I seriously had to stop in my tracks and go through what I had done this morning to see if I could recall taking any mind altering drugs that would explain what I was seeing. And nope, I didn't recall taking anything, intentionally OR accidentally, hell, with the exception of a glass of wine after my mum's funeral, I haven't had a drink in over a month. So I'm positive what I saw actually happened.
I decided to go for a walk up the street about 10.30 this morning for 3 main reasons:
1. I needed some
shit stuff.
2. I had to get out of the house and get some fresh air.
3. And it was a beautiful day.
Now the suburb I live in is your typical inner city suburb that has lots of cashed up professionals (they used to be called yuppies, do they still call them that?) so there's lots of food stores where you can get a meal and coffee. It's not what you'd call "artsy" like St. Kilda or Fitzroy, and I've heard more than one person call it "the Toorak of the south" And once a year, we have some kind of very loud car race here that apparently is fairly important to some people.
Anyway, I digress. As I get to where the main group of shops are, (or should I say breakfast restaurants) I notice a larger group of people than would normally be there on such a sunny day (and mind you, it does get mighty busy) I didn't think a whole lot about it being the first real warm sunny day in a while. Until I saw him.
He was this guy of about 60 -65 years old dressed like a hippy from the sixties, a refugee from the acid age. That in itself made him stand out like the proverbial canine testicles, but he also looked like he hadn't showered or changed clothes since the sixties. But what he was holding was what was drawing the large crowd of both kids and adults. He was holding onto a fully grown female Llama*.
BUT, behind the guy and his Llama was this girl, and she was playing a harp. She was probably about 30, and quite good looking, and the harp she was playing looked very expensive and well made. This wasn't your garden variety, three quarter sized, chuck-it-in-the-back-of-a-station-wagon-t
o-get-it-to-the-gig type harp. This was a full sized, concert quality, I'm-a-serious-player, type harp. She was wearing, what looked like to me to be a, very expensive and low cut evening gown. What set this whole outfit off was the pair of ratty old ugg boots that she was also wearing.
She had a big metal bucket in front of her which I assumed was for tips, although, I wouldn't have been surprised if it had've been half full of Llama poop. And the song she was playing sounded vaguely familiar, I must know more about classical music than I thought.
So I'm standing there, wondering if I'm hallucinating or not, watching all these kids with their parents crowding around this Llama wanting to pat it, while this chick in the evening dress plays the harp in the background (what is that song?). Then all of a sudden the guy holding the Llama says "oh, look out kids, stand back for a second" then runs over to the table of a couple sitting near by having a coffee, and grabs the newspaper off the table, which happens to be the financial times (the guy at the table looks at him like "what the fuck?"), races back, opens the newspaper and puts it on the ground behind the Llama.
Yep, you guessed it, the Llama lifts it's short stub of a tail, and then drops the biggest pile of Llama poop I've ever seen**. It easily would've been 18 inches high and completely covered the open copy of the financial times on the ground (I guess the guy drinking his coffee won't be asking for his paper back). This of course, is followed by the obligatory ten second long, very loud, Llama fart.
Well, this of course caused all the kids (and a few adults) to burst into the loudest bout of laughter I've heard in quite a while, so loud in fact, that it drowned out the sound of the harp for a few minutes, so much so that I looked over at her to see if she was still playing, and she was, but she was also trying her hardest not to smile (without much success) and just shaking her head. What is the name of that song she is playing? I know I know it. By this stage, there are kids literally falling over from laughing so much, and it did bring a smile to my face, the first one in a while.
I move into a position where I can watch the harp playing girl more clearly while I try to figure out what song it is she is playing, and the wind was blowing my way, so I also had to get out of the way of the stench of the freshly steaming pile of Llama poop. You know how you know you know a song, it's right there on the tip of your tongue but you just can't say it? A guy walks over and drops some coins into the bucket, and says this is one hell of an act, she mouths thank you, and then goes bright red. By this stage, I'm standing there like a Kangaroo caught in the headlights, trying to think of the name of the song she's playing. And then it hits me. She's playing Cold Chisel's "forever now".
She finished that song not long after I figured out what it was, and then launched into the next one. By this stage, I'd almost forgotten about the Llama, the guy holding it, and the big pile of Llama poop. The next song she played, after the obligatory 30 second harp gliss, was as instantly recognisable by it's riff as it was unexpected. It was "pretty vacant" by the sex pistols.
I can tell that she was a good player and knew her stuff, but at that point, I decided that she needed to be rewarded for not only her skill and talent, but also for her choice of material, so I got a dollar coin out of my pocket and threw it into her bucket. She nodded in my direction and mouthed thanks. I'm guessing the hippy would also get a cut of that, and I'm sure some would also go towards Llama food. Perhaps I should've thrown in a bit more because I could only imagine how much food a Llama would eat if that much poop comes out of it in a day.
Anyway, that was pretty much my morning, I went to the shops, got what I had to and headed home again. As I passed the Hippy, the Llama, and the harp girl, she smiled at me and winked, (the harp girl, not the Llama) and I noticed she was playing "start me up" by the rolling stones. I went back and dropped another 50 cents into her bucket.
*
I'm not sure of the life cycle of Llamas, but it was pretty fucking big, bigger than I thought Llamas got, and as for the female bit, again no guarantees, and I didn't have a good look, but I didn't notice any testicles, and it had what looked like what I imagine a Llama vagina would look like (not that I spend a lot of time thinking about it)
** Again, I must admit, I haven't spent a whole lot of time, in fact any time, studying the toilet habits of Llama, but I didn't think that any animal could, or would, store that much poop.
nostalgic
exhausted
chipper
annoyed
blah
