I 🤎 hume highway (ft. bush piss)

i'm in me moom's car

Good evening cherished townsfolk!

pov holding you against your will and forcing you to taste test my bolognese sauce as i wear a $7 target dress and a flower clip that i found on the side of the road in my hair while taking photos on photobooth, please consider this my legal statement that if I die, I do not grant anyone access to the reprehensible imagery in that desktop application

Welcome to the first company correspondence of twenty twenty-four. Hope y’all had an equal part restorative and debaucherous December. I took a hallowed social media hiatus to heal my attention span and pre-carpel tunnel thumb. This was meant to come out las naigh (the text here was: “I couldn’t help blowin me load loov & being here a day early!”) but I forgot to press the ‘send’ button like a true goose.

Good to be back no less. 😌

I spent the season in Victoria, mostly horizontal on my parent’s couch playing Mario Kart and Guess My Fart™️ (GMF) with my older sister. If I could create my own heaven, there would be a designated GMF room. Everyone’s invited and participation is mandatory. How it works, if you’re unfamiliar, is that you get a fart ready then everyone in the room has to make the noise they think it will be with their mouth, then you let the cannon loose. It’s better than UNO. And I’m a bonafide Draw Four freak!

The end of my festive season is always definitive, as it’s observed with the drive back to Sydney along the Hume Highway. Tonight, I present to you the ultimate guide to surviving the 880km drive solo.

---

The power, passion and pitfalls of the journey made themselves known in full force the first time I did the drive in 2020.

Like most other sane homo sapiens, I avoid public bathrooms at all costs. If you think the average public toilet is gross, the numerous stalls that dot the Hume Highway are a collective abomination. They emit an especially foul, acrid-piss-scented aura that reeks so vividly I can conjure it with a single thought, That’s So Raven-style.

I therefore patented the one and only way one should wee on the highway: The Double Door Dash. You pull over (preferably in a gravel area off-road), pull your pants down between both the opened passenger and rear doors and do number ones. Voila, you are shielded from oncoming and outgoing traffic and free to pee. What’s more, the maneuver doubles as a glute stretch after sitting on your dumptruck (or flatpack in my case) for numerous hours:

Unfortunately, one hour after inventing this tactic, my borrowed Corolla began to sputtle and roll to a halt. I experienced every road tripper’s worst nightmare – I ran out of fuel. Who does that? It was fucked up! Thankfully, I was in the left lane (respectful) so I trailed off with the hazards on. Three hours and three hundred dollars later, with the help of an insurance company representative with a billycan of petrol, I was back on the road. I’ve since learnt my lesson and that a full tank is worth more than an empty bladder, bush piss or otherwise!

---

Flash forward to 2024. With eight more trips under my belt, I feel close to mastering the journey. I always opt to go the ride alone. It feels cosmic and emotional to me. You know how you sometimes cry on a plane… it’s like that, but you can stop at your chosen fast-food establishment whenever you please.

The Hume Highway ain’t known for its scenic beauty. It’s long, flat and straight. It looks the same from the front and the back: utility manifest. If you do dare look in your rearview mirror, you’ll likely only see a Land Cruiser up your ass. It’s always a farken Land Cruiser! What do they feed you guys? Please sort out your sexual fantasies, because ramming the backside of my Hyundai clearly isn’t doing it for you.

always with the fkn bullbar. PLEASE

Anyhoo. There was a little stretch of respite from the onslaught of asphalt that brought me to literal tears. I had just passed Canberra (Toto unaccounted for) and suddenly found myself surrounded by mountains. All around me were these gorges and rocks and heaps of trees and the light was dappling. It was so strangely glorious (I’m not a major nature person) that tears welled up in my eyes. I had been pretending to smoke out the window with a perfume tester less than five minutes prior so it was good to finally feel something real. I didn’t have a full breakdown worthy of queueing up my trusty The O.C. Playlist, so I moved on, asking Siri to please “play Troye Sivan Got Me Started” to resurrect the vibe.

---

In between scream-singing Don’t Stand So Close To Me by The Police and multiple phone calls cut short by dogshite reception, I devoured one single podcast episode.

I say ‘devoured’ because I consider listening to even one podcast all the way through a feat. I’m not cut out for podcasts. I’ve hosted four in my lifetime but really all I want to do is listen to extreme-BPM-level pop music and pretend I’m Britney Spears 😭

If I am going to endure a podcast, I want it to be educational or highly produced. I like ABC Conversations for the latter, Huberman Lab for the former (personality trait).

A day before skipping town, a friend o’ mine suggested I listen to a podcast where Rick Rubin is interviewed about his creative process. For the longest time, I thought Rick Ruben was Rick Ross but he isn’t, he is Rick Rubin. He is one of the world’s most storied and successful music producers. He is a kook of the highest order– he’s basically always barefoot and has a recording studio called ‘Shangri-La’ that is completely white (floors, walls, everything) so as not to influence the artists’ creative process.

Ok those cushions look beige

He works with a major spectrum of artists and has done so since the ‘80s – Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Limp Bizkit, Shakira, Kanye West, Ed Sheeran, Lady Gaga, Angus & Julia Sto– OMG.

I just read that he produced ‘Mr Hanky The Christmas Poo’ AKA the greatest South Park song of all time!

This song means so much to me.

So, this is the podcast he guested on:

I was sceptical of this listen at first – the title is clickbait manifest and the royalty-free extremely corporate conference inspirational music made my bum tingle. But I stuck around and thought the host was brilliant. Listening along, he asked Rubin every question I wanted answered – at the right time, respectfully. And listened to the answers.

Rubin was really honest and generous with his answers, never dodging them politician-style or waffling on like a waiter talking about tonight’s special, which is always an obscure fish in a broth I instinctively loathe.

When asked who the most “musically gifted artist” he’d ever worked with was, I thought he would keep mum, but instead he said one of them was Santana. “The first time I was in the studio with Santana and he started playing the guitar, it felt like ‘this is coming from another planet’ … it was a transcendent experience.” He named a few other musicians, noting that one drummer could “make anything interesting the way he plays it.”

I was really taken by the concept, that two people could play all the same notes with the same level of skill but one just feels different. I asked Siri to play Into The Night (ft. Chad Kroeger) by Santana to test it out:

Chills up my spine! Body rolls and gyrations at 110km an hour ✔

The main takeaway from the podcast for me tho was his belief that an artist does their best work when they are doing what they like. Sounds so cliche and obvious, but following your intuition is a muscle. It’s easy to be swept into doing things you think people will like instead of doing what you like!

It makes sense too – if you do something you don’t 100% like and it flops, it’s truly horrendous. Big ‘going away to be with Bort in the attic’ areas. But if you do something you love and it flops? Well, the experience of making it was fun and that is the stuff of life ✨

That’s the company’s modus operandi of 2024. Finding and following the gut feeling. If you listen to that podcast, please reply to this email and let me know what you think of it!

May this year bring you everything and more.

Be well.
Froomy x

P.S. I was kinda lying in that monster energy drink review… I finished the whole can. I think that’s why I cried going past the trees.