Sometimes I wish I had a job.
I mean: a man’s job. Or a woman’s job.
Someone’s job. It doesn’t matter, as long as they let me have their job.
But only if it requires physical strength and good problem-solving ability.
It also should present a modicum of danger.
I’m thinking I’d like to be an “electrical contractor”.
Look at all those cables and stuff, and that thing people use to climb places.
That’s the accoutrement of a man’s job. Or a woman’s. Doesn’t matter. If you’re an electrician in New Zealand, you’re a sparky.
“Sparky”. Typical. If there is a cutesie way to describe something, Kiwis will use it. You watch.
Here’s an example:
The arvo went pear-shaped when the sparky made his wees on a 10,000 volt power line. But she’ll be right, he had two bikkies for brekkie, and they were yum.
When Kiwis talk like that, I wonder why the other Commonwealth nations don’t slap New Zealand upside the head.
Then I hear Australians talk, and I remember the lingual bar for entry into the British Commonwealth is low, probably somewhere at the bottom of the Kermadec Trench.
Plus, Australians are assholes.
Two things get in the way of me being a sparky.
I have no desire to urinate on live electric wires.
I also have no idea what any of the tools are called, or how to use them.
I’ve lost count how many times an implement ended up puncturing my colon because of my complete lack of tool skills.
I guess I’m just not a man’s man. I don’t know from tools. I hate sports.
Plus, men are assholes. A lot of what men do is just foreign to me.
Of course, regular readers will know me as a ladies man. But the man part is more of an honorarium than anything else.
The most I can say is I’m a man, technically speaking.
Which means I’m going to have to work at being a man.
Especially in light of our new neighbors.
Nobody knows much about them, except they like to have sex a lot. This is public knowledge, I swear.
They leave their door open, and all their windows, and the woman is quite enthusiastic in the vocalization of her pleasure-taking.
Some days, it’s so loud, it sounds like a David Attenborough special on Bonobos, but with a classic porn soundtrack (our neighbors are always playing funk).
Jacquie got the idea to take revenge.
We were the best qualified couple in the area to teach these newcomers how embarrassing it is to hear other people have sex.
The next time we did it, we left all the windows up, and the door open, and we amplified the noises we normally made.
It was a lot of fun, but how many times was I supposed to shout, “ow, not there; ow, not there,” to get the point across?
I wasn’t used to this sort of thing. Usually, I just bite my pillow.
Doesn’t matter because the exercise was lost on the neighbors. If anything, their romps got louder and more public.
First it was the laundry room, then it was by the rubbish bins, once inside their car, twice inside ours, and I even saw them do it in the queue while I was waiting to buy soda water at the shop.
To tell you the truth, I was starting to feel self-conscious. Was I performing my functions adequately as a man? Should I cry less or more during the act?
This was turning into a crisis.
To make things worse, the new guy-neighbor started building furniture because they didn’t have anything for the apartment.
Every time I passed him working those tools, my penis retracted another centimeter into my pelvic region. Another two weeks and I’ll have a vagina.
This guy needed furniture, never picked up a tool in his life, went out and got everything he needed, and voila. He saw a problem, and fixed it, like a man.
It was clear that my status as alpha male of all Parnell was being challenged by this upstart.
I had to compete on his level, so I wracked my brain to come up with a DIY project of my own.
The first step was to identify something that needed fixing. What problems were there around the house that Jacquie has been complaining about for a while?
After much soul-searching I realized what needed to be fixed. Me.
I have been successful thus far in my five or six year sex-life to keep my man-pollen sequestered, far away and safe from the Death Star (ie., Jacquie’s egg sacks).
But the only way to full-proof against accidental contamination is to cut the essence off at its source.
So, I decided to give myself a vasectomy.
In retrospect, I probably should have thought twice before taking that old fashioned Kiwi “No. 8 wire” approach to major surgery.
Not because I actually went through with it. Jacquie made sure of that when she caught me naked in the bathroom with a 500-foot spool of No. 8 wire.
But more because I was so threatened by this guy, I told him on the spot, “Hey, big shot, you think you’re a man because you can build a shelf? I’m going to cut my own balls off. How do you like that, pansy?”
Well, I’m not sure what to do, because he made me promise to show him the results.
I’m going to have a lot of egg on my face when he sees close up that I’m still a man, right where it counts.
Basement Life 