Don't go to Brisbane

Let me preface this video: at it’s core, it’s a love letter to Brisbane.  I was born here and I’ve spent  a lot of time in this city,  and every few months Brisbane  manages to pleasantly surprise me.  The lush green roads, the old Queenslanders,   the charming nonsense of every  turn and weave of the streets.  I just want everyone to know that I’ve written  this with love, because what I’m about to say…   well, it’s truth. And the truth is Ask anyone you know to list five good things about Brisbane. After naming the weather, West End and the fucking   jacarandas they’ll stand there like a stunned  mullet trying to think of something, anything,   that doesn’t make them look like a toolbeater. And look, I will happily acknowledge that there   are some fantastic aspects to Brisbane,  but you know the game fuck, marry, kill?  I want to do all three of those  things to this city all the time.  Every day I go about Brisbane doing the same  activities and every day Brisbane finds new and   interesting ways to shit me to tears. Honestly, it’s ridiculous.  And I’m torn, as well, because while I  genuinely do love the place, I feel like   every second I live here drives me closer and  closer to the day where they lock me up in an   insane asylum and give me a frontal lobotomy. And we all know what they say about that - I’d   rather have a bottle in front  of me than a cock in my mouth.  Not that there’s anything wrong with having a  cock in your mouth, beer just tastes better. That is, of course, quite unlike  car exhaust which as we all know,   tastes even worse than beer and cock combined. You don’t need to eat a catalytic converter to get   a taste of engine excretions in Brisbane because  if you live anywhere near a main road - and in   Brisbane, they’re all main roads - as soon as you  leave your house in the morning for your daily   commute your nostrils are immediately assaulted  by the acrid smell of 50 million Ford Rangers. Take this, for example. Welcome to Ipswich Road,   population: 50,000 cars daily back in 2015.  What’s it like now? Well, thanks to the post-Covid   migration wave there are a lot more Victorians  on the road and accidents are rising as well.  Coincidence? I think not.  Anyway, with 340.6 olympic swimming pools’  worth of cars travelling down its noodly   little median every day, if you’re stuck here  in peak hour, you better make sure your brakes   work otherwise your teeth might get very  well acquainted with your steering wheel. But look, you can’t place  all the blame on the roads.  I’m on the southern bank of the Brisbane River,  and right over there is the northern bank and   also a lady who forgot how to walk or something. Now, while I could swim there, the odds are I’ll   end up being lunch for one of the thousands  of bullsharks that live in the water,   so I’ll have to drive. Because I have to drive,   that 500 metre distance has now become a  30 minute commute. Or I could just walk   over this bridge but that would be too easy. Essentially what I’m trying to say is that a   man with no arms or eyes could do a better  job of creating a city plan than whatever   absolute fuckwit designed this giant,  inedible plate of concrete spaghetti.  Unlike Melbourne which is beset by Boulevards,  Brisbane is basically bereft of them,   and if you've ever wondered why such a  monster dong of a city has these narrow   little bottlenecks everywhere, the answer is  because people in the 19th century were stupid. Queensland didn’t even exist when the  city was founded, so the concept of   Brisbane becoming a bustling beta city was,  much like today, completely unbelievable.  The first settlers laid out a grid of narrow  streets for the CBD but the rest of the city   became a bit of a free-for-all and I guess  the early city planners that came here took   one look at the hills and though fuck this,  I’m going back to Melbourne because if you   look at the city now, it’s a fucking mess. It’s a capital city that was never designed   to be a capital city, but that wouldn’t be such  an issue if the city had good public transport,   and guess what - it doesn’t. Thanks to the city’s low density,   trains in Brisbane don’t serve all that much of  the population which means all they’re really good   for is providing convenient places for crackheads  to have seizures next to four year olds. But if trains turn you off don’t worry, because  there’s a ferry to whisk you away on the water.  If you’ve ever been assaulted by an eshay on one  of Brisbane’s trains and thought to yourself,   “hmm, you know what this needs? More  nausea and vomiting,” then my friend,   this is your mode of transport. So effective is their coverage   that they can take you anywhere in  the city that you’d want to go so   long as it’s within a 5km radius of  the CBD and on the Brisbane River. And I’d like to say you could  escape all this nonsense in   the city centre itself but that would be a lie. Thanks to an historically extreme lack of interest   in preserving heritage buildings, the CBD has been  transformed into this aggressively dull mixture of   skyscrapers and fuckin real estate agents. Even when it’s full of people, the main   mall is still so boring that it  literally puts people to sleep.  And I mean sure, newer buildings are starting to  use a bit more architectural flare but as is par   for the course in this city, there’s always  something behind the facade that ruins it. On the western side of the CBD this big,  bulbous casino is being built which is   a piece of critical infrastructure direly  needed in our current cost of living crisis.  You do have to admit that it’s a very impressive  structure though, with its very own bridge to   ferry people from South Bank straight to its  blackjack tables and a gaping hole between two   massive cheeks that you’re only allowed to access  if you throw money at it, just like your mum. But unlike your mum, I don’t get paid when I  suck off truckers behind a servo so I don’t have enough disposable income to gamble. I mean, if I did I’d probably spend most of   it starting a grassroots campaign to force the  government to demolish the Grey Street Bridge.  Just look at it. I can’t stand this bridge.  They could have built it like the Walter Taylor  Bridge which is notable for the fact that people   used to live in its pylons like a shit version  of Round The Twist, but they built this instead.  This is the AU Falcon of bridges - it gets the job   done just fine but holy shit it’s ugly. If you put all the bridges of Brisbane   into a classroom this bridge would be the  one sitting at the back eating boogers.  You wanna know which bridge would  be at the front getting a gold star? This one - the Kurilpa Bridge, which  for some reason everyone else hates.  But not me. I fucking love this bridge.  Wanna know why? No? Well, I’ll tell you anyway. The bridge was opened in 2009 and was  built using the principles of tensegrity,   by which a structure is held up using the forces  of compression inside a structure under tension.  It might look like a group of hill’s hoists having   a gang bang but each cable and tube  is integral to the entire structure.  During the building of it, every single component  had to be perfectly made, down to the millimeter,   otherwise it could have halted the entire project. It is a masterpiece of engineering and if you   think that the Alibaba Sydney Harbour Bridge  is more impressive than this giant monument   to bondage then you’re either blind or a  bird because I’m pretty sure birds would   always prefer the Story Bridge due to the  fact that there are more cars to shit on. But come Friday evening, the birds clear out  anyway because just north of the bridge is   Fortitude Valley, a smorgasbord of buggery  and Brisbane’s prime destination for drunk   18-year-olds, coked-out FIFO workers and people  who have just been released from Wacol prison.  It’s a sight to behold and also one of the most  horrifyingly unpleasant places you could possibly   hope not to be, and for most people older than  30, partying on the Gaza Strip would be a more   appealing way to spend an evening than stepping  foot on the valley’s piss soaked pavement.  It’s a bloody valley alright - a culture valley. A valley of degeneracy and vice.  And you know what, when I was an  18 year old, I fucking loved it. You’d never know what a night  would hold in the Valley.  Would a stranger pick a fight with you? Would someone throw a pot   plant off an 18th storey balcony? I mean, it’s all possible when you’re young.  But as people grow and change over the  course of decades, so too do cities.  They evolve so slowly that you don’t notice  day-to-day, until one day you wake up and   it’s 20 years later, and the same city  you knew as a kid has evolved into this   weird tangled mess of problems, a process  that you can’t remember ever seeing start. But the truth is, it never really started.  Brisbane’s always been a mess. You’re just getting older. I think of Brisbane the same way I think  of cats - cats are assholes, they know it,   they don’t give two squirts about what you think  of it, and you can’t help but love ‘em for it.  Brisbane can be boring and ugly and messy, but  it’s never going to change that, and even if   it could, it wouldn’t care what you think. And that’s why every Australian, no matter   who they are, secretly loves this city. It’s the bad boy of Australian capitals,   the black sheep of the family, and there’s nothing  Aussies love more than a true blue underdog. Look, what I’m trying to say here  is that at the end of the day,   Brisbane’s got its good bits and its bad bits. But like it or not, if Brisbane wasn’t shit,   it wouldn’t be Brisbane. And you know what?  I’ll be damned if it isn’t the  best shit city in the entire world. And now, a haiku Stop calling it Brisvegas It is nothing like Las Vegas Kindly shut the fuck up