There were three things that Charlene despised.
The first were frauds, the seemingly never ending line of people pretending to be something they were not, doing things they hadn’t, telling her about achieving things they either exaggerated or, more often than not, had never actually happened.
The second was hipsters, including (but not exhaustively) bearded men in sandals, women who did two (or more) kisses on the cheek, those who disliked anything mainstream out of, what they alleged to be, principle, anyone who wore anything ironically, anyone who did anything ironically, waiters who said “mate” or “dude”, people who smoked roll up cigarettes or pipes and anyone who opened a conversation by telling her the last gig they went to in some suburban underground (read “shit”) venue.
They also happened, in the most part, to largely be frauds.
The final one was the word c**t. Charlene had a difficult relationship with this word. Firstly it was an aggressive, nasty, often degrading word used by misogynistic under-sexed arse holes and comedians desperate to dig themselves out of a hole with extremes of language. Secondly, there were points when, upon meeting a fraud or hipster it happened to be the only word with the required punch to deter and scare them away in one spitting venomous moment. This naturally caused somewhat of a dilemma.
This left her, at this exact moment, on a Monday evening at 9.15pm in Chino’s bar (and occasional disco and Chinese restaurant), stood next to an ironically bearded man talking at her about the last obscure band he saw in an underground (read “shit”) venue explaining how he stepped in on lead guitar when the guitarist had failed to show.
So Charlene stood up from the table, downed the rest of her pint, looked around and left, never to return.