Corrigan. I first met Corrigan in the lounge bar of the pub near home one Thursday night. He was dressed all in white, and even though it was the 80's that was... different. I thought he might be a bloke with an alternate partner gender preference to the rest of us at first.
Well I was wrong about that. Corrigan is the only person I know who has messed around with computers longer than me. We were online before the interweb appeared using a 1200 baud modem and signed up to all the cool BBS sites. We could tell a cool BBS from a crap one because they had better ascii art pictures.
Corrigan beat me at computers. We used to play this game called Elite, it was a space trader / pirate / combat game. A requirement of advancement in the game was the demonstrated ability to dock a line rendered spacecraft with a bigass hexagonal line rendered spaceport. The space port revolved anticlockwise and the target docking pad was a rectangular slot about 4 pixels bigger than the ship. Docking was achieved by lining up the post slot sized dock with the correct approach angle, then approaching the sucker SLOWLY while rotating the ship to exactly match the spaceport rotation speed. All while not messing up the approach vector. He was good at that. Maybe that's why he ended up with five Sons?
Corrigan beat me at dancing. This bloke could dance! Dancing was how we met girls and got to talk to them and stuff. There was no SMS messaging then.
Corrigan beat me at girlfriends. He'd wizz though half a dozen cool fun relationships with some really cool girls. I'd hang around with Jan trying to "make it work" and wondering if all women were neurotic and why she was moody a lot. (It was probably me, seems I had that effect on some people.) Then Corrigan met Lil and it was good. She was perfect for him because she could see through all his BS.
Well in the due course of time, they got married and I got to be Corrigan's best man.
And it was good. After a while Matt showed up, he was a sparkly eyed little brat and we loved him to death.
Next came Mitchell, Corrigan and Lil asked me to be his Godfather, which I consider a great honor to this day. After a while Wazza showed up, he was the cute one. Then they had twins! O hooley dooley what a madhouse their place was! During these years I went waay off the rails and had to go get a few of the scars I probably needed to get. But I was always made welcome in Corrigans house, Lil looked out for me like a big sister would through all my messed up years. Corrigan never left my side, the only time I wasn't around was when I chose to go walkabout, but every time I'd come back with my tail between my legs they gave me a place to stay.
Corrigan couldn't beat me at Dumb. I was the champ. Mind though, he gave it a bloody good shot every once in a while. Mr Walton's, if you want to know why yer windows were crook a fair bit please send an envelope with lots of large denomination notes and I'll tell ya a yarn ;-) Also, a note to the staff at the hospital:
You've probably sussed this out by now, but you shouldn't shoot wasted blokes up with Pethodine.
His title shot for the Dumb championship was at another wedding. My other mate Chris stole Jan, and they got married. Me and Corrigan were invited to the wedding. He left in an ambulance or at least the ambulance attended, I was a bit wobbly on it myself so I don't remember that wedding much. Closest I ever went to loosing the dumb title that night.
Corrigan couldn't beat me at Pool, unless I was having "one of my turns". I reckon It's time he got his ass on a train and headed out here to blue sky country so we could go play some pool. We probably wouldn't though, we're both getting on now. I'm pretty happy just hanging out at home these days. Plus I've got an asskicking home network set up with some serious state of the art equipment. We'd probably buy a few 2 litre bottles of coke and some Pizza and play multiplayer games for 48 hours straight.
Corrigan has a sister Jane, she's an awesome lady. I should have made more of an effort to be a real mate to Jane too, but I was too Busy running around Yahooing with Corrigan to have much time for sisters. Jane likes dogs, I can tell. It's all she ever bloody posts about on facebook. I often wonder how different things might have been for our crowd from the local inn if we all had smartphones and facebook. While I'm at it in case you are stalking me or Corrigan on the interweb, I'll send a G'day to Pete, Brian, Big Brian, Grandpa John, Allison, Paul, Gennifer, Chris, Jan, Peter the DJ, Joanne, Hindy, Darius, Cathy, Junior (he was an asshat but I remembered him) Donna, Lils sis, Cathy my sis. These two sometimes hung out with our crew but not much. And G'day to all the other randoms who drifted in and out back then.
These days I spend more time talking to Corrigan's third born Wazza on ventrillo than anybody from our old crew. Wazza reminds me of me a lot. Smart, quick witted little prick, so damn annoying and frustrating ya just gotta like him. Or find an axe...
Anyways this is an ode to Corrigan, so he gets the last word.
Goodonya mate.
