Adelaide During the Fringe

From Tuesday til Saturday I was in Adelaide seeing friends, Fringe shit, and fam. I planned this trip and bought the tickets pretty much as soon as I got back from my Hometown Christmas last year, but this time around – without everyone having the obligation to spend so much time with their families, and everyone from everywhere being back in town – the trip was way way way way WAY much better. Here's why:

Tuesday I got into town at seven-thirty at night after a brilliant (as always) bus ride involving books, music, and some great ideas and time alone to think. I love those bus rides – there's a reason I always include at least one in each trip home. As soon as I got off the bus I headed straight to the Cranka for some free Tuesday night comedy and caught up with Ross Voss, Josh Cruze, and saw some great comedians who I hadn't seen before. Jesus, what a refreshing change seeing people's sets that I haven't seen ANYTHING from. Being around the same comics all the time in Melbourne, while obviously lovely as it gives a great sense of community, can become exhausting because whenever someone has a good set, you already know more or less how the set is going to go. I can still recognize when someone has done a good set because they have performed well or really captured the audience or whatever, but it's rarely THAT exciting to see someone do well if sixty to eighty percent of what they're doing on stage I have seen before. So seeing my open mic contemporaries in Adelaide do their thing was a great break.

Then the Rhino late show that night was awesome – Will Anderson did some great stuff about framing Adam Hills for a murder by hopping away from the crime scene. Then we somehow got into the Artists' Bar. Then we got drunk. Then we went home. By the way 'Home' for this trip was Phil's place in Kent Town, which was a fucking great change in and of itself because it was a ten minute walk from town, and the posse that he lives with are fucking sick. Sick as dawgs.

Wednesday I woke up earlyish with a hangover, me Elle and Leon went to breakfast at ETC which was always one of my favourite Adelaide breakfast spots. We consumed, then I sweated my shit down to the DMV and got my full license. Tick. Then back home, broke into the guys' house through Leon's bedroom window and crashed out for the afternoon under a fan waiting for MA BOIIII S. Rouse to call, but finally having to pay a Twenty-Five-Dorrah cab to his place during rush hour after he was to shit to get out of bed all day. We reminisced over Pool Party (WHOSE PARTY?!!) days in Empire and then I had a gig at the Ed Castle that night where I also met the lovely German, Sarah for the first time after chatting to her for ages on CouchSurfing since mid-year. The gig went okay – good enough, although I felt I performed a really tight set, but the crowd reaction wasn't AS amazing as I would've liked, but I was happy enough – then me, Elle and Josh Wills jumped into the Artists' Bar again after Rouse went home to crash.

Thursday: another hangover, another breakfast, another cruisy afternoon in Kent Town that ended with the most brilliant snap-decision of recent times with me, Phil, Leon and Nick Fuckenwhatever unanimously agreeing in about five seconds to go to the Tap Inn and have beers. After this I went on to dinner with the fam and shaking Dad's hand after his last day of working some shitty job that he's had for the last ten years and moving into semi-retirement at the tender, supple age of forty-five. He now plans to become a stay-at-home wife and paint the house while Mum Dawgz is off making DEM STAX. Now THAT'S Feminism, bitches!

After family dinner I went off to see David Quirk's Fringe show which was fwarking brilliant I have to say, notwithstanding the tech blunder that sort-of ruined the ending. I can forgive that, the show was great, and I still need to write to that dude and tell him how much I liked it because it really was that good... if any of you reading have a chance to see David Quirk's 'Shaking Hands With Danger' at either the Adelaide Fringe (until march 16^th I think?) or the Melbourne International Comedy Festival later this month, do it. Drinking and deep hangs with Lucy at hers, and then the Rhino Room Late Show again capped off my Me Time before I headed to the Botanic to romp some cunts I'd never met before in doubles pool and crash out around three AM watching something I don't remember on the laptop. Or maybe it was music? Three days into this journey I start to get mixed up about details.

Friday played host to another breakfast/lunch thingo at the Austral with Phil and Eliesa, and then meeting up with Sarah again for a CouchSurfers' picnic in the Botanical Gardens. I convinced my new CS friends to join me in jumping the fence into WOMAD that night to see the Cat Empire – I decided to jump even though I had a press pass, a move that infuriated Phil after I lost his pass in a drunken haze later that night, but for which I'm sure he has forgiven me, and will understand. Adrenaline baby. A-dre-na-line. Before WOMAD though, we went to the UniBar for some final nostalgia and I caught up with Sammy B and Chess – DA BOIZ from Immanuel College. We spat the shit over jugs of cider and laughed heartily as if we were seventeen again. I know I'm not really allowed to reminisce that heavily because I'm still only twenty-two, but whatever, fuck you. I remember shit too you old fuck reading this. That's right, you. Old.

After loosing my shit to the Cat Empire (six years since the last time) me and Jaleesa the Dutch girl went to Trashbags in EC and I capped off my stay catching up with the Kings of Hindley St: Johnny Monday, Jason 'Terror Terror' Petersen, Jake Baker, Liam Ball, and a million other cats that were there that I won't start to list off now mainly because I don't remember shit and I'd probably start guessing, and guessing poorly. When I woke up at ten am on Saturday, I looked at my phone and confirmed what I knew instinctively was the case anyway – I had missed my bus. Mum bought me a plane ticket because she's a diamond, and I spent the rest of the day in Glandore, spending some time with my little bro watching Louie off my hard drive, and then driving around with Eliesa in order to make up the loss of the press pass to Phil. I bought the boys a bottle of wine for letting me crash at their place, and then at nine pm, Eliesa drove me to the airport, and an hour later I was inside a flying steel box, soaring over the country on my way back to Melbourne.

So that's why this trip was better than the one over Christmas. Any questions?

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.

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.

I'm Going to get Drunk

I can't fucking wait until tomorrow night. I always put too much stock in these planned evenings, but I guess that's just the way I operate. I'm a schemer. I like to plan things. I like to be in control? Maybe... that could be taking things a little too far. Stop trying to psychoanalyze yourself Tugzy. Chill the fuck out.

I've got work tonight at midnight, as P.U., but this Friday shift doesn't look like being the normal burning drudgery that I wade through every regular weekend because the promise of a whole Saturday of drinking and immorally festive behaviour is looming, bright and hopeful in the distance. Goon is the drink, my friends, and two-dollar-fifty bottles of bitter Chardonnay sit waiting for my thirsty stomach on the shelves of Aldi just one block down Victoria Street. My man Samson Benger is down from Adelaide in one of the rarest random-chance encounters that I have experienced in a long time – the kid has come down for a once-in-a-blue-moon weekend away on the very same weekend that I choose to take my first Saturday off since moving to Melbourne. Stars are aligning and wolves can clearly be heard howling behind the mountains.

The worn-out deck of playing cards that adorn my desk is currently fourty-seven out of fifty-two cards finished, and tomorrow the fifth-last card will be written off. I don't even know how I'm going to contain my excitement after knocking-off of work at five-thirty am... I'm going to have to devise some way of getting to bed. I'll rig a system of pipes up to a bottle of chloroform and hang them from the roof of my bedroom so that a fine mist of knock-out gas will come down in a violent shroud and engulf me bodily upon my return home this morning. I will pay someone to sleeper-hold me when I walk in the door. I'll buy a cryogenic sleep-pod and power it with human tears. I'll... I'll... FUCK! I'm way too excited.

Do you know what it's like working less than twenty hours a week and going to comedy five nights a week to watch people do the thing that you love, and learn from them, and two or three of those five nights you get to do that thing too? Do you know what it's like to spend the majority of daylight hours in any given week writing jokes and stories, and reading brilliant books and browsing facebook and the internet and re-watching old Simpsons episodes? Do you have any fucking idea how brilliant this shit is? But I don't party enough... I really don't... somehow I've managed to trick myself into believing that what I do when I'm not earning money can still be fairly classified as work, and so now that I have given myself this rare opportunity to really get rowdy, I'm so over-ready for the occasion that there is a reasonable chance I'll spoil it by passing out at ten pm anyway? Who can honestly say they've been there? Well everyone, probably, but I bet you were all teenagers huh? I feel like a fucking sixteen year old.

I'm excited, energized, prepared, poised, and anticipant... apparently that's not a word? Fuck off it isn't, that's simple verb-to-noun conversion we're looking at there. Anticipant. Anticipant. An-ti-ci-pant. Fuck off. Good.

Peace, Taco.

This Post is a Little Bit Arrogant but Eeeeh...

Karmon's 'Wowshit' is blasting from down the passage, bass is shaking the floorboards and the fifteen-hundred dollar sound system in our living room is being given its daily workout. I love living with these cats, every week during the day the sunny ambience of the house is inevitably broken when one of the three DJ inhabitants of my Richmond abode decide to jump on the deck s and have a mix. Deep house and techno are the staples of this summer, and while the weed smoke sits heavy under the ceiling and soaks in to the plaster, the pounding bass sends ripples through the air. I sit in my room and write. Listen. Focus.

Then every weekend at sunrise a new horde of loud, obnoxious freaks crawls through our front door and pile themselves on couches and empty floorspace and throb with the music. They are messy and uncouth and ugly and their eyes twitch and their faces are dirty from sweat and alcohol. They are fucking brilliant.

What I have noticed, pretty much since I moved into this place, is that this is the house I have always wanted to live in. Constant parties, a parade of new faces and stupid conversations, drinking, drugs, people... this is the place I wished so hard for every weekend from the moment I turned eighteen, but never managed to secure. I always felt like I was on the outside of some huge social network, forever looking in through the tinted windows, trying to make out the figures within. I strained to see the people inside as they did all the amazing things I thought I could see them doing, I beat myself up wondering why I could never find the way to acceptance. I now realize that this very desperation which has so shaped me the last few years was the reason that I never felt like I was in the middle of things – that I always felt like I was on the outside looking in.

Now, only a year or so later, I have stopped going out and looking, begging for that acceptance and trying furiously to get into the middle of that scene; the town scene. Ironically, after all that fruitless toil, it is only now that I have stopped trying that I somehow find myself sitting in the middle, in the room with everyone else, behind the tinted glass. Of course that's not how it feels, it still feels like I'm on the outside of something, and when the people come into my house on a Saturday or Sunday morning, I don't feel like these are my people coming home, or that I am one of them and they are here to see me, because they're not... but I know that to anyone sitting where I used to sit, out in the world of clubbing and partying and weekend benders, I must look like I'm running the show back here.

I guess the lesson here is something that I've been repeatedly telling myself for quite a while now, something that is undoubtedly, irrevocably true, but that never seems to fully sink in, no matter how often I say it. Everyone is insecure, everyone is troubled, everyone stresses about things and no one really has it as together as they would have the world believe. We are all struggling to fit in somewhere, or impress someone, or live up to some lofty ideal. I look at some people and just think, “wow, you are just fucking cool”... some people just seem to have it and exude positivity and excellence wherever they go. But those people are looking at someone else too, saying the same shit, and wondering the same things. “How do they do it?” We're all looking to someone else, wondering how they built their house of cards... well... like maybe not Brad Pitt or something.

Brad Pitt is the apex of humanity. He is the monolithic idol from which all subsequent human endeavour can be traced. And with that grand, overreaching statement, I think I'm just about finished for today.

Peace, Taco.

Enrolling to Defer

You know what I just did? Like, just right now? I paid eighty-nine dollars to the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre (VTAC? More like Vee-WACK! Amirite?) so that they'll process my application for uni next year. I'm applying for Bachelor of Arts at University of Melbourne, and the plan is to get accepted, transfer my one-and-three-quarters of a year's worth of credits from Adelaide over to Melbourne, get a student card, and then defer again... maybe do one subject... maybe... maaaaybe... that's a bit fucking maybe. I'm definitely not stoked on the idea of traipsing back to uni next year, so the question is begged then; why apply at all?

I've had some great times during my prolonged years of tertiary education: Adelaide University was a bastion of restraint during three years of my life which were filled, almost exclusively, with drinking, dancing, and lip-bitten comedowns. Every week of classes that pulled me out of bed in those torturous days studying politics, morality, and mindless electives is another week that I can count as having not thrown away completely into the furnace. I learned some degree of planning – sitting in the smoking area of a club at 8am on a Sunday, it seems irresistibly tempting to drop another sixty on pills and cross fingers that this Monday's comedown wouldn't be so rough. I learned to keep to deadlines, and I learned – or to be fair, let's say rediscovered – the joy in feeling smarter than other people. What did I do this week, you ask? Well I didn't really do very much for the first three days, to be honest, but on Thursday night I sat in a computer lab all night researching and typing out a gloriously passable account of Rawlsian social theory... what's that? You don't know what that is? Well it's all about... well... fuck, actually I've forgotten, but seriously guys, I did that assignment, and for a week afterwards when people asked me what I'd been up to, that was the dick-hardening answer that I threw out to their bemused faces.

Had I not attended uni for the past three years, my life would have been almost completely devoid of any structure and any purpose. In the four years that have passed since I finished school I've been at uni for at least a few weeks each year – fuck in 2010 I actually did a whole year!! While my measly six upper-level course completions speaks volumes for the sub-par effort that I've put in during those four years, it feels good to have done anything at all... I mean, I almost feel like I've been able to get the best of both worlds with this double life of uni student slash hardcore club-head that I've been leading. On one hand, I know what it's like doing assignments and writing essays and sticking to deadlines and going to tutes and studying and putting off drinking and facebooking during lectures etc. etc... but on the other hand, I have delved, at least some way, into the perilous world of hardcore drug taking and seen the shadow cast by our society's vast underbelly. I'm no Rhodes Scholar, nor am I about ready to stand in an alleyway and sell four nights a week, but I've had a taste of both paths, and I feel wiser for it... is that an arrogant thing to say? Is that repulsively self-congratulatory? Am I just trying to warp my own arbitrary experiences into a coherent narrative to excuse myself for the lack of direction that my formative years have been characterised by? I honestly don't think so.

I paid that eighty-nine dollars today, the blow was made so much softer by the fact that I cleaned UP on my tour this morning, but when I paid it I couldn't help but think that what I was doing was basically flushing that cash away for the chance to be able to say that I haven't thrown it all away just yet. Uni is such a clearly defined path, and I can't say that I've totally given up the idea of going back at some point and finishing my (snigger) Bachelor of Arts... but right now I'm so happy – so insanely, illogically, unreasonably content with where I'm headed and the way my life is working – that it would be stupid to fuck with everything just because forgoing the safety net of tertiary education feels a little scary. When I came out here, I came out with the intention of living without a net. I wanted to stare into the abyss and jump, knowing, guessing, hoping, that there would be something in between me and that infinite black to grasp onto, and that that something would be enough to justify the sheer stupidity of the initial leap of faith. I wanted to exist beyond my familiar comfort zone.

I'm not going back to uni next year, but the option is still there, I haven't lost sight of the path completely, not yet, maybe soon though. For now, the edge is still out there. For now, I'm still holding on.

Peace, Taco.

November Life Update

What has even been going on for the last few weeks? I haven't kept y'all very well updated have I? Not that the majority of people give two shakes of an indifference stick about my day-to-day potterings and trips to the toilet, but for those of you who do, enthralling tales of a young man out in the wild lie within. Tacooooo is doin' it for hisself!

I have seven days of drinking left for twenty-twelve (FINALLY, my compulsive need to type numbers has paid off, none of this 'two-thousand and twelve' bullshit) and it's looking right now like they are almost all spoken for. I'm saving four for my trip back to Adelaide from the 20^th to the 28^th of December, which means only three remain. One will be for next Thursday when I hit up the Peek Tours pub crawl in an effort to gauge the amount of alcohol required to achieve complete standing-unconsciousness – doing it for science – and that means the last two days will fall somewhere in between a week from now, and December 20^th. I've found the best nights, even with my freakishly regimented year of monitored alcohol intake, have been the unplanned ones, and so with that in mind, I won't be pre-booking nights for those two remaining nights of drinking, but I'm sure that someone cool will pop up in the three or so weeks and convince me that Now! Now! Now! is the time for drunkenness.

Money-wise things are looking slightly tighter than I would like – and with every indulgent cafe lunch the noose keeps slipping – but as it stands I am making $250 a week from working at Yah Yah's, and probably another $250 a week from doing walking tours. Let's make that $200, just to be conservative. Realistically I'm probably pocketing around $550 a week, but at least a hundred of that goes straight into the wind so it's not even worth counting, $450 it is. Rent is $170 a week, so with another piece of nifty rounding that leaves me $250 a week to play with – and I really have to catch myself here, because although I use the term 'play with', what that should really mean is 'put away in an envelope and not look at'. I have to pay $500 by mid-January for the festival show I'm doing with Rob Caruana at Station 59, and a bus up to Adelaide and Plane back for Christmas – probably another $250 – and I'll be wanting some party-money for when I get down there, so unless the opportunity for sort of Mafia-sponsored contraband run on the Greyhound bus presents itself in the next month, that'll be four weeks of income spoken for. Conveniently, four weeks is the exact amount of time that stands in between me and Adelaide right now, so without getting too confident here, I think it's gonna be ok... there's always the surprise phone bill to worry about, but fuck it... live a little.

My ankles still hurt from repeated falls off my skateboard, although I'm getting better (marginally), although I'm guessing it's going to be a while before these badboys return to their regular size. Cruising down to the river-side skatepark the other afternoon with Brodie and his bro was easilly call of the week, watching people who can actually do things other than roll around gave me the balls to eat shit in the hope of being able to land even one tiny little trick. I just want to be cool guys!!! Fuck, that is seriously not far from the truth.

Also our internet is capped, which is probably the most crippling ailment known to civilized man. I have slowly begun to doubt the existence of AIDS, Hepatitis, and all forms of cancer, by the logic that if God wanted us to suffer needlessly through our lives, he wouldn't waste his time with microscopic viruses and fiddly tumours, he'd just cripple us by taking away our access to the infinite database of porn that should, according to all sane reasoning, be available to us instantly at any hour of the day. That's exactly what he's been doing to me and my housemates for the last six days, folks. God works in mysterious ways, and today his name is Telstra.

I think I just lost my notebook – one of three, even in note-taking I am meticulous and thoroughly organized – no massive loss really because this one contains the hurried scribblings of ideas for jokes and stories that I then look back on and expand in my other two books, but still annoying nonetheless. I've found myself lately thinking about the way that we use paper and the written word as a method for dumping the thoughts that occupy our brains onto a physical medium, thus eliminating the need for our minds to stagnate upon them. It's kind of like the way a computer uses a hard drive to store information it isn't using right now, while the info that it does need immediate access to is stored on the RAM. The written word is so amazingly useful because it allows us to free up our minds constantly for new information, and ensures that if we have a good idea, we don't need to stress ourselves remembering it, because we can just record it and have it waiting for a time when we feel ready to pick the thought back up again and follow it through.

I've gone off track slightly... but now that we're here, you can get a pretty good idea of how my life is faring right now. Without anything serious to think about – no real troubles to speak of, no stress, no pain, no emotional hangups – I am free to float and dawdle around whatever thoughts and pastimes I want. Sometimes things feel hard – comedy is not an easy pursuit, as friendly as the people might be (and they are), the stage is a lonely place – but whenever I feel myself getting down on setbacks, I recount the things I've done in the past week and shake my head once the ridiculous simplicity of my life sinks in. Life gets hard friends, but right now it seems easy.

Peace, Taco.