No More Wristbands

I was walking down Brunswick St in Fitzroy just now, wearing the jacket I bought a few hours ago from the Salvos and carrying my washing in a sports bag on my back. I stopped at the lights, took the blue, rubber charity band from around my right wrist, and threw it in the nearest bin.

When I was fourteen my friend at the time Ross Novak came to school with a bunch of charity bands that his mum had given him to give to his friends – I don't think it was properly explained at the time that they were in support of cancer, we just put them on without thinking. Everyone else quickly tired of theirs, but mine stayed on for years... Then at a party in 2008, my white band with the word 'Friends' now well and truly worn away from the surface SNAPPED, and fell off of my wrist. I had barely spent an hour without it on in the last three years.

I called my recent ex-girlfriend in tears, drunk and stupid, and tried to explain to her exasperated patience what had happened, and then when she hung up, I kept drinking, and eventually, later that night, smashed a glass bus station with a hammer that I had in my bag from a Scout camp. That evening ended up costing me around two-and-a-half thousand DUCKING FOLLARS. Actually, I don't think the band breaking and me smashing the tram stop are connected at all... it's funny to look back and place irrelevant events together on the same timeline though, huh? Searching for meaning. A world full of disorder.

I had a few more bands after that, each of them breaking after a few months, but the one I threw away today had lasted me a particularly long time; I think I picked it up in early 2011. I was in the City Cross Food Court in Adelaide, just off of Rundle Mall on the King William St end. I got some KFC – presumably to eat. Just as I was walking away from the counter I noticed that they had a little stand full of charity wristbands just like the one my wrist was conspicuously devoid of. I had grown to feel naked without the constant light bouncing of one of these faux-jewelery thing-a-dings reminding me of wrist's continued existence. I can't remember whether I bought the band, or whether it was free, or whether I stole it, but whichever it was, I wore that band, again, almost every minute from the moment I put it on until about an hour ago, when I threw it in the bin on Brunswick St.

And fuck those bands, really, the thing meant nothing to me. I don't give a fuck about charity... not in any real, tangible, I'm-actually-going-to-give-you-money-and-spend-time-thinking-about-this-issue way. Whenever anyone has asked me about the wristband – and let me just qualify this by saying that such events have been truly few and far between – I've only replied with a boring, “Oh, I just like wearing wristbands... I don't know what it's about.” And that's a fucking lie anyway, it used to say “From Hunger To Hope” before constant wear rubbed the indented letters away. I don't know whose hunger was being magically transformed by my constant wearing of a blue rubber loop, or what hope that trinket could possibly bring anyone. What a stupid piece of nothing. What a pointless, blue, wristband-shaped turd. I threw it in the bin, and now I'm going to stop thinking about it.

Wristbands, eh? I'm fighting the good fight, here, people.

Peace, Taco.