No More Comedy

This afternoon/night I went to the last show of the year at 100% Nuts in Brunswick and had a great gig with a bunch of other crew. By some mysterious planetary alignment a bunch of random punters actually showed up all within about ten minutes of the show starting and made a decent-sized crowd for us to perform to so that was nice. Damian cut off his dreads as the opener and I bought a BLT for twelve bucks which I really shouldn't have done, but did anyway. A delightful afternoon, no matter who you ask.

What sucks now though – and I only realized this about twenty minutes ago as I was sitting at the tram stop writing a new joke that had come into my head on the quiet eleven pm walk down Victoria Parade – is that there is no more comedy for the rest of the year!!! Today was my last gig for 2012... well, my last gig of material anyway. I don't think I can accurately express how fucked that feels to all of the non-comedian daywalkers who read this blog... and I'm sure there are HORDES of you. Oh yes.

But seriously though, I now have AT LEAST two weeks with no gigs and no stage time. Where will I get validation? The situation is seriously dire, I'm shaking, my mouth is dry, I'm not looking forward to the pain. I was writing this joke and thought of a callback I can do in the middle of it that references some other shit and works really well with a joke I've been doing recently and I was getting all excited and happy with myself when I realized... holy fuck, I'm not going to get a chance to even TRY this on stage until like the first or probably more realistically, second week of January. Jesus Fuck. That's so far away, and no doubt I'm going to be writing a fucking BUNCH of material over the Christmas break, and now there's going to be a massive back-log, and the joke that I just wrote – which I am actually really happy with, and I know has legs – will possibly get lost in this massive stretch of time between today – my last gig of the year – and my first of the new year. The Kieran Butler Roast is on Wednesday, and then the stage is taken away as well. There's nothing after that until the new year is back in swing... god damn it... oh god... oh... oh... oh... I don't know what to say about this. Where to go? What can I do? Nothing is the answer, absolutely nothing.

It's cool that I've fallen so happily into comedy and am still enjoying it and have the same drive after going pretty hard at it for about six months... I would never have expected myself to become so dedicated to doing something as I have become... I really love my life here.

After the 100% Nuts gig at Bridie O'Rielly's I went with Millie, a friend from doorknocking days back in Adelaide that has spent the last five months in the outback working and has just returned to civilization, to the Comic's Lounge to catch the highly-hyped and very talked-about Dov Davidoff perform his last Melbourne gig. He was seriously good... like seriously fucking brilliant. It was weird though, I mean I watched a bit of his stuff on YouTube this week after everyone was talking about how good he is and how every comic absolutely had to get down to the Comic's Lounge and catch him. Normally I take the advice on seeing shows that those guys give out with a grain of salt because I know they like to get butts on seats and will oversell comics to do it... but the amount of raving that went around about this guy was next fucking level, so I thought I'd better get down. It ended up being a coin-toss that decided it, but still, we went down and got in with some free tickets I had buried at the bottom of my bag.

The stuff I'd seen on YouTube hadn't excited me too much, because it seemed to be mostly pandering towards the kind of mass-appeal audience demographic that has produced half of the outstandingly adequate Comedy Central specials of recent times... this guy just seemed like another mildly talented US comedian talking about work, sex and his silly parents. After a few of the jokes that I recognized from the YouTube stuff though he got into some political gear and some other really interesting personal stuff, and I liked the direction he was taking a lot to be honest, I really enjoyed the second half of his set. I mean, I was always going to enjoy it, it was never going to be a bad set or anything. I am under no delusions about sub-standard comedians making it onto Comedy Central or anything like that – I know it requires a massive level of talent to get that far and so to see a guy who has had an hour special perform live is always going to be a captivating and ultimately funny experience, but I wasn't expecting anything too interesting other than a few clever punchlines and charismatically delivered dick jokes.

He started on the introspection though and I really started listening... the lame thing was though, and it was clear that he could feel it too, as soon as he started down on the stuff that was really interesting and actually felt like it was going somewhere new, the audience stopped digging it. At the start of his set, Dov made a few jokes about girl's tits and the first black guy that ever fucked a white girl saying 'look what I found'... that kind of predictable shit. The audience ATE IT UP. They fucking LOVED it, and I let out a small chuckle. But later on when it got a little more challenging, you could feel people switching off. Are we so impatient and stupid as a society that we need any original ideas to be so carefully couched and presented on a silver platter between easily-digestible sex jokes? Has comedy really been reduced to how many laughs we can get per minute? Is that what we want our art form to become? It really worried me to watch this comic who clearly knew what he was doing go up on stage, kill it with dumb material, and then lose his audience with the clever stuff, because it made me think: if this guy can't grab them, then what fucking chance do any of us have?

I went into the gig sceptical about the quality of the comic I was going to see, and expecting a wry smile and a shrug of the shoulders. I came out having realized that the comedians are not the problem, the audiences are – we are, every time we decide to go for safe, sensible vanilla instead of stretching ourselves and giving someone the opportunity to challenge us. That's a scary thought guys, because I don't want to be listening to dick jokes for the rest of my life, and I sure as fuck don't want to be telling them either.

Peace, Taco.

The Last Two Weeks of the Year

One thing that really annoys me about word processing programs is the way that they have developed to be so complex that half of the subtle formatting options seem to auto-adjust, and arbitrarily change without warning. When I write my blog, I write each entry on a new page in the same document, and the formatting is always the same: date, double space, then start writing. Lately though, pressing enter in this particular document has started making a wider space than before, and so I've had to start using shift+enter to make my line breaks instead of just pressing enter. I know it's not a big deal, definitely nothing to hunger strike over, but it's a part of my life, and if I don't say something, who will?

I've been thinking about this drinking thing next year again – I feel like the pressure is really on now, because on one hand, this year has been the most productive year ever and I know that a lot of that is down to the fact that I haven't been drinking much. Based on that argument alone, I should continue with my fifty-two days of drinking a year in 2013. On the other hand, though, not drinking this year has taught me valuable lessons and I've developed the ability to say no, and refrain from over-indulging in my favourite vice. I think maybe I've even tempered my previously fawning reverence for liquor, and if I were to go back to not having self-imposed limits on my alcohol intake, I think I could employ these lessons myself. I just want to recapture a bit of spontaneity in my life instead of having to plan every outing like a prison break. Lame.

My alarm just went off: I have two alarms set every day – one at ten-forty am that says 'Write', and one at five-twenty pm that says 'Write you lazy fuck!' – and then there are the other ones reminding me to pay rent, call people, be awake or do my washing. My life is so ordered, or rather, I try so hard to make it ordered. But for every alarm that goes off, my threshold for ignoring these reminders increases, thus making me all the less likely to take notice of any URGENT NOTICE that I might have given myself for that day.

Fuck I hate this double enter thing.

The Kieran Butler Roast is coming up on Wednesday, and also, ding ding, ta-da ta-da, Rachel, my absentee girlfriend is flying back into Melbourne from places afar on Tuesday. Then on Thursday morning I'll be grabbing my dirty hobo mitts around a couple of mushroom caps and valiums for the ten-hour bus ride to Adelaide – The Christmas Party awaits. My good friend Rouse's twenty-second birthday is on Friday and against the odds he's made it this far without getting his ass locked up so we're off to celebrate in style by attending the same club that those fuckers smash their heads at every week. That sounds sarcastic, like I'm not excited, but really I am... next weekend is going to be sick.

So also tomorrow (Sunday) I've got a spot at 100% Nuts in Brunswick which should be a lot of fun, and I'm catching up with Millie, a British girl I worked with at AIDA Promotions in Adelaide – the job that pushed me over the edge of sanity and into this mixed-up experiment in the first place. She's been living in the outback for as long as I've been living here in Melbourne, but she's finally emerged from the dirty shrub she's spent the last four months sleeping in to wash her hair and rejoin civilization. She'll be at the show on Sunday as well, which is nice... Everything is coming together for the last two furious, high-octane weeks of the year. Last night at work I found out that our bar is closed for New Year's Eve because we only managed to get a license until one am... I was planning on working NYE for the fat stacks and free booze, but now that the decision has been made for me, I am WIDE EYED AND JUBILANT!! So many possibilities. So many opportunities. Christmas. New Years. Fuck the resolution, someone hand me a beer right now.

Okay, maybe don't... I've toyed with the idea of dashing a whole year's worth of restraint and self-control just for the joyous thrill of doing it. Smashing my own arrogance and destroying something beautiful... fuck that would be awesome. But no, I'm NOT going to do that, I have four more drinking days left and sixteen days to use them, fuck man that's not even hard, this really is not a challenge anymore. I probably won't make the final decision on whether I'm doing 52 Days I 2013 until about March... or maybe I'll try and put it off until later... and later, and later again. Who can tell at this stage? I'm just sitting at my computer, here and now, fingers fluttering and eyes pupils dilating in the darkness. The blinds are drawn, my shirt is off, the floor is shaking from techno. I think I'm going to cook some bacon.

Peace, Taco.

I Don't Care

My eyes are heavy and my shirt is on the floor, it's hot tonight in Richmond. I'm listening to this album called 'Poor Boy/Lucky Man' by some guy called Asaf Avidan and his band, The Mojos. I had never heard of these strange people before today, and I never would have if I hadn't met a couple of people on my tour today, had lunch with them, and then told them to add me on Facebook. The guy added me first, and then the girl. I checked both of their about sections, (god, this is getting a bit to 'twentyfirst century social interaction' isn't it? Ugh) noticing in the girl's, whose name I refuse to write because I cannot pronounce it, that she keeps a blog. So I went onto this blog, and saw a few quotes – some really nice stuff actually, but the thing that really caught my attention was a song called 'Your Anchor' by the crew I'm listening to right now.

So I downloaded their album, and I'm listening to it, and because the only torrent (jargon, jargon, jargon) I could find of theirs was their discography, I have their other two albums as well. Maybe I'll give them a listen. This music, this vaguely folky, rocky, guitary kind of thing... oh look, a horn has started playing, lonely over an acoustic guitar riff. That's quite nice. I feel that this music is passionate and impressively raw – someone cried over this I think. Someone at least shed some bodily fluid. Someone cares a lot about the sound that is coming out of my speakers right now, and I'm really making an effort to be that person that cares as well.

Fuck I wish I could find something to be passionate about, I really feel like I have all this pent up energy inside of me, but nothing to throw it onto... and I can't just 'use it up' – it doesn't work like that. I'm sitting here, listening to this undoubtedly beautiful music, but I'm finding it really hard to relate it to anything real. What are these people singing about? What machine are they raging against? I feel like I'm almost at the point where Winston ends up at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four when he has fought all his life against the creeping tendrils of the party and their mind-controlling propaganda machine, but then just as his final opportunity for redemption is at hand – when the party finally has him killed – he finds it within himself to submit to them and become one with his meaningless, lobotomized contentment. I feel like I am so close to saying, “well, that's it, who cares if things are bad for some people, who cares if I'm being marketed to, who cares if I have designer products thrown at me every day – what if I like it like that?”

I feel like I have to get angry at things, or be upset about something, in order to 'find a voice' in comedy – but what if I don't see the world like that? Fuck, I know this is even wrong to think, but what if I see the world as an inherently happy place? That is such a confusing statement to have just made – look at what I just said. Look at what you just said Aidan. “This is wrong, but I think things are good.” WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THAT? But apparently everything really is fucked, and as an intelligent, rational, observant human being, I'm supposed to notice that and be angry about it. And if I don't, then I'm naïve. Stupid. I'm enjoying my life, but I know that there are so many people out there that aren't – they don't even have the opportunity to enjoy anything. The vast majority of the people in this world are born, feel hungry, and then they die – that's a Louis CK joke, and it's so terribly true. But I'm having a good time though... fuck... what am I supposed to do about that? Do I stop having a good time? Should I be angry about the fact that I'm having a good time? Or should I just be happy with the fact that I've drawn the lucky number in life's ridiculous lottery and continue on with my easy life and simple pleasures, trying not to think about the writhing hell that continues to burn daily in most of the rest of the world?

I want to end this by just deferring to another one of my, 'oh well this is too hard to think about now, let's all have doughnuts' punchline/endings. The ones I'm so good at writing that tie everything up in a little bow... but I shouldn't. I can't. Fuck. This stuff really doesn't work like that. I just don't know what else to do... I can't offer myself a solution, I want to care about the bad things that are happening in the world, but every day as I wake up and find myself feeling good about everything, I am stared in the face by the harsh truth of the matter – I really don't care. I just really don't. What am I supposed to do about that? I hate my indifference, but it's mine, and I'm so indifferent that I don't even care. Catch 22. The ultimate trap. Staring truth in the face, it hurts, or at least, I know it should. Help me, someone, I am stuck in a paradox.

Peace, Taco.

Failed Organization

Directly to my left stuck to the wall with Blu-Tack is an A4 piece of paper with a bunch of dates and corresponding dollar amounts listed on it, which are divided into two columns: 'spent' and 'earned'. This depressed, abandoned piece of written record is just the latest in a long line of failed attempts at organization that stretches as far back into my past as I can remember. I'm always trying to order things like this, and I always give up. Half-finished projects and notebooks full of meaningless numbers haunt me from the bottom drawer of my bedside table. Why?

The column on the left of this thing hanging on my wall is the 'spent' column, and the one on the right is 'earned'. Basically, from what I can tell after deliberately ignoring it for the last two weeks, the idea of this little table was that I would write down every dollar I spent on the left, and every one I made on the right, but I think the catch was that only money that didn't pass through my bank account would be included... the idea behind this was that, of my two jobs, one pays in cash and one pays into my account. So my cash job would fund spending money, and my other job would be for rent, which is direct debited on the fifteenth of the month. Since I make roughly $250 a month more from my legit job than I need for rent, I should be able to save $250 a month in my account, and so if the 'spent' column equalled the 'earned' column on this little sheet, then I'd be $250 up at the end of each month.

It was a good system, in theory, but there are millions of variables that always contribute to these things not working out. I won't go into any of them here because we all know that to organize the finances of a twenty-one year old male requires at least a bachelor in some sort of accounting as well as a keen readiness to accept mysterious syphoning of money into nefarious late-night/early-morning frivolities. That having been said though, surely I should have been able to stick to the system I'd devised for myself for longer than – hold up, I'll just read the dates on the paper... – nineteen days. Jesus christ, that's woeful.

Nineteen days of diligence... this reminds me of when I was a kid and I used to race marbles down my Hot Wheels car tracks two at a time, pitting the marbles against each other in a sixty-four-marble elimination competition and studiously recording the scores as one beat another and another and another and eventually the grand final was contested by the remaining two. I had massive sheets and tables and a track that extended across my room and I would draw up the fixtures in preparation for the competition, and the games would begin. Inevitably though, the four that ended up making it all the way through to the finals were my four favourite marbles, and the gold one always won because I thought it looked prettiest – I was never one to accept the outcomes of pure chance. I could never sit by and watch my world be ruled by chaos... now that I'm twenty-one though, controlling reality is hardly as simple as giving old 'goldie' a little nudge at the start of the race. Shit is real in here... shit is DEEP.

I do it all the time: my system for recording comedy and blog ideas is split into two books, the distinctions between which I have yet to be able to confidently define... and each book is split into a front and back section, which are also separated in an equally arbitrary fashion. This one has jokes... that one has premises... but then this one has a few premises that are sort of half in joke format... and that one has stuff that's slightly more developed... and this one has stuff I tried last night... but that one has a few bits and pieces in it that belong in the other book but I'd left it at home that day... that one has something about Christopher Hitchens next to a shopping list... this one has poems on the middle page. It all means NOTHING. USELESS. DROSS. Swear words.When I go to find my new bit about how my housemate owes me eight beers, I know which book I wrote it in, because I just remember... as much as I wish that I had a system, so I didn't have to remember anything, I don't. So to the casual observer, it may look like my life is arranged neatly in a simple system that allows me to work at optimal efficiency, but this casual observation is a fallacy. My shit is fucked. I don't know where anything is. I'm admitting it. Right now. I'M COMING APART AT THE SEAMS!!!

I don't know what else to write here, because I didn't plan this piece of confused word-jumble out before I wrote it. I guess I should end with a funny quip – something to tie everything together nicely and make me feel good again, so that I can accept the mess that is my bedraggled existence with a smile and a flick of my long, flowing hair. Quips... jokes... funny chucklings... if only.

Peace, Taco.

Waiting for Inspiration

I don't really know what to write about today, or this week, I feel like my juices are a bit used up at the moment... ew that sounds weird, I kind of want to backspace that, but I won't. Unblinking honesty, that's what I'm all about. Breaking down boundaries. I'm such a fearless crusader of truth.

It's weird that I want to be a comedian, or a writer – something where I get to have views, and then express them skilfully to a large audience through whatever medium I choose. I want to be this thing, but right now I don't really feel like I have very strong views on anything much. Like I care about shit like global warming, and music, and people being free, but I feel kind of abstracted from these problems because I live such a comfortable life... but this comfortable life that I live is what is currently allowing me to develop my craft (that's apparently what I'm doing here) as a writer and comedian, and this period of development right here is what will give me the voice to say things that I want to say, when the time comes that I figure out what those things are.

It still sometimes feels like I'm cheating myself out of real living though; sitting around here writing trivial little jokes and churning out random thousand-word chunks of writing. What am I working towards? Just the abstract goal of 'being a comedian'? 'Being a writer'? What kind of goal is that? I have always said that I want to be someone who says something meaningful with the things that I do, not just someone who does them for the sake of doing them – these things, flimsy semblances of life direction that they are, are only worthy goals if I have something worthwhile to say. But right now I feel dangerously ambivalent and hazy in my convictions. I don't feel like I care very much about anyone except myself, and I don't like that, but I don't know how to change it either.

Five months ago when I moved here I was sure that I had found the thing in my life that I wanted to pursue, and I still believe that, but I still wouldn't say I have definitely found something to be passionate about. I think the difference between a hack comedian or writer and a great one is as small as the strength of the convictions and beliefs they express through their chosen medium. Any hack comedian can talk about politics, or religion, or suicide, and any great writer can put down forty-thousand words about the differences between men's and women's toilets... these simple distinctions between topics are not what make careers trivial. An artist's work becomes trivial when they are only expressing superficial feelings – feelings that they know they are supposed to express, and may even be aware that they want to be expressing, but they don't really, truly have. Bill Hicks wasn't an amazing comedian because he talked about politics and conspiracy theories in the second half of his career, he was an amazing comedian because he actually cared about something. So it's all well and good for people to say, “you just have to speak from your heart and speak about what you actually care about” – that's obviously very good advice. That's not the hard part though. Everyone is speaking from their heart, all the time, every day people say what they really think and say it with conviction because they don't want to be misunderstood. The hard part though, is finding something to care about that strikes so deeply within yourself – myself – that saying what you really think is no longer simply a monotonous exercise in honesty, it actually becomes important.

When I find something to care about – like something that really, instinctively makes me give a fuck – I know I'll stop peppering my writing and comedy with disclaimers about how 'I don't really know where this is going' and 'I guess that's what I'm trying to say'. Conviction will come, at least I hope it will. Fuck, I am sick of waiting.

“Don't wait for your dreams, Taco! Go out and get them!”
Fuck off dickhead, I'm busy watching rap battles on YouTube.

Peace, Taco.

Now We're Fucked

Okay, so what's this about then? I feel a little shit all of a sudden. I feel a bit strange. I got a call today from Ben who is one of the guides for Peek Tours, the walking tour company that I've been getting about half of my paycheque from for the last few months. He said he had to cancel his tour this morning because he only had two people rock up, and when he went to check out the competition (I'm Free Tours) their guy had like twenty people... that's a lot of people for a Monday. That's worrying.

They must have been doing something in the month or two that they've been running that has given them these numbers, but what that thing is, I am absolutely clueless... I've never even SEEN THEIR FLYERS!?! But the fact of the matter now, is that they have fucking WAY MORE people, and we are left with barely any base from which to make money. This is stressful because tours is really the main base of my income right now, and add to that the fact that I've just faced this week, that I'm going to have to quit Yah Yah's after the new year. I won't rant and spit here right now because I don't think that'd help anything, but to put it plainly, I can't work in that place anymore. I hate it. It is fucking terrible.

So let's look at how things are now then... in about a week, my two sole sources of income now have a limited life, one due to work conditions, and one due to competition. Fuck. FUCK. !!! Things were going way to smoothly... I know I'll be able to get work at another bar with Sean around February when his new project kicks off, but until then, and until the final security of my twenty-second birthday rolls in (twenty-two is the age when I can finally claim centrelink... but more on that well of shame when it rolls around in two months' time) … (THIS PIECE IS INCOHERENT!!)

Until February, I'm going to be waiting in the wings, basically. I'm going home for Christmas, but now that I'm faced with it and the looming rent deadline on the fifteenth, I don't know how I'm going to be able to get the coin together unless one final gambit pays off... Tomorrow I'm going to go down to the I'm Free tour and suss out their situation. I'm going to have to move fast... I'll have to talk to this guy... ugh... FUCK... I think I'm admitting to myself right now already that I'm going to be jumping shit... FUCK... this sucks so hard. I want to bring the Peek Tours guides over as well and make sure everyone can still keep doing tours... I won't know what the score is until I meet this guy tomorrow and suss him out, and suss out their guides situation.

Shit just got really stressful this week. No more smooth sailing. Oh yeah, I had some gigs yesterday though. Well I say 'gigs', one was ONLY comics, so it was basically a workshop, and for some reason I got really freaked out when I was on stage and bailed... I'm kind of pissed off that I did that, because I could have hung around longer and got some really good feedback on jokes... anyway, that's neither here nor there. I went and did another spot at Voltaire after that and did a new bit which went pretty well, but the recording fucked up so I didn't even get to listen back and see what I could polish up... Ugh.

The getting drunk and partying on Saturday night was really fucking good... but I don't feel like that really matters at this point. It wasn't especially satisfying and felt pretty arbitrary to be honest... like, why am I drinking? Why do I need to go out and party? What have I done to warrant this? It was really lucky that I had the Saturday off work because I would have killed myself if I'd had to go in and had my face spat in for five and a half hours again by... *breathe* … ugh... fuck... breathe, breathe. This ranks as EASILLY the most unreadable and retarded thing I have ever posted. Don't even bother.

Peace, Taco.