27th century hedonism

I’ve never been to a strip club. Okay, that’s not completely true; there was this one time in Prague in 2006 when I stumbled into one accidentally and was mistaken for a stripper. But now I’m off topic. I only bring up strip clubs because there’s one around the corner from my house in Brunswick. In flashing pink neon it announces itself nightly to passersby on Sydney Rd: Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club, Erotic Ultra Lounge. That’s right, it’s not that the lounge is ultra erotic; it’s actually an ‘ultra lounge’. I imagine that were I to enter drunkenly one Monday evening, driven into the affordable nethers of a Sunshine stripper by one too many irritating Commerce students in my politics lecture, I would find the ultra lounge decked out with the marvels of the 27^th century, ready to launch from the Northern suburbs of Melbourne into suborbital flight at a moment’s notice. But if its garish exterior does indeed hide a futuristic ‘pleasure node’, the overweight bouncers and the sad-looking men congregating outside to smoke in the cold give nothing away. For the seemingly innocent functional change of adverb to adjective, ultra, I can but dream.

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