McCluskey — the Mad, Bad & Sad Boomer, & The Stuff He Hates On
Some old golfer with a gut won a big tournament in the States overnight and, as we march around the park with beer bellies and Olympic-level sneakers, McCluskey reckons it’s a vindication of everything he, his generation, and the realm that we survey have ever stood for. He cites it as evidence that there’s still hope for washed-up white males. I note it as we get to around 5k steps.
As young workmates in the early 90s, me and McCluskey would drink at the Concourse bar in the bowels of Wynyard Station on the way home to our respective and stylishly renovated California bungalows in the leafier suburbs. It was like touring your own small intestine before coming out the other end.
Jack Daniels whiskey in rock glasses; bags of Smiths crisps pulled open on the table; ‘skimpies’ who called us ‘luv’ and who we politely treated as if they were nuns in full habit, and; Dunhills before the Exorcist pictures on the pack. And, the real order of the day: tearing savage strips off stupid bosses and the stupider politics of the day, which we were clearly experts on.
Jack Daniels used to give you a 1/10th of an inch of land at their distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee. If we’d bothered sending in the labels from our ‘dead soldiers’, me and McCluskey could have been land barons.
Somewhere down the line, we got basically decrepit and had high-tech installed in our hips and knees; boozing became power walking on Mondays a la John Howard. Me and McCluskey never conceded this defeat; we just quietly performed a “strategic advance to the rear”. It was like texta’s in your kids’ colouring box just drying up.
Sometimes when we go walking, in honour of Mr Howard, aka ‘The Great Man’, McCluskey even wears his Aussie cricket tracksuit. He bought the merch at Lords “when Tests actually meant something” and he’d snuck away from the international business meeting he told his wife he was going to London for.
You might be getting the picture. My mate McCluskey is a mad, bad and sad boomer. He’s part of the group now rightly or wrongly derided by some as sexist, bigoted if not racist, patriarchal, exploitatively capitalist, apologists, privileged, obviously unconsciously biased, and basically to blame for the ‘fuckedupedness’ of the world.
McCluskey is basically the Satan of Intersectionality. McCluskey is hella hated.
Guess what? He hates you back. But thing is: McCluskey is either too absorbed with Stan or Netflix, or figuring out when our border reopens so he can go skiing in Japan, or too busy hating lots of other stuff to let you much know about it. He’s also consumed with important work chronicling the demise of society as we apparently preferred it.
On today’s walk, McCluskey briefed me — cos I have somehow and unknowingly become his Principal Private Secretary (PPS) — on such matters. Here are two I noted today and I share them, well, because walking in McCluskey’s moccasins is sometimes a Harbour Bridge too far — to use a martini of metaphors.
Alphabet Soup. McCluskey genuinely does not give a shit what people want to call themselves according to their bits or their lack of them or the ones they’ve replaced with other bits. Nor does McCluskey give a flying fuck about where people want to put their bits or with whom.
But thing is McCluskey has always preferred Minestrone to Alphabet Soup. In the first one, everything’s just all mixed up, interesting and flavoursome. Nobody had to tell McCluskey that it was diverse and inclusive soup. It just was. A good one was made with love and love is truly blind.
In the second one, you spend all your time trying to find the right combinations of phrases and letters, and you inevitably come up short, or can’t fit everything on your spoon etc. McCluskey justs wants to eat his soup — and he hopes everybody else can have some and is happy eating it — and doesn’t want to have to think too hard about spelling tests.
When we’re not looking at each, which is pretty much all the time on our walks, I diplomatically mention to McCluskey that one of his sons is gay, that he nearly punched out the McDonald’s manager who gave him a bad time, and that he voted yes in the referendum. But he says that’s different.
The Trance of TikTok and Tattoos. McCluskey points his Samsung at me (cos Apple is too hip for him) and shows me reel after reel of kids on TikTok basically dancing the same criss-cross dance to the same songs, and congratulating each other with hundreds of thousands of likes for so doing.
McCluskey says this is definitive proof that the current generation of young people talk a talk of ‘agency’ and ‘voice’ and ‘empowerment’, but walk a walk of ironclad conformism in fashion, style, political sensibility and skin ink. This is apparently not a stretch, according to McCluskey, but a damning hypocrisy and an arrogant divide between values and behaviours. He starts to riff about the ChiComs too, but I kinda lost his thread there.
Instead, as the step counter on my iPhone gets to 10k, I remind McCluskey that he’s looking at videos. And how he always belts out the chorus to his favourite Angels’ song — “No way, get fucked, fuck off!” — and his blurry blue tattoo from his days in the Army Air Corps Reserves. But he says that’s different.
McCluskey checked the time, and said his goodbyes. He’s a busy man. Today, he’s going to measure the length of the train at his sushi place and then divide it by the number of little dishes going past. Videotape it as evidence etc. He wanted to prove to his wife that the ratio was deteriorating.
