MICF Wrap-Up and Plans for 'The Future'

Once again, it really has been a long time since I've written in here, and I can feel myself getting out of the habit of writing, and really letting myself off the hook, which essentially goes against the whole reason I started writing on this blog. I think I can rationalize it this time though, and so, because I can, I will... here goes.

Comedy festival finished on Sunday (21/4) and that was a really amazing night. Massive. Huge. I felt like something changed that night – although it could have been because of the acid that we all took, because that darling chemical always gives events a sense of high significance, but I think the night itself was really special. One thing I'll always remember about the night that ended up closing out my first ever comedy festival, was that a group of Station 59 comics, disinterested with the Bollywood-themed closing party at The HiFi Bar, went to the Crown Casino – because it was the only place open – and decided to do a standup gig to seven assorted strangers, picked up from amidst the slot machines by the manically ambitious Sofie Prints. I got one amazing laugh at one point which rippled through the crowd, and yes I can sense the eye-rolls of comics listening to me calling seven drunken men and some comics a 'crowd', but that experience really was different. I don't care what anyone says... ew, look at me up on my soapbox defending myself. Gross.

The festival itself though was awesome, if not completely and utterly exhausting. I bitched out on going to see a show last night even though really I probably could have and still been fine for work this morning (I'm cleaning pubs and restaurants Monday, Wednesday and Friday now, but I'll get to that in a minute). I saw some inspiring work: Simon Keck, Jon Bennett, Daniel Kitson, Blake Mitchell, Setlist. I made some new friends, and some connections for the future, I did a bunch of spots including five at the Exford Late Show which was at times a surprisingly good room, but also lived up its reputation the first night I was there. I feel like this weekend will be full of rest as I finally catch up on the sleep I habitually missed throughout the festival, and hopefully come Monday I'll be back to square one energy-wise, because I feel FUCKING DRAINED, just right here.

So now, here's the plan folks. I'm going to Brisbane for two weeks starting next Wednesday (1/5) where I have a few spots lined up, as well as free accommodation with the lovely Corey White who I saw MC the show 'Undiagnosed' to about twelve people, and so feel unqualified to comment on at this juncture. I hear his comedy is very good, and I am grateful as SHIT to him for offering to put me up in his house for the whole two weeks. The reason I decided to do this trip is basically that for the first time in my life I have found myself in the strange position of having some level of disposable income. I feel squeamish... I don't really feel like I have earned or deserve this money, but I sure am not going to fuck it away on drugs and drinking – even if I wanted to I don't really feel like I have the capacity to be doing that anymore: I need to keep moving. I'm not saying that as a sort of order to myself, it's gone beyond that now. I actually need to keep moving, like I can't stop. I don't know how to not be doing anything any more, and every time I drink I end up being bored and edgy the next day when I'm not doing anything productive. Don't even start with drugs, in the last six months I think I can count two occasions where I've actually taken an amount of drugs large enough to create any sort of after-effect the day, or days after. It would be arrogant of me to say “I'm done” this early in the piece, but I am definitely having a break, and I can't see myself going back there any time soon.

After Brisbane I have a loose idea of a plan that I've been formulating in the days since Sunday, and so, in the interest of having something of substance recorded for my future self to fret over, here it is. My plan for the foreseeable future, may it hang over my head like an ambitious anvil, ready to fall at any minute and crush me:

• I want to write a story-show, or at least a show with a coherent through-line, and I have already decided on the topic, although I won't go into that here because to be honest I don't really think anyone is too interested in an idea. But I've started the earliest of early preparations for the show's creation. On the advice of Kieran Butler I think I might try and figure out at least some of the material on stage, even just to see if I can do it. Just to see if I'm anywhere near able to attempt that yet. This is my new challenge.
  
• I'm going to take this show, which will hopefully be up to half an hour in time for October, to the Melbourne Fringe and perform it as many times as possible at the Station 59 Free Comedy season there.
  
• Between the end of the Melbourne Fringe and the start of the Adelaide Fringe I'll keep workshopping the show and hopefully – and this is the part of the plan I'm not sure about and the part that will probably depend most on the performances during the Melbourne Fringe and my ability to stay focussed and passionate about this idea – it'll be up to around fifty minutes for the Adelaide Fringe, and then I'll take it there.
  
• If Adelaide goes okay, then I'll do the show at next year's MICF at Station 59 Free Comedy again for two weeks.
  
• Finally, if everything has worked out and if my money situation is still holding up in twelve months' time, I'll book my ticket to Edinburgh 2014, and book my spot in the Fringe, and then I'll have a fifty minute show to take over there where I'll hopefully be able to book a spot in one of the Free Comedy venues and do my first overseas shows. If I can make it to Edinburgh then I also want to head over to Spain and do the Camino de Santiago for a month, and with a month in between the two I'll travel around Europe a bit and say hi to some friends from Bolivia and people I've met in Australia.
  

So that's it, that's my plan for the next 18 months, and that's my recap of everything that's happened for me in the last month. Well not everything, but everything my fingers feel ready to write about right now. I'm sorry I haven't been writing, although I don't really know who I'm saying sorry to, because even after I put this on Facebook, probably only twenty people will read it, and you wouldn't have read it if I didn't tell you to anyway. So sorry, to me, but also good job me, you're doing okay, although you could really do with some new clothes to be honest.

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.

3121 Hangs

Yesterday I had only one person on my tour, an Indonesian girl called Neysha, and so instead of packing my bags and going back home in a huff, I decided to take her on a quick tour in exchange for her buying me lunch (atlantic salmon... I get my money's worth). We were going to go check out Ballarat after lunch which would have been nice but in the end we couldn't because it got a bit late in the day, so we went our separate ways. It was a lovely afternoon all in all, and I'd like to thank the lovely Neysha for lunch, although … (I pondered long and hard over which conjunction to use here because it seems that the use of either 'and' or 'but' to preface the information I'm about to deliver would set the tone for the rest of this bit and betray my feelings towards the events I intend to describe... I have definitely over-thought this... hurry up Taco, people are getting bored) … there was something else that was far more interesting than salmon.

We were sitting at the tram stop in Richmond waiting for the tram to head back into the city to Southern Cross Station. I sat on the end of the bench on the corner of Church and Victoria streets and Neysha sat in the middle, to my right. To her right again there sat an old man, probably around sixty-five or seventy years old, dressed as most old men usually dress and waiting for the tram like we were. Neysha and I talked for a while about Richmond and why I love living in this suburb – to paraphrase my housemate Brodie, “it's that 3121 real shit” – there's a real grittiness about Richmond and I told her I enjoyed that. While we were talking, as if on cue, a local smackhead approached the bench. I've seen this girl before, wandering aimlessly around Victoria street in the middle of the day, stumbling, glazed eyes, riding the tram with a lost look on her face. She's one of many sad characters that populate the streets in this shitty inner-city suburb of Melbourne, and I'd always had my suspicions.

She approached from the right – from the other side of Church St – and looked first at me, but must have assumed that the girl I was with, being as she was roughly the same age as me, was my girlfriend. Her eyes then fixed on the old man, and she stopped herself just in front of him and squatted on the footpath in a submissive, prostrate position before looking up at him and engaging in conversation. Her voice was thin and high-pitched, and she was clearly drifting in and out of lucid consciousness, never fully in control of herself, but she grabbed the reins for long enough to look into his eyes and ask, “you looking for a good time?” As she said it she made a motion with her right hand to imitate the way she would suck his tired, sixty-five-year-old dick to a climax for some pithy sum of money that I didn't quite manage to overhear. I was paying as much attention as I could at this point while still trying not to be too obvious... it was hard to maintain an air of normality and Neysha and I had stopped talking as soon as the afternoon's twisted courtship had commenced. I wanted desperately to hear what he was saying, but I couldn't grasp much of anything. Maybe he said something to her that I didn't hear, or maybe he didn't even reply to her, but whatever his voice did or didn't tell her, I could understand everything from his uncomfortable body language... he tacitly refused her subsequent urges and offers to give him her phone number. “Do you want to call me later?” She asked. “I just need some money for food and a packet of smokes.” She was getting a little more forceful, sensing, surely, that there was no relief to be had here.

All this time I said nothing, and Neysha said nothing, and we both allowed what was definitely the saddest, most enthralling spectacle we were likely to see for quite a while, to play out. The woman with the thin voice stood up after about thirty seconds, having obtained neither business nor money from her client, and walked away in the direction that she had come. Once she was out of earshot I resumed talking to Neysha and told her about how I'd seen this woman before. I saw her with a bunch of other broken, drug types across the road from Woolies a month or so ago; one of the guys she was with was trying to sell a gold necklace to some fresh looking Asian kid with a hoodie and trackies. He was talking with quick, dirty slang about how he'd stolen the necklace off of some guy he'd bashed the night before, and was using words like 'bruz', which made my skin crawl. It reminded me of the way some of my friends back in Adelaide talk, and it scared me to think that people I know are constantly only three bad decisions away from staring this life in the face too. They had left the hooded Asian with the promise to be back in half an hour – they were “going off to hit the hammer” (inject heroin). I told Neysha this other story to go with what we had just seen, but I left out the part about it reminding me of people I knew because I didn't want to start down that depressing conversational path, only having met this person five or six hours ago.

Both times I've seen glimpses of the course underside of Victoria Street, 3121, I have laughed to myself. I don't really know why, I don't know what about seeing a drug addict solicit prostitution or overhearing another try to sell stolen jewellery is funny – actually I don't think anything about it is funny, not at its core. At the very base of it, it's fucking sad. It's terrible, but it's also surprising – not that it exists at all, but that it exists right there, right in front of me. It's kind of scary, but also kind of exhilarating too, although the naivete required to believe that makes me want to rethink myself a little... nevertheless though, the sheer shock of the whole situation is where the laughter comes from. When the heroin lady walked away from us after failing to pick up her lonely, uncomfortable target, Neysha and I both laughed to eachother with raised eyebrows and twisted faces. We weren't laughing out of amusement, we were just shocked... so fucking shocked... we knew what we'd seen, and as much as we were laughing, we both knew that neither of us was making a joke.

“When the heroin lady walked away...” that's how I started that sentence. That's how I described her. “The heroin lady.” That's all she is to me, that is her only distinguishing characteristic. Not her face, not her eyes, not her hair or her voice or her clothes or her views on China. Heroin... that's who she is, and that's what she does. Jesus Christ... where do I even begin?

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.

A Letter to Ted Danson

Preface: If you don't know who Ted Danson is, he was the star of the late 90s sitcom 'Becker'. Fucking brilliant show, and WAY under appreciated. Watch it. Watch it now.

Hello mister Danson. Should I have capitalized 'mister' there? I'm not sure, these formalities often escape me but know now that if the convention in this case is, in fact, to capitalize the honorific before your name, esteemed sir, then I have not diverged from it in spite or out of some pathetic attempt to belittle you. The truth is – the whole, complete, unadulterated, bare, slippery truth – is that you fucking rock. Ted Danson, you are fucking dope.

I decided to write this email a few days ago while talking to my friend on the phone (yeah sorry I'll drop the grandiose tone now – let's rap Ted. Let's talk like grown ups). So yeah, I was on the phone to my friend and we were talking you know blah blah blah... we're in our early twenties so the conversation spanned a wide range of topics from girls, drinking, drugs, and the time we broke into a construction site and smoked a spliff on top of the crane after scaling it from the outside... we're basically living the renaissance here Teddy, and it's great. But amid the lacklustre conversation and tired youthful cliches one recollection strangely sprung into my mind for no reason I can accurately pin point. I will now recount what I told my friend that lazy afternoon – it's not that interesting... in fact it's really one of the least interesting stories you'll ever receive as a piece of fan mail. But it's fan mail nonetheless, and while I'm sure the days of Becker have long since faded from your memory, I hope it will bring you some fleeting happiness to know that that show about the angry doctor from Brooklyn still captivates people ten years after it's termination.

So about eighteen months ago – Easter weekend two-thousand and eleven – I was in what might fairly be termed a 'downward spiral'. I was spiralling, Tedford, spiralling in a direction whose mean trajectory was, more or less, vertically downward. I had recently committed several various crimes of petty vandalism, each one more inventively stupid than the last, and was facing quite a serious charge of 'illegal interference' for one of those crimes. Basically I opened the back of this guy's ute and smashed a bunch of stuff that was sitting in the back... but that's neither here or there is it... suffice to say I was in a pretty bad place. At the start of the Easter weekend – the day before Good Friday – my family had gone away and left the house to me and I, in my drug-addled, oblivious state, took this as a sign that I was in for four days of unbridled partying with friends upon friends upon friends staying at my house and spending time with me. It turns out though, that people don't really want to hang out with some guy who is only interested in getting drunk, taking heaps of drugs and going into the night breaking shit... I was that guy, and I was pretty fucking boring.

So on Easter Sunday, after I'd been fired from my job on Saturday night for not turning up (I showed up for my 9pm shift at 9am... I was pretty fucked -chuckle-) and after I'd realized that no one really wanted to party with me I went round to a friends place and decided to take acid. I'd taken acid before, but this time it was some special type of acid that lasts thirty-six hours. No joke, the shit actually hijacks your mind for a whole day and a half, and man... that shit lasted. It was insane. I took it at 7pm Sunday evening, and didn't end up getting to bed until 2am Tuesday, the stuff had legs. It was like my brain was the hard drive of a computer – an old computer whose only function was to calculate pocket change and use it to by cheap wine – and that hard drive had been thrown into a swimming pool with an electronic magnet at the bottom, simultaneously frying the circuitry of the thing with water and wiping every piece of information off it with the magnet. The magnet... god damn it... my brain, my precious, fragile brain. My mind. The thing that I pride myself on more than anything else is that I am sharp. I can think. Maybe I'm wrong to pride myself on that, or maybe a little arrogant, but I do nonetheless; I can't help my opinions of myself any more than you can help that you love cheese, or coffee, or a nice glass of scotch. It's just an opinion.

For this whole day I honestly believed that I was going to have to re-learn ever aspect of my life – I thought that I had broken my brain, cracked it in half and irreparably splintered myself away from sanity and down into the abyss of floundering idiocy. It was the scariest day of my life, and I remember feeling completely alone, and completely worthless. My family were away in our holiday home, and I had welcomed their leaving thinking that the hordes of friends I somehow believed I had would swarm into my house and keep me company all weekend, but it was not the case. I realized that, in my selfishness I had pushed everyone away and not even realized what I was doing, and then I had taken this drug, this insanely powerful drug, and forever crippled myself and rendered my life useless. Then I started watching episodes of Becker on my laptop.

I watched all day, all the way through season one and two, and then I think I skipped a few seasons I'm not really sure, but I remember getting to the series of episodes somewhere in one of the later seasons that started with Becker sitting at a bar recounting his problems to an indifferent bartender, and moaning about how he doesn't have anyone in his life to support him. It seemed to mirror my situation exactly – John Becker, a lonely, bitter man oblivious to those around him who care about him and support him every day. Then there was the episode with Jake's hot new girlfriend where Becker thinks she's hitting on him and right up until the point when she reveals she just wants to be friends it coaxes the audience into thinking John was going to sleep with her. Will he betray his friend? Will he do the right thing? The episode where he and Margaret are attracted to eachother, or not attracted, but maybe... they can't decide whether they are, even if they know they don't want to be together... I'm ranting now, I know it, but I'm trying to remember each episode without going onto wikipedia and refreshing my memory. Maybe it was because I was on hallucinogenic drugs, but each episode seemed more poignant than the last, and as each story wrapped up and laid one of John's anxieties to rest, one part of my frightened mind was subdued as well.

It is possible that the effects of the drugs gave the show a strange gloss of meaning that was intended in writing or filming, or that is, in actuality, not there at all, but it doesn't matter to me. That day changed my life, for many other reasons not related to Becker, or you, Ted Danson, or anything you have ever heard of... it just did. But I thought you might be interested to know about a day in the life of some blandly eccentric, twenty-one year old writer from the dull town of Adelaide, South Australia and read with vague amusement of the time he took acid and watched your show. That really was a great show man. Becker was such a nice dude, and he really cared about his patients and what he was doing... he just had no patience for idiots. God damn it I loved that show haha...

That's pretty much all from me I think, if you end up reading this, I don't need a massive response and I'm sure you don't have time to write one... but just any acknowledgement would be amazing. How about we play it like this. If you read all the way down to here, then reply with the topic line 'A Fan Letter to Taco, from Ted Danson'. That's me, by the way. Taco.

Have a good one Teddy. Also I love bored to death. Cheers I've never seen, although I hear it was quite good.

Peace, Taco.

A Bad Day Turned Good

This blogging thing seems to be going in cycles and I've decided to stop trying to force it so much and just let it happen. That's not to say that I won't be pushing myself to write whenever I have a free moment – hell yes I'm going to be writing as much as possible. Just that if I've just had a few good weeks of solid output, I can accept maybe that my brain might need some time to catch up. I CAN'T KEEP UP MY RED-HOT, FULL-TILT, MAXIMUM PACE ALL THE TIME!!! That was a Red Dwarf quote, for those of you playing at home.

So today has been a great day so far, and it only promises to get better. If we are going by the conventional 'midnight-to-midnight' day system – and for the purposes of this recap I think we just may – then the day started rather poorly with me beginning my shift at Yah Yah's. Yah Yah's is a great place to work; it's fucking brilliant actually, but starting work is never any good... although, being as it was that my shift started at midnight exactly, and that I had realistically already started working by 11:55pm, it could be said that the worst part of my shirt – the dreading anticipation of a night's labour – was already over by the time the thirteenth of October, twenty-twelve was upon us. I only worked until three because I had to give a tour this morning at 10:30am, which required a 9am alarm and it seemed the day was going to be one feral shit-storm from the get-go, but I think all that sad, dejected moping about how much my Saturday was going to suck has ended up turning things on their head.

So I got home at three thirty to my housemates (and OH what mates they are) parting hearty in the lounge room with thudding house music and deep grooves aplenty. I bought a pack of Doritos (Cheese Supreme you FUCK what else?) on the way home with five dong I found on the floor at work and skated down the big hill. Yes, yes and yes. The scenes I return home to after work every weekend are inspiring to say the least. This is the house I always wanted to live in from ages eighteen to twenty – a natural after-party destination that any self-respecting head would want to return to after the din of the dancefloor dies down. It is precisely because of my adolescent desire for such a place that I never was able to create one in those days, and the greatest comic irony of the whole thing is now that I live in the house of my naïve, popularity-obsessed self's dreams, I don't so much care about the parties that happen here. I'm willing to join in for a while, maybe suck down a few puffs of the spliff in circulation, but before long I'm in bed, and sleeping while the walls continue to shake.

I did my tour – woke up at nine, pickups in town from ten, tour until one, and made eighty cash units from the seven people on my tour, although I did forget to take the photo of the group (god DAMN it I keep forgetting that shit) so I'm looking at a thirty-dollar pay-in for that one. 'E neva lerns, duz e'? Nope. Also ran into an old friend from way back in Adelaide – Dom the Drummer from Brighton. He picked me out of the lineup at Aldi and by the sounds of it he's doing the do just like everyone else is over here in Melbourne; tearing shit up and screaming down the dangerous road. Numbers were exchanged and I'm sure we'll be seeing much more of olde Dominic from now on.

Back at home by one-thirty and in bed watching season two of Community with commentaries by two, and now I'm up at five thirty after a quick chat to Peter Pan of Neverland fame about how he's striking his demons back with bamboo poles and a head of positivity... things are looking up. Tonight I'm doing a spot at Station 59 for the late show, and then work, which somehow seems a lot less ominous after last night's shift and the catharsis of writing this post. Everything is so much simpler when it's laid out in simple terms doncharekkin? Yes, is the answer we were looking for there. Yes people. Just yes.

Peace, Taco.

A Message For You

When is it time to let go?

In recent years (like pretty much, this one) I have gained a deep respect and admiration for my mother for allowing me to do what I did in the years after I finished school. I won't bore you with the OUTRAGEOUSLY INTERESTING details, but I definitely took life by the horns. (note: replace 'life by the horns' with 'quite a lot of drugs') I was eighteen, and then nineteen, and then even twenty for a while, and the train kept speeding up and gaining momentum, and from the outside it must have looked pretty out of control. I always knew I was going to be fine, but I guess I can only say that confidently now having fairly emerged from the clouded mist of loud, thumping bass music and Monday morning blood-vomit... I always knew I was going to be fine – that's what everyone says when they reach the other side.

So for those three-ish years of steadily increasing drinking and two, three, four day benders, my mum (and my dad too, but really he was always chillin' so my mum mostly) was probably scared shitless that her son was going to end up a defective homeless man, scrounging through the gutters of some third-world slum, trying to find algae to cook into a stew... and I guess that fear was well justified. The party lifestyle is an alluring temptress, and there is a very real chance for anyone who is drawn in by it to come out the other side ravaged and broken, their life withered away to nothing. That's why I have such admiration for the courage that I now recognize in the way that she allowed me to go off and do my own thing for those first years of semi-adulthood and independence. If she had reigned me in and tried to stifle me – and doubtless she could have, and would have been acting only out of love – I probably would have rejected those attempts and no doubt run further away. She didn't though, she let me do what I had to do, and now I'm better for it. Good on YOU mum. Well done. Champion effort; here is your first-prize colouring in book.

Thing is though, how far do you let them slip? How long would it have been before ol' mum dawgz had said 'enough' (and she would have said it just like that too... “WOMEN” – amirite?) and told me that I had gone too far. We all know the saying, 'if you love them, let them go'. The implication there, is that if they love you back, then they'll return after realizing themselves the error of their ways, and that that self-induced revelation will be far more lasting and profound than anything that can be taught or imparted second-hand. Well I assume there would have been a point – and maybe I was audacious/stupid/lucky/wary enough to just tickle that point myself in my most self-destructive days, but my exploits in the field of drugs and alcohol really never even approached the levels of those around me. Those for whom drugs were not just simply a recreation, but an escape. Those who possessed an incurable itch which could be momentarily scratched by the familiar, overpowering calm of one or another addictive substance... from what I'm told it's a bleak world out there. I could never see it, but for those who can, I'm told any escape will do.

So they keep falling, or maybe driving themselves downwards. Burning a trail down and down and down into the abyss, happy to be rid of the light and the brutal pains of a world they are increasingly unable to relate to. To understand. What a luxury. I am only assuming here based either on my own extrapolations, or careful observations from half remembered weekends – only those who have crossed over the edge fully understand what is on the other side, but by that time most if not all could not care less about spreading the word. The edge is not a goal to shoot for. This is not a field trip, you can't just stare in, you fall all at once, and you fall all the way.

And this person who keeps pressing on, passing the point of no return, only to have others around them revise that point, and revise it again and again... a glimmer of hope, a moment of possibility. They give up all hope, only to have hope restored to them, almost against their will... and then dashed again. And again and again and again. You think I'm talking about a specific person here, but I'm not. This story is a generic one, fit to be told in generalities. The people who are reading this story are not living it, and those living it are definitely not reading. Not this. Not now. But what would a mother do for this person? This being who admits themselves to being without hope, and has all but consigned themselves to oblivion. What can a mother do? Or a brother? Or a friend? Can we let them keep falling, knowing that they don't even want to be picked back up? Is that a grave injustice? Or are there some who should be allowed to fade away, just as they have always wanted... these are the most painful thoughts my friends, the decisions that no one should ever have to make.

I've tried searching out the blameworthy parties. Doctors. Teachers. Parents. Friends. The government. The clubs. The party people. The scene. The dealer who sold that first bag of weed – marijuana: the gateway drug. The drugs themselves. Some other force, surely something outside of us can carry the blame. God? The Devil? No one is there. No one is listening. No one is going to answer... I don't know what to do anymore... and how selfish of me to make this about myself, I'm not even living it. I'm safe in my perched position, far far away from the edge. Never looking down.

All I have left to say is that if you can hold on, and even the smallest part of you wants to, then please do. We don't want to lose you. Not now, not yet, not ever. I could never hold someone responsible for giving up when their task seems too hard, there is no blame to be found there either. I wish I could do it for you, but I can't... but if you can hold on...

Don't do it. I love you.

Peace, Taco.

Calling Out from a Good Place

Rising sounds, and the beat keeps rising. The time is ten twenty-one and it's Sunday evening, I'm sitting in the living room with Brodesh (that's Brodie and Desh – PICK IT UP!) and everything is happening. Where are the parents? Where are the law enforcers? Where is the landlord when we are skateboarding up and down her wooden passageway like a bunch of lecherous louts? “Who cares?” should be your immediate answer to all of those three questions, today is the day for answers, discovery, and simple solutions.

I'm not trying to say that we're somehow pioneering some new way of life – we're clearly not – and the phrase 'out front, breaking boundaries' has become so overused that applying it to a person now seems to imply a level of mundaneness completely separate from the original intention. But we're doing the do out here... something just feels right. Something happened by accident when I moved over here that has made life that much simpler, like the unintended triple-syllable rhyme at the end of a sentence you said to the cashier when you were down at Coles buying your groceries. I was doing absolutely nothing in Adelaide... for the last two and a half weeks I had a shitty, terrible MENIAL joke of a fucking 'job' selling electricity to people door-to-door. Not even selling, just convincing – I was a door to door convincer – trying to persuade people that their current electricity companies, whatever they were (it was irrelevant really) were somehow screwing them out of money and that the company I worked for could save them cash. (we couldn't... AT ALL) But even when I wasn't taken up with this worthless existence, when I had free time, I wasn't in the right place within myself to do anything with it. And before those deathly last two point five weeks when I had NO job, it was even worse. I couldn't bring myself to do anything, but coming over here just changed everything.

I don't even know what it was, but from the first day that I was in this city my life and my mind just felt different; as if a change of scenery was the permission slip I needed to get out and do something every day. Sitting in and watching movies and pretending to work no longer enough.

So now I'm sitting here with a tie wrapped around my head and fastened in a crude granny-knot with the two ends hanging down over my left temple like a cheap ponytail-wig and everything in my universe feels right. Of course I can't leave you here, how could I that would be like leaving myself. But I just want you all to know that from where I stand right now, things couldn't get much better. It reminds me of what Bill Hicks once said, that “evolution didn't end with us growing thumbs you know... now it's time we started to evolve ideas.” It's a stretch to tie in, but you know I'm up to it... I feel like I've gone about as far as I can in the happiness direction, being happy isn't even a goal any more, it's done. It's still happening, but I don't have to try any more. I have to find some new direction to progress in now, and that's where the idea of evolving ideas comes in... whereas for as long as I can remember since I emerged from the mist of adolescent emotional entrapment I've just been trying to find and maintain pockets of happiness in a chaotic life, I now know that regardless of the good days and the bad days and the dips and highs and swooping changes in my mood, I don't have to worry about that any longer. Now it is time to grow in another direction. In the last two months that search has begun, and it continues today. I just thought I'd report back for a second, and maybe rest on my laurels just that tiny bit.

So this is me, calling out. Aidan Jones, for one night at peace with the world, before the search resumes tomorrow.

Peace, Taco.

The Day I Woke Up

I woke up that morning with a heavy taste in my mouth and crust over my eyes, I knew the time was late, and I knew I had to get out of there. It was 5:45am I think. Looking around in this place I loved once, a pang of sadness crept into me, the first muffled rays of dawn shone through drawn blinds and hit the thick curtains. I think it was a Monday... I think that not because I remember the exact day or date, but because that seems a fair day for the sort of scene I am recalling right now to have happened. Monday comes after Sunday, and Sunday is the last day of the weekend where desperate souls try in futility to hang on to the high and ride the wave all the way in to the shore. For as long as you are prepared to wait until the next, surely bigger wave, you are doomed to be forever swimming back out, away from the shallows, and never making it all the way in.

The last few weeks had been different from what I had expected, the clubbing scene was not how I remembered it. In place of smiling faces and nods and handshakes and expectant conversations I had found numbness. The repetition of it all seemed so much clearer now, even the drugs seemed dirty. When first started going clubbing I remembered the highs coming on like uncontrollable frenzies, welling up inside you and taking over your mind first, only for your body to follow helplessly. I remembered sitting on a chair in Garage one Thursday night in 2009 and looking around with that last, deep breath, knowing that this was the beginning of something special. I remembered these things, but I began to question myself... had it really happened like that? We are all guilty of romanticising the past – each and every one of us holds on to sepia memories and foggy, glimmer-lit scenes of a childhood that no one can verify. Was it really that beautiful back then? Or was I just longing for a time that I knew for certain did not exist right now... maybe it hadn't existed back then either, but more likely then than now... more likely I was happy then, than happy with this. Waking up on a sullied, stringy couch at 5:45am on a Monday morning, back sore, head still muddy.

Even up until I had gone away, the scene seemed happier. I lay under the blanket and tried to roll back over and face the floor – 5:50, still no signs of life. I remembered that spring in 2010 when every Sunday was a sun-filled scene of mayhem. Cashed up and ready to go we were, and the city was our playground... that's what we used to call Friday nights at Red Square: 'Playground Fridays feat. Bollocks DJs and Neverland's Lost Boys'. Saturdays spent drinking and screaming in fits of laughter, Sundays spent jumping around in the grass and arguing about who was going to the bottle shop. Whose turn was it to go buy food. “You lit the Red Square fire Tugzy, I've got that shit on tape!!” Noonahs and nills and lawishi and a million other nonsensical rambling strings of words that couldn't make sense to anyone that wasn't there. They just couldn't, you had to be there for the ride, for the weekend. There were no passengers.

I knew I wasn't just imagining these times, those nights and mornings and frantic afternoons, I know I hadn't just imagined the last three years... so what was so different now? I'd woken up in someone else's house, on someone else's couch, with someone else's clothes on many more times than this... why did this feel different? I'd just gotten back from a four month trip overseas, and in those four months, things seemed to have somehow changed. But looking back from this uniquely privileged perch on Monday morning, nothing seemed to have changed at all. The weekend was still the same, and the clubs and the music and the drinking... maybe the drugs were slightly diluted and gritty, but that shouldn't really have mattered. The whole reason we had been comfortable living this life was because we knew, deep down, that we didn't need the drugs. Drugs are just a tool, they just keep you awake for longer so that you have more time to enjoy the things in the scene that you're really there for: friends, music, dancing, talking shit down Rosina Street and laughing at the kids with their fake IDs. Then selling drugs was just a tool too – everyone wanted them already, no one was pulling kids out of church and forcing the shit down their throats, they were just supplying an ever-present demand and funding their weekend in the process. Funding the life that they loved, that we all loved.

I sat up on the couch and threw the blanket lazily off of my body, only then realizing that there was another body lying one couch down from me – my feet must have been in his face I think. I rubbed my eyes, finally committing to something, and walked out the back to see if anyone was still awake. No signs of life. Six o'clock now and the sun starting to flood the open areas of this cramped back yard. Rouse had a garden for pissing in, and a tree for hanging lights off – little fairy lights that I assume he liked because of the 'Tinkerbell from Peter Pan' connotation. Never grow up. The couches were a bit wet, but I didn't bother to sit down, I was just out here grabbing my lighter and seeing if I'd left anything, I was quickly decided and it was definitely time to go. There was still time to salvage the day and fit in a bit of something normal. Time to write a poem, or maybe start readings for the new semester of uni. The difference between me and my brothers-in-arms – and that's what we were; brothers – was that I had found a life outside of the town scene. I had university, and I had pretended for so long that that was my passion that slowly it had started to become true... I got really, really lucky.

I padded in my bare feet around the house almost slipping on something slippery, almost stepping on something sharp. Bare feet turned to socks, and socks turned into one shoe, then the other as my body started to get it's bearings. Dishes in the sink, shove them out of the way just to get a glass of water. I grabbed what I hoped was the last of my stuff and shoved it in my backpack, then, offering my hand in front of Plummy's face as he stirred on the couch, I waited for a farewell handshake... these were always the sloppiest. Monday morning, who has the energy to do anything?

I never said goodbye to Rouse, it's just not what we did... he was asleep in his room anyway – hidden away and fragile, not to be disturbed. He knew anyway, no one ever left for good, it was just until next time. And we were all coming back, we needed it for ourselves... well that's what it had always felt like. Something was different this morning though, something about wallowing in the pit that we had made for ourselves didn't seem so glorious and appealing to me on that hazy day in the suburbs. I had come back from overseas, and something just didn't feel right any more. I felt like I wanted to purge my system, the thoughts hadn't organized themselves in my head yet though. All I knew was it was time to get moving.

I would come back, of course, many more times. And many more times I would wake up in the same situation, but I was only there to visit after this day, never to take part. From the moment I walked out of the front door to Neverland on that briskly cold Monday morning and stepped into the world, I would be merely a passenger on the ride I had helped to create. Never again to be lost in the high-speed blur of the night, caught up in the drug scene. I remember the cold and the ice on my skin. I remember taking deep breaths of fresh air that burned my lungs and ate at the tips of my fingers. That was the day I woke up.

Peace, Taco.

Week Five? Six? Fuck it... Brain. Melting.

The rising sounds of Above and Beyond's 'Sun and Moon' tinge a new Monday with a drop of melancholy this clear afternoon. Spring is almost here, eleven days by my chronograph, and yesterday was Sunday. It was one of those Sundays. Oh boy, was it ever.

Losing control of your emotions never comes highly recommended, even when surrounded by close friends and sure allies. Yesterday as I was paralyzed by the burning fear raging inside my nerve centre my emotions swung back and forth and round and round, flinging out in all directions and taking out pedestrians like a giant truck fishtailing down a slippery, one lane road. CRUNCH – a mailbox. BOOM – three rows of apricot trees. BAM – the front of some lady's white sedan. I took my foot off of the brakes yesterday, and, as always, today I am left trying to get my bearings and pick up the pieces.

Melbourne really is an amazing city; there are ridiculous amounts of opportunities for anyone with even the slightest leanings towards artistic expression. Today I've made contact with an online magazine called YAWP that follows Melbourne's comedy scene and gives comedians and writers in general a place to display work and write about our world – I might just submit a few articles for those guys to have a look at... probably a few of the things I've written on here recently that I'm pretty happy with. Also there's a TV series on channel 31 (some community channel) called Crack Up Lab that will feature twenty-five up-and-coming Melbourne comedians in a five-episode stand-up competition with the winners from each episode going into a sixth episode final. I've put my name down for that and even if I don't get selected to go on, I'll probably end up in the crowd checking out which comedians that I've met around the place do spots. That's just the thing about this place, it is literally impossible to be stuck for something to do... if anyone somehow is then I would suggest fairly confidently that they aren't looking very hard and probably spend more than the fair allotment of time smoking weed and touching their dick.

But yesterday man... the part with the Adelaide crew at Timmy, Brodie, and Desh's place... I don't know what it was and I'm sure the fair majority of it was in my head, but there were some wack vibes floating around that place towards the tail end of the afternoon. I was paralyzed in silence for around two hours at the height of my trip which was definitely less than enjoyable, although it did give me time to think about my drastically altered social life when compared with the easy comfortability of Adelaide. Gone are my best friends – those who I can be absolutely sure to call at any time, day or night, and know that they'll be down for whatever cause I throw at them. It really goes along way towards creating a deeper appreciation for the few friends that I have found who I know will be friends forever. It's just like that song says; “understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on... work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.”

I feel like all my life I have been like that truck driver, trying desperately to keep my load under control, to stop it from taking out the bushes and fences and old people's shitty cars on the side of the road. If I let my attention slip, even for the briefest moment, some bump or twist will send the dangerous trailer viciously into the side of Mr Gerald's tool shed. Even sometimes when I remain vigilant, the task of keeping my emotions in check is too great, and shit inevitably gets fucked up. It's hard, this control thing... and sometimes I wonder whether I'm doing the right thing at all in trying to play puppet-master with my own feelings. This is all I know for now though... I guess that's the reason I'm out here. To break the cycle of destroy and rebuild, destroy and rebuild, destroy and rebuild. To kick the bad habit of entropy.

Peace, Taco.

Nothing Much

Ok so I know I haven't written in a week an a half or some shit but it's sweet, I'm here now, and I'm ready to open up my heart. Cue music – let's go.

I went to Sydney last week for a few days and besides breaking the bank and still owing French Girl some one-hundred noo-naahs I had a pretty chill time – almost better than the last time I visited Sydney, although not as good a story to tell around a table of drunks which is generally my final measure of how good an experience something was. We went on a tour of the Blue Mountains, ate lots of sushi, and fought bitterly in the way that exes trying to give friendship a crack are inevitably wont to do. All around though, I had a nice time.

Other than that I've been thinking about becoming a walking tour guide in Melbourne and am meeting the dude that's going to be sorting that out on Friday to get a script and learn the tour etc. etc. so that should be a chuckle... and I did my Victorian RSA yesterday so I can work behind the bar at Yah Yah's and hopefully pick up a few more shifts and whatever.

I really don't feel in the mood to crank out something very interesting right now which sort of sucks because I haven't written since before Sydney and so much interesting shit has happened... but maybe I need to wait until I tie up one more little knot out here in the real world before I can start changing the record on here and writing about what's actually on my mind right now. I think I'm just going to wait until it's a little bit easier, a little further down the track.

I've been writing a whole bunch of comedy though, and last night I had some mushrooms and came back to the hostel and wrote a WHOOOOLE bunch of what was, at the time, A-grade Material. I'll be trying it out at the Comic's Lounge workshop tonight so we'll see how good it really is but I've re-read it and it does look rather intriguing. It wasn't just he psilocybin.

Peace, Taco.

Something Serious

I've nearly been here for two weeks now (that extraordinary milestone will be reached as of tomorrow evening) and I guess it'd be safe to say that I'm 'settled in', as far as knowing where shit is and having a rough plan for how things are going to work for the next month. I went out with the Adelaide crew on Friday night to The Liberty Social, a club with a chalkboard for a sign which houses heart-murmur-inducing bass beats, a dancefloor full of people who actually came to dance (more on that later) and a bar that, as far as I can tell, is mostly concerned with serving water. Friday night was fucking sick and reminded me what first attracted me to clubbing as a fresh-faced eighteen year old cast out into the world. Well now I have been cast out into the world once again, and further this time. I'm still as fresh-faced and stupid as I ever was, only now I know a thing or two about dancing.

Friday night was a night where it all came into place for me and it really hit home that this city is where I'm going to be spending at least the next few years of my life. Someone said – and the words spill out of the black, flashing haze for me right now, but no face accompanies them – that a few people have come over to Melbourne and made a go of it for a month or two, only to go back home, tail between legs and empty handed. It never even crossed my mind that such a thing could be an option in this adventure... even if I were to end up living on the streets, a rough induction to the gutter would be far preferable to the long road back to safety and easy living that waits back in Adelaide. I guess that's only privilege talking right now though, and maybe after a few nights under a newspaper I'd be ready to call it quits. The point is, though, it's not even going to get to that stage, no chance, no way, no how. Nope.

I'm really very grateful to everyone who has made the last two weeks so god damn easy for me, all the Adelaide crew who have been so quick to say, “fuck yeah dude, we're so stoked to have you over here”. I wasn't expecting to have much of a support network at all when I got here, but the fact that one was pretty much ready and waiting for me has made everything ridiculously easy – like all I had to do was pack my bags and the rest was taken care of. Words with Brodie and Desh on Friday night after the club put all that in perspective though, and it's clear now that moving over here from Adelaide really means the same thing to a lot of people. Making that first mental jump and pulling together whatever resources you might have at your disposal back home to get over here is not an easy thing to do... and that's why, once you're here, the hard part is finished. It's not as if Adelaide is such a worthless, dirty crap-shack that only the people who get out are worthy of recognition, not at all. But what everyone that has moved here in the last year or so does share in, I think, is a common sense of purpose and determination, and that comes from having made that first step and packed up shop for the long haul. That first mental step is like a filter that clears out the people who aren't interested in bettering themselves or pursuing a passion with any serious commitment. It weeds out those who are still more interested in partying and staying out late every weekend than seeing what else is out there, waiting in the world. That is not to say that everyone in Adelaide is stuck in that filter, wasting away their life doing absolutely nothing – not at all. Obviously there are plenty of people that aren't interested in coming to Melbourne, and are perfectly happy and able to chase their dreams from their city of birth, but it does mean that over here, while this group remains populated with people who have made the great leap, there is no one sitting around, wasting time, and talking about shit that is never going to happen.

As a side note, I am completely aware of the irony that I have just spent seven-hundred words ranting on about how good it is to be in Melbourne, where no one is talking shit.

Peace, Taco.