Butch aka Travis

I know this is a totally unrelated blog, but i find it amusing. Even if no one reads it.

My whole life i have had a love/hate infatuation with fountains. Perhaps its my primal insticts which drive to them, they are after all, a symbol for life, its mans homage to his neanderthal roots, ever city has a fountain, we love our fountains and worship them the same way an Ape worships a waterfall.

However, i seem to have a checkered history with fountains.

When i was in High School i came up with the idea of perhaps pouring some sort of bubble forming mixture into them. In my hope town of Cleveland, Qld, there are 3 fountains on the main street, about 200 meters apart, but they run from the same water flow. Its a man man reservoir just made for these fountains.

SO my friends and I decided to do it one day. I went and stole (yup stole) 20 litres of Industrial Detergent from the back of the Cleveland Kabab shop (they went out of business because they were caught using lettuce they had ‘found’ in a Coles Supermarket Dumpster). I rebottled it in 5 easy to use (and quicker to empty) 4L bottles and we waited.

There was no use just walking up and putting it in, we wanted to do it quick, get the heart rate up. I better add in, that Cleveland is a small bayside town, touristy, always hot, right on the water. There is water everwhere in Cleveland, its a typical small quite baside town, hence the Cops are relativley bored. If they had caught us they would have arrested us no worries.

We worked out a plan, we had to all dress the same, and have numbers on our back, 1,2,3,4,5, I was number 3 which meant when we ran up to the fountain, i was third in line. We also all wore beanies and ski masks. We had scouted the fountain a few days earlier and decided whom would stand where, and what locations would produce the most amount of bubbles.

With all the planning done, we had to do it. We all jumped into my lemon yellow 1980 model Ford Cortina, and put the stereo up loud. We played No Fun At All’s Dont be a Pansy. We found a good place to leave the car so we could get back to it quickly. I parked in the bottle shop car park, out of view from everyone, the car was surrounded by a huge hedge. We all got out, put our beanies on and our ski goggles, and waited. We were all really nervous, the anticipation was fantastic, and we counted to 10 and we ran.

The run was about 50 meters to the fountain. We were in mid flight when Number 1 yelled out “DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?!?!?!” a fantastic lline taken from Starship Troopers. We finally made it to the fountain, which was in an incredibly public area, everyone was watching us in almost small town disbelief, they watched ou every movement, for this was an event that they would one day tell their Grandchildren. We finished pouring the 20L of detergent in the fountain before making rour getaway as quickly as we entered, we were gone, the whole, well conducted plan going to a T was over with a minute.

We made it back to the car, and we drove off somewhere, to take a few minutes to let the endorphins settle down. We waited for 5 minutes and drove back to see our work. We drove down the main street and were shocked to see that nothing had begun to happen, no bubbles, nothing. We drove past a few more times, looking as suspicious as possible and much to our dispair, nothing happened.

We drove off, but as we did, one of the fountains which is connected to the reservoir, and is the third in the line (there are only three fountains, the one we poured the liquid in was the second in the line). The third fountain was bubbling furiously, 3 old men were standing around scratching their heads examining the bubbles. We drove up to see the 1st fountain as were surprised to see it was bubbling as well, then we finally drove back to the main fountain and couldnt see it for all the bubbled pouring out, it was incredible, bubbled covered the fountain, and much to my delight i observed 2 young kids playing in the foam. I had created a happy thing, something that people enjoyed. The crowd of people was impressive, at least 30 people stood in small town disbelief.

I returned later on in the evening to show my dad what we had done, we had to tip toe around because the Cops had shown up and had launched an investigation into the fountain vandals scandal. Hell, we even made the local paper. The bayside bulletin.

After the success nothing could stop us, we hit all the towns around us and their main fountains, Capalaba, Wynnum, Victoria Point, we maintained tradition by doing everything the same as we did the first time, we listened to No Fun At All, we wore ski masks, No. 1 even remebered to always shout out “YOU WANNA LIVE FOREVER?!”, but we soon ran out of fountains, we even did the Cleveland ones again, but we were getting bored. We wanted a big one and we ended up orchestrating a massive attack on Brisbane City’s main fountain, the King George Square. We managed to get out hands on 40L of detergent, the biggest ever, and one Saturday afternoon, just before Xmas we did it, and got away with it, a few days later we did the one at Southbank which was even bigger, and had fantastic success, but we almost got caught, we were chased by a Chubb Security ‘Guard’, but we managed to jump in the Cortina and get out of there.

The King George Square Fountain, There are some spouts which you cant see there.

Why do i bring this all up now? 6 years later? Well, you see, i was at University of Melbourne the other day and again i ran into trouble with a fountain. I ended up accidently pulling out what i thought was a broken peice of metal from the Fountains Overflow Reservoir, only problem was that once i pulled it out, the Fountain did indeed overflow, Rupert thought it was good because it was an RMIT student fucking up UM, but Jennie goes to UM and she thought it was good as well!?

Where to from here? Oh I dont know….. Trafalgar Square maybe?