A friend recently showed me a post by an underage camwhore about boozing up gummies and making them the stuff of nightmares. And if you’ve been following my blog long enough you know that I don’t bother making a point unless I mean to take it so far past its logical extreme that it leaves you awake at night, hugging your knees and shaking back and forth, wishing you were this amusing.

And unlike most of my drink posts, this isn’t waiting until the next Friday because you need time to prepare these if you’er going to be dealing with family this “festive*” season.

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So I know I’ve posted this one already in a previous post, but it may have been lost in all the sarcasm and bile.
Also, being the day before Christmas, I figured you’d need a drink, or something, that allows you a bit of ye olde ability to jam metaphorical fingers into hypothetical ears and scream (Fa)La!La!LaLa at the top of your lungs so you don’t have to deal with your miserable family and how much you hate them and oh god would it really hurt them to get you something other than fucking socks for once?!

As you can tell, I don’t really do Christmas…

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A.K.A. Should I buy the banana or kiwi flavoured lube?

The contract with my previous employer was not renewed when new owners took over (who then decided two weeks later that they actually did still need me. But they weren’t willing to keep me on the pittance I was being paid before, so fuck them). So I’ve been looking around for my dream job, something in events management. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the job hunting process. It’s long, grueling, and disheartening… at the best of times.

You submit your resume, a bog standard cover letter that you’ve mail merged with the position title, place of employment and HR persons name, because if you had to make a unique one for every role you’d go insane. And then you see the same job advertised next week, even though they never even sent you a bog standard rejection letter by way of reply. Bastards.

So it was a breath of fresh air when I saw one role that was actually basing its decisions on the actual quality of applicants work. Whilst you had to submit a resume, that didn’t matter nearly so much as following the process by which you had to actually apply. For starters, you had to apply on a specific date. Not have applications in by, nor after… But that one day only.

That’s not the most interesting part though. What truly set this job out from the rest, and I’m certain weeded out a lot of the standard applicants that just shotgun blast their resumes out there was that you had to design an event for this event management company. And not any event. You couldn’t just rehash an old plan you may have had lying around. You had to create an entirely new event, with budgets, mood boards, layouts, pictures, etc., of how you would announce to other people in the events industry that you had just been hired by this company.

What a fantastic concept for selecting candidates for a job! Actually looking and seeing if they’re capable of producing the actual work that you’re hiring them to do. It staggers me that more places don’t do this, but simply look at a resume, and often don’t even look past the education details, let alone to what you’ve actually done in your career so far.

Not at all like what (IMHO) I now consider the worst employment agency in Australia, with a poor record of data retention, and rude HR people that will reject your resume in less than 2 minutes after sending it… Is that even enough time to open it let alone read it?!

Either way, it got me thinking that there are all these jobs out there that seem totally goth, but simply aren’t when you get into it… Other than fashion and cosmetics retail, what out there is really all that goth?

• Owning the Haunted Bookshop
• Being a professional psychic / ghost hunter
• Grave digger and/or Mortician
• Forensics
• Drug Dealer
• Model

In fact, looking up “goth job” on Google even returns modeling… and porno, which is kind of modeling anyway. Now let’s compare this to what about 95% of the goth community are employed in:

• IT (Software)
• IT (Systems Maintenance)
• IT (Engineering)
• McDonald’s
• IT (Consulting)
• Part time modeling and creative arts career (Read: The Dole)

So what’s a guy to do if he wants a job outside of these areas, has training and experience outside of them, and yet still can’t find work outside? Give in? Certainly looks like a reasonable option. This is the great year of You Have To Give Up.

Or strike out, and be the most bizarre, attention grabbing whore you can possibly be.

And that’s what I aimed for with my event proposal.

If people are wondering what event I proposed… I think you’ll like it: Read it here.

And if you’re wondering, Im happy to organise your next function

Location: Insignia (corner of Flinders & Kings streets)

In short: Gulag = fun & cheap(ish) absinthe

Crowd Type: lazy-goths, ex-punks, Nick Cave look-alikes

Drinks: good prices on premium liquor, nice selection of beer.

Music: Too loud to make out things that weren’t punk.

You’d think from these post titles that I have something against Gulag.

Honestly, I don’t. I actually really like the place… most of the time.

I went again on Friday after getting somewhat screwed over on dinner plans (you people know who you are! Taste my emoticon of embittered darkness… ò_Ó ), and proceeded to have a good time for the majority of the evening.

The venue really is the sort of place that you tend to only see a goth club in as part of a movie. It’s how a goth club should look. And the drink variety is actually pretty decent, especially as there’s usually a good supply of Absinthe and nice whiskies and wines.

Mon’s done herself fantastic favours there with the venue selection.

But I have two issues that burn like my genitals after a weekend of hedonistic indulgence on the goth scene itself (No, I kid… there’s no burning… the stabbing pains of Jaz stabbing me with a sharp object of stabbing tends to outweigh considerations of said indulgence. If only there were an emoticon for embittered sadness).

1) The music.

Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of music I like to dance to. Can’t be helped. Different strokes for different folks, it takes all kinds, united colours of Beneton, if a tree falls on a unique flower in the forest do environmentalists go to a Get-Up meeting with Peter Garrett?, etc.

But can we please do something about DJs having no concept of volume? I like “Baggy Trousers”. I have some, I wear them… But sometimes, I like to talk to people while I wear baggy trousers, rather than listen to a song about my attire while I go hoarse trying to convey some deep insight about why I’m so wonderful and I should run for political posts. The fact that I’m a trained vocalist, and can project at nearly 110dB, and people still have trouble hearing me means that the music is actually at the sort of noise levels that will cause permanent hearing loss. A volume monitor in the DJ booth, please!

I know the setup of the venue means that two insanely large speakers in a small room won’t get the sound out of that room very well without it being intensely loud, but it’s a small venue. The best sound level should not be three feet outside the upstairs door.

2) The People

And this is the part of when a goth club is no longer a goth club. When non-goths come in and the music changes to suit them, which ties in directly to my first point.

I get it. The upstairs bar closes, piss heads don’t want to leave. They hear music downstairs and come to check it out. Sure, that’s fine. If they can handle the people in ‘funny clothes’ and the music, let ‘em stay. There are plenty of ‘non-goths’ that like to hang out at the goth clubs (Zak, I’m looking at you) and that’s fine. I’m not one to say “you’re the wrong type, GTFO!”… But don’t pander to them and encourage them to stay!

Shit, if people wanted a club that pandered to hetero-socio-normative types, whilst looking goth, Goo would still be around.

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