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Oblivious on Oxford Street

A tiny museum, planning and rest, then getting crushed at pool.

B R

24 Apr 2023 — 4 min read

6 April 2023 | Sydney Australia

Got a little late start on this day - the ending of my previous post may provide a clue as to why - but today was intended to be a rest and planning day.

Took a quick jaunt back to the park with the LGBTQ Memorial, as they have a tiny tiny volunteer-run related museum that wasn’t open when I was there. I was hoping to take another crack at trying to visit the Jewish Museum after being thwarted by youths, but it was closed.

After a brief conversation with my host, Robert, where I again produced an incredulous look simply by explaining a typical thing that is normal (but terrible) in US politics - this time it was the notion of electing judges - I was off.

This evening I went out to Oxford Street to see about a bar or two. I was led to believe that the next day - Good Friday - would not see a lot of things open.

Hometown pride, in a manner of speaking. There is a joke here about a left hand exploding a bird but I’m not clever enough to make it right now. Sound off in the comments.

I actually caught this small but very energetic and perhaps appropriately (for the day) empty drag show on Sunday at the Oxford Hotel. Everything is a “hotel” here but rarely do they actually mean “accommodations”

They had a place called Stonewall. I’ve been to the one in New York, which is basically just a bar with a lot of merch. Here it was a standard gay bar but actually had bar stools, which are not as much a thing in New Zealand or Australia.

Picture from TripAdvisor because I wasn’t here long enough to really consider snapping one. You might note the machine they have there that precisely dispenses quantities of liquor - Sydney was once notorious for underserving.

But it wasn’t more than maybe 20 minutes that I left. A young man almost immediately struck up a conversation and invited me to play pool at the bar next door.

His name was Marcus and we ended up playing with a friend of his - who’s name I didn’t even catch for reasons that will soon become apparent - and his friend, a lovely trans woman I’ll call Moira, (1) to protect her privacy but also because (2) I am not 100% the name I have written down is even accurate anyway.

When I can think of nothing better, I have a standard open ended question I like to ask people. I directed it to Marcus’s friend:

“So what occupies your time?”, I asked

“Trying to get laid”, he said, seemingly annoyed.

“Oh”

It was shortly after this that Marcus got a little closer to me, breaking that important physical barrier as a subtle, but pretty clear message.

Marcus: “Do you want to get a drink at my place? I live just upstairs.”

Me: “I’m…not really in a rush at the moment”, which was true - and I just end up getting anxious with people I don’t know well anyway, “do you want to get another drink?”

And so it wasn’t more than 20 minutes before Marcus and his friend disappeared. I initially believed they had just gone to go get another drink, because - as close friends of mine can attest, I can be shockingly oblivious - but Moira let me know they weren’t coming back, that they often left together in this fashion, but she would happily keep playing. And I was as well.

She was crushing all three of us repeatedly and with ease, but I will say after 2-3 games, as I got back into some practice (I used to play endlessly in high school) she only won every single game with merely a comfortable margin, rather than a truly embarrassing one.