of cognition, hallowed eyes of someone 7 hours deep on a 6 hour trip. I told him I liked the show and he said, “Thanks, but I need to lie down for like 5 hours”.

NIGHT 4: Dank Magic Night

As I sit down near the back of the crowd I notice that they have gotten the sparkly curtain out for this one. Which makes sense, because tonight’s show is going to be a magical event.
To be perfectly honest there was not a lot of comedy going on, but the magic more than made up for things. It is always a wholesome experience to watch true to life magic nerds wow an audience with their hard-learned tricks. After the show Joel was as excited as a kid, telling everyone within earshot outside, “How awesome was that?”

Night 5: Dank 29

A man walks into a bar for the fifth time in a week. This sounds like the start of a joke, but it is simply what my life has become. Comedy has sapped all sense of reality out of my daily toil, and now I am stuck in an existential loop of punchline after punchline, meaning nothing but laughter in the crowd around me. I can’t wait to get inside.
Tonight’s show has sold out. Not a small achievement with the amount of other Fringe shows going on.
Janaye Henry walks out as MC, she wears a fluffy yellow jacket which looks like it could be the fur skinned off some minor character in Monsters Inc. She warms the crowd up brutally, a trial by fire, immediately asking for names and questions and job description from punters. There will be no hiding under darkness tonight.
The show kicks off with a great set from Gabby Anderson who pulls from her Catholic past to great comedic effect, without relying on the tired crutch of church-bashing. Another great comic was Jundas Capone. He jittered on stage with his strange energy and a nervous smile. My favourite joke of the night goes to him: He announces, “I am now going to do some impressions,” a breath, “this is an impression of my Dad,” in a deep moronic tone, “blah blah blah blah blah”. This joke knocked me for six. The headline act was the incredible Li Alimoana. His energy was probably my favourite moment of the whole week. He has such a positivity about him, and his jokes made you feel good. He swears a bit, but you get the feeling that he wouldn’t have to cuss at all to make you laugh, a rare thing in this era of “edgy” comedy. He uses his multi-cultural family as fodder for his comedy, but in a positive way that makes you feel good about living in a community where such cultural mixing can happen, and be laughed at, with relative ease.

The show was a cracker way to finish off what had been a Dank week. Outside the venue I had a yarn with a couple of first year kids who had left the haven of Te Puni to brave downtown for the sake of a few laughs. I asked them what they thought of the show.
“Oh it was all good ai! Comedy is fucking sick!”
Yeah, I guess it is.

It was late November and cold as hell when I stumbled into the Zhiguli Beer Hall.

I was in Moscow, about to take the trans-Mongolian rail line to Beijing, and after finding someone in my hostel who could speak English, had decided to go out for a beer. My companion was a potbellied Sri Lankan man in his late 30s called Indika, who was in Russia to find love, and spent every waking moment on his phone Facetiming anyone who would answer his calls. How he planned to find love without speaking a word of Russian, I forgot to ask. The beer hall itself was an old stolovaya (cafeteria), clad in long communal benches and grim interior décor that harkened back to the years of the Siberian gulag.  Most of the patrons’ attention was focused on TV screens showing a local soccer match, but no one was much interested in the outcome; it was just better than looking at the walls.

After we got a couple of steins the size of my head, Indika got up to bother the barman for the wifi password so he could continue Facetiming. I turned and noticed at the end of our long table, the cragged grimacing face of some sinewy old Russian, glaring at me with all the malice he could summon. He was flanked on both sides by compatriots mirroring his distasteful look: one was a skinny guy with a mean face,  the other a titanic beast of a man whose jowls wobbled with an anger barely contained. Indika came back to the table, loudly showing his cousin back in Sri Lanka the bar he was in and drawing much attention to us in the process. I tried to get him to calm down and talk about the soccer that was on TV, but he wasn’t interested. Instead he looked straight down at the Russians glaring at us from the end of the table, pointed at them, and said to me, “Hey Danny, those guys are looking at us!” Through gritted teeth I said, “I know, you fool, stop pointing at them”.

It was too late; the sharks had smelt blood.

The cragged-faced man got up from his seat and drunkenly sauntered over to us. I desperately tried to finish my beer but these steins were huge. The Russian slammed his hands down onto the table with a force that rattled every bottle in the bar,  screaming spittle-inflected into my face, “SPEAK RUSSIAN!”

At this signal his cronies slid down the table with their beers and sidled up to us, too close for comfort. The Russians now surrounded us from all sides. The skinny man leaned his mean face close to mine and started talking quietly in Russian. I threw up my hands in confusion, and he repeated his words, this time with a sinister force behind them.

Indika, oblivious to the danger, took countless selfies.

Now, in preparation for the trip, I had spent some time learning a few key phrases, and it was this stilted phrase-book Russian that I threw out at random to try and remedy the situation. But the man who had screamed in our faces was uncharmed by my flailing pidgin Russian. He leaned in and spits out, in English, “Where – are – you – from?”

“Новая Зеландия” (New Zealand).

The man’s face froze and he said, “Novay Zealandia… I LOVE NOVAY ZEALANDIA!” His initial hostility was buried beneath a sea of alcohol and black bread, as I was bombarded with questions about every Russian’s favourite country.

The exchange would have continued to be a pleasant one, if the mammoth sized jowl-wobbling Russian, whose name turned out to be Valeriy, hadn’t gotten it into his head that he had to contest my New Zealand manhood in an arm wrestling match. I knew I was going to lose, but in the interest of respecting foreign customs (and not wanting to anger a behemoth 8 steins deep) I agreed.
A space was cleared on the table and we locked arms.
Valeriy had the cruelty  to not just finish me off straight away. His arm locked in place on the table and he laughed as I squirmed and flailed about, trying to shift the Christmas ham attached to his body down to the table.
Then out of nowhere I felt Valeriy’s arm begin to give, and like a damned fool my heart filled with glee at my imminent success. But it was all a ruse. The conniving bastard had fooled me good, and finished me off by slamming my hand down onto the table, hard. This would have been bad enough, but Valeriy found the whole affair so hilarious that he stood up, called the whole of the Zhiguli Beer Hall’s attention to my plight, and when they turned around and looked at us he grabbed my hand and we recommenced the whole brutal charade.
This tickled the onlookers mightily. Their laughter filled my ears as Valeriy, after much clowning, easily bested me. I looked to Indika for help, but he was Facetiming a distant uncle and paid no heed to my plight. Valeriy’s eyes grew cold, and he could see that I was completely in his grasp. The man’s face was a canvas of pleasure, reaped from my pain and humiliation. He did not tire of the sport for hours, by the end of which I was a husk of my former self.

Russian hospitality can do that to a man.

Later that night, lying on the sagging bunk of my cheap Moscow hostel, I sweated in fury and rage at the fat-faced Valeriy, and swore that when I returned to Novay Zealandia I would train to become the best goddamned arm wrestler that he had ever encountered. I would return to the Zhiguli Beer Hall and show that meatheaded Russian and his laughing cronies just what kind of hell is unleashed when you damage the tender masculinity of a New Zealand male.

Interior – Present-day Wellington – Day

It turns out that Arm Wrestling is a lot more complex than I first gave it credit for. I had originally assumed that there was nothing more to it than two arms, bulging, throbbing, vibrating, veins popping out of places they shouldn’t even be, red hot tension moving from the wrist outward along the arm up the neck, colouring both competitors’ faces, and coating them in a film of sweat.
Boiled down to the relatively simple equation of:

[(arm Y<arm Z)+flatsurface]+(force x tension x time) = 1 winner (arm Z)

But I was very wrong. There is a lot more to it than that.

The complexity that is Arm Wrestling is apparent within its tricky history. An attempt to untangle this is seen on the New Zealand Arm Wrestling League’s website. Arm Wrestling is an ancient sport, the first contest to be commemorated with a painting, on an Egyptian tomb (this fact attributed to the Ultimate Arm Wrestling League is so flimsy and unsupported a thesis that even Google turns up nothing to support it). The fantastical origin story has the sport somehow travelling from Ancient Egypt to the pre-Columbus Americas, and from there to the European taverns of the early 19th century. But the first recorded Arm Wrestling competition was held in California, in 1952.
You with me?

Well, at this point, even I wasn’t with me. Thoroughly confused but not about to give up, I decided to broaden my knowledge by watching the 1987 movie Over the Top, starring Sylvester Stallone as amiable long haul truck driver Lincoln Hawk, who attempts to win back the love of his son by arm wrestling various meatheads who get in his way. The film features many ridiculous moments, including but not limited to, Stallone letting his 10-year-old son drive his 18-wheeler big rig, and Stallone talking. As the lights came up, I found myself even more in the dark about Arm Wrestling, and sought the illumination of the Wellington Arm Wrestling Club.

The club is in its early days. A boast of seven members in the Facebook group turns out in reality to be two guys in their lounge, with my addition making three. The two guys in question would not have looked out of place in the Stallone movie I had just watched. They were packing serious heat in the guns department (translation: they had big arms), and wore shirts tight enough for the cotton to strain along the bicep. They introduced themselves as Max and Sarkez, and to their credit hardly blinked at my skinny untoned arms that have never seen a gym in their life. I was led into the training grounds, which was where the Arm Wrestling table stood in the centre of Max’s apartment, but not before taking my shoes off.

The setting of the Arm Wrestling table was in close proximity to the kitchen, where Max’s female partner pottered around making pasta, a clever motivational strategy no doubt designed to raise the testosterone levels of the competing males.

As I was new, I was instructed to watch as Max and Sarkez powdered their hands with chalk and gripped hands over the table, looking into each other’s eyes and rocking back and forth with such vigour that I couldn’t tell if they were wrestling or warming up. As they ran me through the basics, I noticed a violent rhetoric attached to the different moves: curling the opponent’s hand was called ‘breaking the wrist’, and changing the angle of pressure was ‘snapping the fingers’. This was possibly a cover for the sexual tension bound to arise when males sweat together in close proximity. The violent rhetoric did nothing to deter my enthusiasm, as I was intent on gaining the skills to bring low my Russian nemesis, Valeriy.

My enthusiasm for the sport did not make up for the blatant difference in strength. Because my inexperience and relative weakness caused a safety concern for Max and Sarkez, I was mostly delegated to saying “ready, go!” to signal the beginning of a match. I took to my position of glorified human starting gun with pride, but soon noticed an issue causing problems for the wrestlers. I noticed that Max was bursting forth at full strength at “ready”, while Sarkez waited patiently for the “go”. Realising that this gave Max an unfair advantage I asked whether I was meant to be saying “ready, go!”, or “ready… go!”? This threw a spanner of confusion in the works and led to about 5 minutes discussion on the pros and cons of both options. After much ado, no clear decision was reached, and I was free to pace the starting call at my discretion.

The moment finally came for me step up to the table and show them what I could do. I locked arms with Max, whose huge hands covered mine and then some, biceps threatening to burst through his shirt. I realised that I was at a severe strength disadvantage, but sought to make up for this with strong willpower. To spurn on this willpower I summoned an image from my memory of Valeriy, complete with cheeks ruddy with mercilessness, jowls trembling in aggression, and that black-holed smile of joy at my misery. At my recollections I felt at once a fire within me begin to burn. This heat began in my chest and worked itself outward to where it was needed in my arms.
The fire was strength.

The strength to forgive.

Because at that moment I realised that no good could come of this vengeance tale. The anger I harboured towards Valeriy was more a detriment to my soul than to his. I had wasted so much of my time and energy seeking revenge on this Russian I hardly knew, and for what? At that instance I resolved to walk the path of violence no longer. I released my grip on Max’s hand and walked away from the table. He was probably relieved because I would have totally beaten him had I not realised that you can solve more issues with love and forgiveness than with Arm Wrestling.

If you are interested in Arm Wrestling, see NZ Armwrestling on FB for more information.
I probably won’t see you there.