Knapp Street on Flinders bus stop. Townsville. A fancy dress party, or the tail end of it at the Playpen Niteclub. 2am and all the $1 pitchers before 10 have been drunk. The smokes have been smoked. Well-worn pick-up lines have been tried...and multiple times shamelessly tested....and predictably failed, but beer-goggles just don't know ugly. Heads are getting tired and no better example than the girl in the Britney Spears outfit, a JCU nursing student, yelling and then crying at her boyfriend, a soldier from Laverack Baracks dressed up in a full Steve Irwin safari suit, wondering just what the hell he was in trouble for. And no, it wasn't for the smashed up glass of the bus stop shelter. It was already like that. Maybe it was because he left his wallet on the bar with her I.D in it. He just doesn't remember, or care, because after downing 2 jugs of beer and an unknown number of Stoli's, his number one concern was keeping himself in an upright position. And why is it all the folks on the other side of the street, a lot of them dressed in dubious regalia themselves ie; bedsheets fashioned into Roman togas and $2 thongs from Silly Solly's, or Village People characters, and even a bloke wearing his red jocks passing himself off as Mitch Buchannon, are singing in chorus across the street 'hit him baby one more time' which only made the poor girl cry more. Yet tomorrow was a brand new day. The sun would rise. Breakfasts would be eaten at 1pm, some fellas would chew their own arms off in a sheer act of survival, never to mention such a near lethal-to-ego sober-at-sunrise-I-must-have-left-my-beer-goggles-on-the-Sunbus encounter with a rodeo-ridin' wilderbeast to friends nor family, and shame-filled slates would be wiped clean for another week regardless of whether the new day began with Townsville's renowned walk of shame or hitchin' a marathon 3 hour lift home across the City in a Council Streetsweeper. The important thing is they lived happily ever after.
...
The End.