Run Away! Join the Circus!

So I was chatting to my brother the other day. The hard-drinking tattooed hippy surfer mohawk mullet brother. Apparently he's joined the circus. I know what you're thinking, "Wow, Rich's brother is a bearded lady?! Cool!" but I'm sorry to disappoint you. It's not that sort of circus. I'm not even sure it's a real circus or if it's his lounge room and an over active imagination. What I am sure of though is that he and a couple of mates appeared on telly the other day doing their fire-breathing, acrobatic, trapeze routine. WTF? Turn on TV. "Hey, there's my brother chatting to Ernie Dingo about the Trapeze". WTF?

My brother and I tend to keep in fairly loose contact, we get along famously but he's a hard-drinking tattooed hippy surfer fire-breathing trapeze TV star. That doesn't leave a lot of time to make phone calls. Although I don't really miss the 3am five minute long drunken blathers I got on the answering machine during the football world cup, I do like the fact that when we get in touch there's usually something to talk about.

Like the other night,
Me: "Hey shithead what'd you do to your leg".
Him: "DOUCHE! I tore a ten by three centimetre gouge out of it on the trapeze board. Been talking to Mum or are you jealous of my fame?"
Me: "Totally jealous, two seconds on a show run by a washed-up actor must have been awesome"
Him: "Stitches, huge scars and TV spots get you laid around here. What you got going for you?!"
...and so forth.

Even when we don't have something to talk about I can usually come up with something cool to torment the little bugger. Last year, when I hadn't heard from him in about 4 months, I decided it was time he should call me. So what'd I do? Well... I took a copy of the Tattoo I'd designed for his left shoulder, a tribalised dragon (I'll put up a pic when I find it), added some other elements to it and printed it onto a T-Shirt. I then sent it to him with a note saying "Found this in a local Surf shop. Man, I hope the money was worth it. I can NOT believe you sold the design". What a surprise, a couple of days later I got a frantic phone call saying that he hadn't sold it and what the hell was he going to do because the reason why he loved the Tat was that it was a one off design. I strung him along for a while, then we laughed and then we caught up like normal. He's a good bloke!

Mind you when I met him at the airport last Christmas I went to pick up his bag and as I bent over he sucker punched me. "That's for the T-shirt!" Ha! Yeah, I had it coming.