Stay with me.
If my friend Matthew and I hadn't gone to the beach, impromptu, on a winter's day, we would have lived the next weekend obliviously parallel to each other. Um. Let me explain: If Matthew hadn’t offhandedly mentioned he was going to Melbourne, I wouldn’t have known my sister and I were in Melbourne at the same time as him. If I hadn’t known he was there my sister and I wouldn’t have bothered making the hour-long train trip to Whitley’s last ever show, in Belgrave. The last train to return us to our city lodgings was coming at 11:54pm, and if we hadn’t bolted through the empty Belgrave streets (in the intermission of Whitley’s set) to catch the last train we would have missed it. If the coin I tossed (to decide if we should stay for the rest of the set) had landed on heads, we would have stepped out of the beeping train doors and headed back to the gig. It landed on tails. If, when we got back to Melbourne city, I had decided to go back to the hotel with my sister, I would have been asleep for the rest of this story. If Matthew and I hadn’t shouted dinner for a few homeless people at McDonald’s we would not have been in time to run into the bantering taxi drivers. If Matt hadn’t asked for directions we would have gone east. He asked, and instead we went west in search of a bottle-o. If we had correctly followed the directions, we wouldn’t have gone down many laneways and an alleyway. If we hadn’t lost ourselves, we wouldn’t have found the most unbelievable oasis of a bar in the world. And if we had been there any other night of the month, karaoke wouldn’t have been on. If we were there any other night of eternity, The Eels wouldn’t have turned up at that exact bar, majestic beards and all, for a post-gig tipple. They wouldn’t have been there to enjoy Matthew and I performing Zero by the Smashing Pumpkins IN KARAOKE. If we hadn’t sung that we wouldn’t have won a novelty breast squishyball and a $3 porno. If I was asleep in a hotel room, we wouldn’t have been there to hear the karaoke maestro say “how about a big round of applause for everyone in the universe”, or to be picked up and spun around repeatedly by Mr Happy, or have seen the best Karaoke versions of “For Those About To Rock” and “Because the Night” ever in eternities nest. If any of these things hadn’t happened just as they had, I wouldn’t have peed on a golf course on a pre-dawn Melbourne day. But they had, and I was. The universe was smiling.
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