Bandwagon Column: On Exponential Curves

On Exponential Curves

We started a bit early tonight.    

We started at one o’clock. We felt normal.   

Two. Lightheaded by this point. We were able to make plans. We could still do tongue twisters.  

At three o’clock we got that mild feeling of floatation, or gliding. Vodafone told us to make the most of now.  

Four. We knocked over objects, we spilled drinks. Cosmopolitan declared it the Summer of You.  We played truth or dare.   

We got to five. We were unusually confident. We got bolder, more flirtatious. In sports cars, green became the new red. Someone suggested strip poker.  

Six. Our speech got pretty slurred. MacDonalds used climate change to sell us coffee. People’s first names became interchangeable. Bad hangovers became likely. Nostalgia. Nationalism. Spin the bottle.  

Seven. We saw lines of large trucks filling Lambton quay. We had sex with randoms.  Ex partners received incoherent text messages. Somewhere around here we reached a sort of point of no return.   

Eight. We hit a spike. The gulf turned to shit. We had breakdowns on the footpath outside Shooters. We gave up on empathy.

At nine o’clock we basically said fuck it, lets make a night of it.
 

By Ralph (with a nod to Don Patterson). This was written for Wellington theatre collective Binge Culture’s last show, Drowning Bird, Plummeting Fish, but wasn’t in the final version.