The Obituary of David Slack - by David Slack

New Zealand’s most boring adolescent, David Slack, has drowned in his own bile. He was 14 years old.

Devonport’s Peter Pan. The man who never grew up. Young Slack thought he could fool all of the people all of the time when he went around misquoting American Presidents and anyone else he thought was a liberal. Wearing nothing but needlecords, a rictus grin, black turtlenecks, and stare-down-the-barrel-of-the-camera attempts at being a straight-up kind of guy Young Slack became obsessed with Housing Minister Nick Smith, and the zenith of his irony was tweeting such lines as Rachel Glucina is an eminent journalist.

In reality he was just a drip. Wet. The kind which makes a man shake his head and hurry on; begone, playground nuisance hanging around the big guys, trying desperately to be funny! 

There were, of course, those who thought him funny. All drips eventually find each other and  form a puddle – water finds its own level after all. There were other pimple-faced, acne-scarred, squeaky-voiced youth whose balls hadn’t properly dropped, sent outside for gardening duty during choir practice – the Russell's and the Simon's , the Giovanni's and the Damian's, they disappeared into the games sheds to exercise their thumbs and index fingers. Young Slack was thrilled to have pals, as they RATFLTAO at the crude sexist jokes they made about what they’d do with the tall, blonde, leggy, gorgeous girl who only bedded brainy men and rugby players. She stared right through them every time she passed a waft of their Old Spice.   Underage Young Slack could only peer in the window on tippy toe, sipping Fanta passed out furtively to him by the gripper.

Poor Young Slack (RIP) - the most misunderstood of all. A speechwriter – how much lower down the food chain does one writer have to crawl before reduced to penning words for brides and grooms too stupid, or too drunk, or too overwrought perhaps, to write their own speeches on their big day. That’s how Slack made extra pocket money . While his chums were out on their cycles delivering papers, Slack typed away, “I’d like to fank me muvver and me farver.” And Slack mailed out an invoice to the ignorami who, unquestioning, sent cheques by return. 

Alas, poor Young Slack, we did not know you at all, (thank Christ - Ed). He graduated from writing speeches to writing obituaries of people who hadn’t died and then he just RATFLHAO, in a manner in which only someone who knew not the difference between dead and alive could do. He muddled satire with cruelty and in the end it killed him.

But then again perhaps we are too cruel to Young Slack, or should we say, Dead Slack? He was a lawyer (No, he had a law degree, there is a difference - Ed) so that may account for the fact he could not string two words together; at least, words which made any sense at all. To wit, we bring you his most famous work titled “That’s My Cab” (why that heading, we have no idea), immortalised for ever on his Signed, Limited Edition, “Island Life” blog (Surely some mistake? No ‘Life’ in a specialist obit writer? - Ed) :

“The front page of the New Zealand Herald this morning honours the memory of George Bernard Shaw. Unable, it seems, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation, it offers us a long, loving description of Chris Carter’s pink shopping bike and many photos of Shane Jones’ banana seat.”

Hilarious? Laugh? The nation nearly started.

Undeterred, Young Slack tried his luck at multitasking - economic forecasting and pretending not to be a left-leaning pinko:

“You want a Labour government scandal? Here’s a scandal. In the first decade of the new millennium, New Zealanders pretended their houses had become worth twice as much as they were, and borrowed 100 billion to make it true. Now they owe that much to the world’s banks, and the debt is a great albatross around our necks. Our kids will have to find twice as much money to buy a house as they would have ten years ago, but their income will be little more than it would have been 10 years earlier.”

If only Young Slack hadn’t choked on his own poison, the Reserve Bank would have beaten a path to his door in an effort to solve our housing crisis.

Sadly, just before he passed on, Young Slack finally finished the book he’d used Radio New Zealand’s The Panel, Radio Live, and Twitter to harp on about for the past decade, appropriately titled, Bullshit.

Editor - We should never mock the dead. Why has this column run so long? Can it die with Metro?