How'D I Do?

A 1-post collection

Queensland Gothic

  • There are dead snakes on the road. Somewhere in your line of sight is currently on fire. It’s perfect beach weather. Pack up the esky.
  • No matter which way you go to your destination, you will pass a dead possum.
  • You must put something inside your shoes when you take them off or there will be a spider in them in the morning. It’s too late. The spider is already there.
  • Drilling small children on the venomous things that live in our oceans before we go swimming. Have fun, kids!
  • The Drop Bear story is a joke to teach us all to look up for rotten branches overhead. Even the vegetation hates us.
  • Winter is not that cold. Spring is. The lazy wind is too tired to go around your clothes. It goes straight through your bones.
  • Long weekend? Time for a barbecue! Remember to check the barbie for snakes. And the gas tank. And the lawn furniture. And the food.
  • There are flies everywhere. All the time. There are flies in the fridge. There are flies in your lunchbox. Keep waving them away before they lay their eggs. Nobody knows where they keep coming from. They are already there.
  • There is a roadside pickup in a few weeks. You stop to check out some of the stuff that random neighbours leave outside. You watch random neighbours check out the stuff you left outside. The collection men never come, but the neighbours do.
  • There is always an abandoned trolley in the culvert. Every day, it’s a different trolley. You never see them go in. You never see them come out. There’s a money reward for some of them to get returned, but the next day, there is a trolley in the culvert.
  • Some kid is yelling at someone in the distance. You can’t tell what they’re yelling, or who they’re yelling to. Or whose kid it is.
  • Someone is mowing their yard. When they stop, someone else takes their turn. If you skip your turn, they will break out the dirt bikes. There is no such thing as a peaceful Sunday morning.
  • Cicadas come out of hiding on the first day of summer. Some years they deafen you with their sizzling noise. There is never a summer without them.
  • Big, ovoid beetles come into your house just to turn upside-down and take hours to die. They try to crawl on you if you step on them. They are waiting for your bare feet. We think they mean it’s Christmas.
  • No matter the neighbourhood, there is always one Bogan House with a dead car as a lawn ornament.
  • The corner shops always have one generic grocery, one fish and chip shop, a newsagent, a chemist’s, and at least one fashion shop with a mayfly existence. By the time you want to go there, it will be gone.
  • It’s just down the road to the nearest bottle-o. No matter where you go, there’s one just down the road. Bogans go there to smoke.