DYB DOB Donkey

This week I’ve been in Bangkok attending a global summit of influential minds on Disaster Risk Reduction, which is all about trying to prepare communities, governments and countries generally to withstand and recover from the effects of natural and man-made disasters.  I was thrilled to be attending the meeting, not only to hear from the world’s leading minds on DRR, but also because I had been asked to present a key note address on the last day, which I was hoping was going to be my big chance to make myself known to these power brokers and who knows, maybe even nab a high-powered, important job in the future.

The discussion topics on offer at the summit have encompassed lengthy soul-searching on setting-up Early Warning Systems which can be operated as soon as the initial signs of a disaster are imminent, so as to alert communities and other parties to prepare for the coming danger.  There have also been detailed explanations of working with communities and various groups on Disaster Preparedness and Response, so that they know what to do when the Early Warning System is activated, and Disaster Mitigation and Resilience, which is all about putting things in place to limit the impact of the disaster on people and their livelihoods.

But as is so often the case with these high-level discussions, all the theoretical jargon and technical know-how immediately get thrown out the window when a real disaster hits, as I discovered this week when my world was thrown into utter chaos by a series of unanticipated, catastrophic events.  

On the last day of the meeting I was up well before the sun, diligently preparing for my presentation.  After finalising the materials and practicing my speech a couple of times, I ironed my shirt and trousers, and headed off to the magnificent hotel breakfast buffet which is a common, essential element of these kinds of global meetings, concerned as they are with improving the lot of those with barely enough household resources to feed their kids.

In the Disaster Risk Reduction biz, when we talk about developing Early Warning Systems, we encourage individuals and communities to look for any unusual events or changes in their surroundings.  Hindsight is indeed a powerful tool for reflection, and through this I must concede that my ability to recognise and comprehend a significant change to the breakfast buffet that morning could well have spared me from the debilitating effects of what followed, however I failed to recognise the significance of the bowl of small, ripe cherry tomatoes which had replaced the more common-place, large, pre-sliced tomatoes on offer during the previous four days.

Failing to heed this important Early Warning Sign, I obliviously sat down to my greasy breakfast and with the sharpened points of my unsuspecting table fork, I pierced the shiny outer skin of a cherry tomato, unleashing all manner of damnation and hellfire in the form of bright, red tomato juice all over my crisp, ironed shirt - my last clean shirt for the week – all within a few short moments of the professional and reputational reckoning upon which my future career in international Disaster Risk Reduction was to be built.

Within a nanosecond of the destructive cocktail of juice and pulp being sprayed from hip to shoulder where moments before there had been nothing but sharp, starchy creases, I was on my feet in the middle of the public thoroughfare, absently wiping sticky yellow seeds from my scalp and ears, while my shrinking spleen emitted an involuntary, guttural groan which rose into the lofty chamber before disappearing into the same, intangible locale as my future career prospects. 

In reflection, it’s quite possible that all may not have been lost at that point, as there may have been some individuals of influence who’d not yet become aware of the destruction my heedless actions had unleashed upon the early morning diners, however my voluble anguish was released with little heed to the number one rule of Disaster Response planning, which is to Remain calm – DO NOT PANIC!.  Instead, I projected a shrill, piercing scream like a couple of over-weight drag queens fighting over a pair of fourteen inch, red sequinned stilettoes, attracting the full attention of every member of the largest gathering of influential minds on international humanitarian responses ever to have been assembled.

Realising my mistake, I made a beeline for the door, only to slip on the organic mess I had created on the shiny parquetry with my clumsy upturning of a breakfast bowl, causing me to land flat on my arse and generating for those influential global minds a close-up view of the world’s first ever edible, indoor tsunami, which proceeded from the epicentre of my soiled behind to the far corners of the restaurant.

Crawling now, I lowered my head in shame and slowly reconstructed a Disaster Escape Route in my mind to guide me out the door and out of sight.  Back in my Safe House hotel room a few moments later, I waited for my hyperventilating to subside and began analysing the situation.  I had come to Bangkok for a reason, and I was not going to let this incident impede my Recovery to a lucrative, fat-cat position on the international stage.  I threw open my wardrobe to take stock of my provisions, only to remember with horror that my Disaster Preparedness for this high-level talk fest had me Stockpiling only the required number of outfits through which to get me through five days of looking as professional as possible, and like I knew what I was talking about, however I had not allowed for Contingencies.  Added to this, I had been schmoozing so much with the ‘Big Wigs’ each night … until well into the messy wee hours, that all previously worn shirts were stained with Guinness and sweaty underarms.

This was truly an unanticipated, catastrophic disaster of career-limiting proportions, but despite the dire circumstances in which I now found myself, I took a couple of deep breaths, gulped down my rising panic and I resolved to make something of this.  “Hadn’t I spent the last twenty years working hard and building my reputational Resilience?”, I reasoned, “Sure I had.  I have what it takes to impress these people with my skills, Knowledge, Attitude and Practice”.  I impressed upon myself that these brilliant DRR practitioners weren’t interested in how I was dressed; they’d carved out their careers through the sweat and tears of responding to some of the most severe humanitarian disasters in recent history: working twenty hours a day for weeks at a time while living out of military-type barracks with limited water and supplies.  They knew what was important in this industry, and it wasn’t the cut of a man’s Armani trousers.  I was going to show them that I too was like them; Responsive in the face of a Disaster.  I grabbed what I could from the closet, and boldly headed for the auditorium.

The Inaugural Global Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction is unlikely to be remembered for anything other than the Global Head of UNDRR, demonstrating the military precision upon which his reputation as a leader of international Disaster Responses was built, directing the Conference Facility Security personnel to chase down and brutally apprehend a scruffy, scab-faced maniac dressed only in a stained Singha Beer singlet, a pair of yellowing y-fronts and army boots, who had burst into the opening session of Day 5, shouting like a lunatic about Dyslexic Rock Renditions.

Attack of the Career-Limiting Tomatoes: Donkey comes a cropper to a pesky fruit at a Bangkok breakfast buffet.  Pic: http://www.bigmike-productions.com

Zit Face: a heart-warming Christmas message

Call me an old, romantic idealist (oh, go-on), but what I love most about Christmas are not the massive haul of presents sitting beneath plastic pine trees, nor the mountains of land-fill generated by Chinese-made plastic crap, nor the crowded press of zombies wandering around shopping mauls (sic) at 2am just because they’re open 24 hours, but rather, what I love most about Christmas are the tales of love and hope; the celebration of solidarity, and the message that our loved ones, including ourselves, are the most important commodity in the world.

So I thought I’d dedicate this, pre-Christmas post to the message that no matter how down-trodden you may feel, or how abhorrent you think you are, there’s always someone who feels worse, or is more repugnant than you.

Over the years, I have gone to great lengths to make sure that this Blog maintains my anonymity, without outwardly telling any untruths (although that may be one of the few just there).  But I am about to reveal something about myself which could well oust me from my quiet, little, internet hidey-hole.

I suffer from disgusting, horrible, disfiguring acne.  It all started way too early, when I was 9 – just my luck getting acne at age 9, but my balls refusing to drop until I was 25! – and by the time I was 13, my doctor was scribbling down in his notes phrases like “visible lakes of pus” and “deep sinus fissures tracking to Norway”.

The awful thing about teenage acne, despite it leaving you looking like something which, in biblical times, would have seen you ejected over the city walls, is that the extent to which anyone really knows what to do about it is inversely proportional to the number of unsolicited opinions that are offered as to what to do about it.

The obvious approach one might have considered when, as a 13-year-old, one awoke to a pillow soaked in blood and pus for two-weeks running, would have been to consult a dermatologist.  However, due to the fact that every teenage kid in my school who had ever visited one of these witch doctors, while certainly having their acne cleared-up within a matter of weeks, was usually left with a face resembling The Somme in 1917, and thanks to the powerful drug regime they’d been subjected to, a bonus shoulder hump and a combination of breasts, falsetto and/or hairless groin (in boys), or no breasts, baritone and/or hairy arse (in girls).  So the dermatologist was never seriously considered as an option for me (I’ve never needed any help acquiring hair on my arse, thank you very much!).

What was considered, and adhered to for most of my teenage years, thanks to my parents placing stock in increasingly whacked-out opinions as to the cause of my acne, was a gruelling regime of either denying or increasing my intake of various food groups and “natural remedies”.

For example, thanks to one of my father’s old cricket chums, I was urgently taken off dairy food for what would have been the best ice-cream-eating three years of my life.  During this horrible period, a new brand of Belgian Chocolate ice-cream came and went, but not for Donkey.  Instead, the only treat going around for this crater-faced barnyard beast was jaffa-flavoured soy milk (what is it about the latent heat properties of soy milk that no matter how many days you leave it in the fridge, it still comes out warm?!).

Needless to say, the “dairy-free” didn’t stop the pus pouring from my facial pores.  Next, one of my mother’s mid-week golfing “colleagues” heard from a “well-respected naturopath” that seaweed was the go.  For about three months, I was forced to chew on semi-dried, stinking kelp every morning for breakfast.  My pimples maintained their proud stance on my schnoz and chin, for which I must admit I was vaguely relieved, as I was certainly reaching the limit of how much kelp I could stomach.

And on it went.  Obviously chocolate was considered and denied me fairly early on in the process L, and even though the acne remained, chocolate was not returned to my needy bosom for many years thereafter.  Raspberry jam was out.  Honey was withdrawn for a while.  Potato chips (surprise! surprise!), Coca-Cola … ok, to be fair, my diet wasn’t all that great, but which teenage kid’s is?

Then there were the topical remedies that were applied to the skin daily, twice daily or even hourly, depending on which women’s magazine such-and-such was reading; thistle milk, Vitamin E cream, lukewarm rhinoceros semen, tomato paste … the thing was that all of these “cures”, according to the “experts” down at Centenary Park Tennis Club, were not to be rubbed-in until no longer visible, but lathered thickly onto the face and left for the duration of the “prescribed” regime. 

Fortunately this line of treatment came to an abrupt end after a work colleague of my father returned from Rotorua in New Zealand and suggested I try using this thick, black, sulphuric tar he’d acquired which, he assured my Dad, was a sure-fire remedy against skin ailments.  So reluctant as always, and smothered in thick, black paste, I made the trek to school one day and was immediately dragged to the principal’s office and given a week’s suspension on a charge of racial vilification (no doubt the matter wasn’t helped when, in a snivelling mess, I shook my hands in the air and asked to speak with my “Mammy … oh I want my Mammy” – visual gag there; you might need to work on it).

All this ridiculous hokus pokus, disguised as treatment and remedy, despite going on for years, never did anything for my acne, and really only succeeded in making me miserable.  The real cause of my acne, or at least one of them, was eventually discovered, like so many breakthroughs in science, by accident. 

One summer, while mucking around on my skateboard (skaters being the only social group who didn’t seem to care much what you looked like), I slammed pretty badly off a small flight of stairs and broke my arm in about 723 places.  Apart from the pain I endured, not to mention being ridiculed daily by my peers for having to get my mother to wipe my 16-year-old arse (and for the record, it’s not true, people!  A person can adapt to left-hand wiping!), I was also unable to get into a swimming pool, which had, for years, been my only competitive sporting outlet.  Within a week of no swimming; with no dodgily chlorinated water infested with infant-piss and used band-aids, I was cured!  No more zits!

Years later, I came to learn that times of stress were also a trigger for an outbreak of fresh facial pustules.  When I mentioned this to my mother, she scoffed, “Oh yeah, sure, stress.  Exactly what does a teenage boy know about stress?”.

Hmm, I dunno, Mum, maybe it is living with two chain-smoking, staunch Catholics who consider masturbation a mortal sin, and who denied me all of life’s culinary pleasures in favour of a daily intake of seaweed and public humiliation?

These days I try to manage my stress in various ways, and this seems to help my skin a little.  But unfortunately for someone whose career involves a lot of international travel, one of the major triggers of stress which is guaranteed to send my face into volcanic eruptions and release a massive miasma of rank body odour (I’ll post about that another time) is international air travel.

Today was a lovely day in Melbourne, and I took the rare opportunity of a late afternoon flight to go for a morning swim down at the local pool.  I was feeling great when I got the airport, and was wearing appropriate clothes for managing my body temperature.  But after all the check-in procedures, and immigration, and finding the departure gate, I nicked into Sunglass Hut to see what they had going on, and while trying on a new pair of sunnies, I glanced in the mirror and noticed what the cocktail of chlorine and internal body oils had done to my face.

Feeling too embarrassed to hand the glasses back to the smokin’ hot sales girl (although she saved me the problem as she’d noticed my face on the way in and was definitely putting some distance between us), I dumped them on the counter and bolted for the loo.

As I stood up close to the basin, ejecting great globules of yellow and red fluid all over the mirror, my self esteem had hit an all-time low.  Although I was scared witless that some poor schmuck would walk in any minute, see what I was doing and lose their lunch, there was nothing for it; I had to purge my face of this vile infestation.

And moments into the process, it happened.  “Oh my God!  That is disgusting!”.  I froze in mid-squeeze, and turned sheepishly to face my denouncer; a well-dressed, Business Class-type traveller, dressed ready to walk off the plane and into a high-powered board meeting.  But to my surprise, the man in the suit wasn’t pointing at me, but rather at another man, of South Asian extraction, who I hadn’t notice come in, but who was standing behind me changing his shirt; his 432 rolls of belly fat and man-boobs any female swim-suit model would sell her only brain cell to have, flapping around all over the place.

I grabbed a paper towel, wiped the mess from my face, and got the hell out of their with Mr Business Suit not far behind me.

See, there really is always someone more repugnant than you.  Merry Christmas everyone.

Welcome to my world.  Pic: http://t1.gstatic.com/images