Photo 9

Freak memories of share household days spark my fear of an overly follicular planet.

These gentlemen here are part of a five-person household from when I first moved to Chippendale, a ramshackle suburb of Sydney. I shared a bathroom with them on the second floor of an enormous terraced house that was filled with an unholy array of comic-related paraphernalia. To my eternal disgust I would often step out of the shower to find myself covered in their hair, it being tightly wrapped around my throat, across my torso and curled lovingly around my thighs.

No amount of yelling in abject horror would remove them.

For the sake of anonymity, let's call them Psimon and Psam.
Psimon was the "eternal stoner" of our household - of which there must always be one to maintain a share-house cliché. No matter what time of day or night it was his room burbled with the gentle rumble of a bong being drawn. In a scary moment of over exuberance one evening he spent some time jumping up and down in the kitchen. As he jumped and clapped and laughed he was stopped briefly mid-flight as his head went through the ceiling. When he fell to the floor, we were showered with crumbling plaster, dust and whatever decades old crud was trapped in the space between.

This wasn't solely his fault. Our "rock musician" flat mate had recently exploded our upstairs toilet, and left the repairs to a "friend" who had poured the remaining concrete excess down the drain in the center of the bathroom floor. The plumbing-related problems this caused us in future times were grotesque and manifold, such as the noticeable weakening of the kitchen ceiling plaster and a simultaneous regurgitation of the contents of all the drains in the the house of their old and rotting contents.

Psam, well, he was our "comics entrepreneur". His Gibson cyberpunk-inspired business acumen in comics was only exceeded by a debilitating naiveté in real world interactions. I have fond memories of talking him down only hours after he lost his virginity.
Despite having an iron and ironing board in his bedroom of mountainous calamity, he also possessed the largest collection of over-sized, blousy, wrinkled white shirts I have ever seen