Tired

I feel tired. I've been doing so much lately: writing comedy for the festival, gigging 5 or more times a week three weeks straight, tours, cleaning, running in the rat race... not drinking enough water. I feel tired, but it's a good tired, a sign that for the first time in my life I think I am really pushing myself towards something. I think? Or maybe I'm just not getting enough sleep.

Money really isn't an issue at this point; I feel like I barely have enough time to spend the paltry amount that I'm making anyway – for those of you playing at home that's about $500 a week, which actually isn't that paltry at all, but it certainly isn't high-roller shit. I am leaving home in the mornings, every morning, and not coming home for hours. Ten hours. Twelve hours. Hours spent running around completing this or that errand, sitting on trams and trains, heading out to gigs to either do a spot, or sit in the crowd and watch. Learning, I've been learning a lot.

I've been working on this bit that I honestly didn't think would be ready for the festival, but turns out may just squeeze its way in to my show (Two for the Price of Free YES!). This whole bit is basically constructed around the idea that I had one day a few months ago that it'd be really cool to move to a new city where no one whatsoever knows who you are, and then create an elaborate, and completely outlandish fictional backstory for yourself. Nothing malicious – not like 'my family died in a fire' or some shit that would require actual acting and would seem like shameless attention-seeking if exposed... just something harmless, but fun, like oh say, that I was home-schooled. So then I decided I couldn't wait until I left for another country to play this game, and the next best place to play it would be on stage... but it wouldn't be funny if I was the only one in on the joke. Considering that the whole point of comedy is that the audience is in on the joke – and whence cometh their laughter – I'd need to figure out a way to let them in on the joke that was being played on them – that I was lying outright to them for no good reason – whilst not making them the butt of the joke.

Then I remembered the story that I have been telling about the time Tim Clark, bless his cotton socks, told me that I had a nice jacket, only to rescind his compliment moments later after it became apparent that I was going to take his sarcastic jibe at face value and proceed to talk about how much I, too, liked my jacket. He lied to me, for no reason it seems, and I couldn't understand the reasoning behind this not-unheard of social phenomenon. Why do that? Why say, “nice jacket man,” only to add after I had accepted the compliment, “oh no, I was joking, it's shit”... what he did there was exactly what I was planning to do in my lying bit about home-school. If I could tell that story, then tell another, seemingly separate one about home school, and have the audience believe it, then lift the veil and say, “hey, look, it was all a lie,” then they would know how I felt, and the joke would be on Tim, and not on them.

I still have a few reservations about the story, I mean I invented it, from nothing, which feels kind of cool to do – just like Brad Oakes said it would ha. – but still there are only laughs in the setup, not the actual story, and most of those laughs aren't that strong... but I guess my joke writing will improve with time. Hopefully. Fingers crossed.

I've also been trying to write jokes about the news headlines off the Guardian – it doesn't matter which paper really, but I refuse to buy copies of the Feral Scum (thankyou Kieran Butler) or any other trashy cum-rag of a publication just to practise my joke writing. No, no, no; I will not be indebted to Rupert Murdoch in my comedy career. Not now. Not ever. No, no, no, no.

So many no's. I think I am tired. I should stop guessing and have a lie down... but there's still so much I want to do. I've nearly finished reading The War of Art that Richie gave me, and then it's on to Fade To Black (And Disappear) by an Adelaide author whose name I forget right now because I can't be fucked digging in my bag and pulling the book out to read the front cover. No. Fuck. I said no more. FUCK. There they are again. Okay, I'll stop now.

Peace, Taco.

Review of Charles Bukowski's 'Women' [SPOILER ALERT]

I just finished reading Charles Bukowski's 'Women'. Like, just finished it. Just now. For most of the book I had no idea where he was going with the whole thing... it just seemed like one graphic, semi-pornographic sexual encounter after another. I mean, obviously I knew he was going somewhere, because I've read 'Ham on Rye', and 'Post Office', but I had no idea where, or whether it would be anywhere truly interesting, and I had absolutely no inclination whatsoever to begin guessing.

I think 'Women' is by far the best of the three Bukowski books that I've read though, and it definitely resonated with me much more than the other two... the language, he is so detached. Every sexual encounter starts with his eyes roaming up some girl's legs – they're not even girls though, really, just bodies with names on them. Then she undresses and submits to him completely; “I mounted, stuck it in, and then...” is a fair summation of the end of every other chapter in this book, and there are one-hundred and four of them. He jumps from woman to woman to woman to woman, never growing attached to them, or even seeming to care when they walk out on him. At one point around the halfway mark he muses that all of his women leave him, but it is clear that this is only the case because he will take sex wherever he can get it. Only on his terms though. Only ever the way he wants it... he knows how he is, and for most of the book he is aware that he is selfish, and a bastard, and he understands why they all leave. He is seemingly at peace.

The morning hangovers and physical sickness barely seem to drain him, and the paid poetry readings that sustain his lifestyle somehow keep popping up out of nowhere, along with groupies, and fan-mail from easy women. He dismisses the men. But he hardly talks of love – he was married once, but had been in love four times. Now a dirty old man of around sixty, he dreams of the day when he is “an eighty year old fucking an eighteen year old.” Life-long dreams of a professional pervert.

This chauvinistic, evil womaniser has his run of the town for most of the book, and the thing is... and I don't know whether this thing is scary, or sobering, or humbling, or maybe just deliciously tempting in its realism... the thing is, it speaks to me. I don't stand for all men, and I'm sure there are saints out there somewhere among us, but the way Henry Chinaski (Bukowski's literary alter-ego) laps up woman after eager, fawning woman should have most straight men salivating. It's not pretty, and it's not nice, and it sure is pretty fucking uncomfortable, but he gets right to the core of it, at least for me. No wonder there is no mention of his mother... no family, no moral compass or ties to a possibly innocent past. Just a dirty old man, “sucking beer”, puking up blood through three-hundred hangovers a year.

Towards the end though, maybe the last seventy or so pages (out of three-hundred) things start to get a little clouded for Henry Chinaski. The sex is still good – in fact the whores and sluts that he so adores only become more and more sumptuous, their young flesh more and more tempting... but he has also met a girl, Sara, who touches something else in him. He doesn't say he loves her, and I trust him, he is a very honest narrator, and is frank and blunt about his feelings, both to his women, and to the reader. He doesn't love Sara, but he knows that she is 'a good woman', and this is a phrase he uses sparingly only once before. But the difference with Sara as well, is that she won't fuck him. She knows about his continuing conquests, and she suffers through his ongoing selfishness, but she always comes back, and there is something in that that strikes a chord with old, dirty Henry Chinaski. His last few sexual encounters span the whole range of women possibly conceivable: a young, nubile belly-dancer from Canada who gives him the time of his life, and gives it to him again and again; an old, haggard, sagging woman whom he loathes even before she is between his sheets, and infinitely more afterwards; a black hooker who sucks his dick terribly five minutes after meeting him in the car park of a liquor store; a ninety-pound, eighteen year old – at last. He has seen everything. Fondled every part, fucked every crevice. Still Sara waits, over Thanksgiving, Christmas, then she gives herself to him, without his asking and says, “Happy New Years Henry”; they fall asleep together.

After he accepts terrible head from the black hooker for twenty dollars, and then drives her to an intersection where she continues to hitchhike and no doubt solicit more of the same, he makes one last attempt – and there have been many beforehand – to steel his mind against any more fucking around.

“Sara was a good woman. I had to get myself straightened out. The only time a man needed a lot of women was when none of them were any good. A man could lose his identity fucking around too much. Sara deserved much better than I was giving her. It was up to me now.”

This is his final challenge to himself... three-hundred and four pages in and barely one more to go, he convinces himself that he needs to give this good woman a proper chance, because if he lets her slip away, then he will be doomed. Then another girl calls, another admirer, and this is where I was scared. Charles Bukowski was about to offer his opinion, in this last page, in one last conversation between a dirty old man and a juicy, delicious, groaning and spread-legged nineteen-year-old temptress. In the final lines of 'Woman' Charles Bukowski would decree whether, in his humble opinion, it was at all possible for a flawed man to accept the love of a good woman.

Anyone who says that Bukowski is a sexist, chauvinistic pig is probably right... but anyone who says that this is all he is is a single-minded, blind fucking moron. 'Women' is a book that is not afraid to delve past the scared facades that we put in front of ourselves to mask our true desires in our attempts to play the role of the good guy. I'm still not sure if Henry Chinaski is a good guy or not, but I am sure that he is a real guy, about as real a guy as there could possibly ever be in my eyes, and when his time came to decide whether he could be loved in the final pages of this book, my heart was in my mouth, as I felt my fate too, rested in his decision.

He sent her back. And still, there is hope yet.

Peace, Taco.

On the Road and Other Medications

Reading Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' the first time was a bit of a blur for me to be honest, I was in Bolivia, and I read the entire thing on my HTC Desire HD screen (that's a phone, if you were unsure) in less than twenty-four hours. Most of those hours were spent on a bus, sitting next to a Bolivian kid who was sixteen or seventeen if I remember correctly. I read the book for hour-long stints at a time, and then would turn to the kid and continue the conversation we'd been having before I had dipped off into my reading and he back into the 'cincuenta centavo' (50 Cent) playing on his iPod. I don't think I rushed through it, but the book has a real habit of lifting you out of whatever you are doing and taking you away on the journey, the road, off into the distance with it... so I definitely read it quicker than I would have a normal book. I'm reading it for the second time now though – I'm typing it out actually, word-for-word on my laptop – and this time I'm taking it much slower.

I've just reached the start of part two, and I'm only going about four or five pages each sitting, because to type about that many pages takes around forty minutes to an hour, depending on how good a day my fingers are having. But I'm loving the fact that it's so slow. I almost forget about this ongoing project every few days, but it sits there – the Penguin-Paperback copy of 'On the Road', the clothes-peg I use to hold the pages open, and the hardcover children's 'The Fun-To-Learn Picture Dictionary' that I use as a board to peg the pages of the book onto – it all sits there on the back corner of my desk, waiting to be opened whenever I feel a little desperate. Typing out books is something that I've grown to really depend on in the past year; first it was Orwell's '1984', and now this. It's a great way to immerse myself in someone else's words and thoughts, forcibly and directly, and take my busy mind off of whatever frantic problems are troubling me. The idea came from Hunter S. Thompson and my former obsession with his wild, drug-addled life and persona, but now that I've appropriated his activity as my own I can see benefits completely separate from what he described – or what were described on his behalf. He did it to “see what it felt like to write a great novel”, if I remember correctly – he typed out F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' – but his motivation is of much lesser concern to me. My aims are much more simple, but much more immediate, and vital as well.

I just passed over a part in 'On the Road' where Dean Moriarty has left his second wife, Camille, with their child to go back to his first wife, Marylou, and beg on his knees for her to take him back. She does, and in Kerouac's own words;

“She understood Dean; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad.”

More reassuring words have never been written, and upon typing them out as my eyes flitted over the page I felt a wave of understanding and hope wash over me. I recently watched a video of Neal Cassady, upon whom Moriarty is famously based, when he was on the bus with the Merry Pransters in the early-mid sixties and to be perfectly honest, he looks and sounds like a complete lunatic. A madman. But sometimes it's hard not to feel, in the furious changing tides of life, that I am mad as well. Although maybe not as outwardly eccentric as Cassady/Moriarty, I'm sure every one of us feels at some point as if they are the exception to some sane rule of the world, an outlier on the bell curve of acceptable normalcy. “Am. I. Insane?”

Well maybe you are, and maybe I am, but Jack Kerouac, in a surely unplanned but far from accidental stroke-of-genius example here, shows that no matter how crazy you think you are, or how crazy you are by everyone else's admission, you still have a place in this world, and you can still find someone to love you. Dean Moriarty, with his head in the hands of his sweetheart, is proof enough of that.

Sometimes I wonder when I'll get tired of the violent up-and-down cycle of my mood and of my life and of the world that I constantly create around myself. I find myself hoping that that day will come soon; “soon, surely, soon I'll find it within myself to settle down and find a level of balance in my life, soon I'll be able to relax.” But every time I find myself repeating this tired inner dialogue, I am tempted, once again, by the promise of a higher tomorrow, and the irresistible, surging rise of a brand new peak. For as long as I am tempted by these peaks though, there will be a frightening low waiting in the trough, and that's where Jack Kerouac and his famous tale of freedom come in. Whenever I feel like I need something else to hold onto, to support me while I ride out the lows and confront the fear, I turn to the pages of this book – and when it's done, the pages of another classic that I'll start typing out – to escape to the open spaces of someone else's words, and leave the dark churnings of my own mind behind for a while. In this way, I remind myself that a new high is coming, and peace is a comfort that, for the moment, I do not need. Not just yet, Tugzy. Not today.

Peace, Taco.

Understanding Cliches

I'm starting to understand a few things a lot better lately. Things that other people have said, and yes, some of them are cliched to the hilt... but things are cliched for a reason, namely, that they are often true.

Hunter S. Thompson said – and no, I can't remember where, but he did say it – that “music is fuel”. He sort of approached that realization by talking about how most people have a very sentimental attachment to music and they over-complicate their relationship with music by making it into some all-mighty force, some god to worship that saves them from the black abysses and carries them through life. I feel you there, Hunter, there was some video by a fairly run-of-the-mill late-emo band whose name I forget that I remember had the band playing their song life, interspersed with footage of their fans, all emoed out, staring into the camera and saying how music had 'saved their life' while choking back tears and shrieking. Ok, fair enough, if you feel that way. But what HST said is beginning to resonate very much with me because even though I still have an intense connection to some of my favourite artists, music as a whole is more like a thing that I find keeps me going when I get bored. The sensation of finding new music and listening to something – discovering it for the first time – is pretty hard to match, and that's where the analogy to fuel comes in I think: finding a whole bunch of new music over the last few days has given me so much energy and from feeling pretty shitty on Saturday afternoon, I suddenly feel pretty damn good. Great, even. And if we are going to get really picky or defensive about the 'music saved my life' thing, well music is just the medium through which amazing artists work, really. It's not music itself that saved you from ending it all when you were fifteen, it was the artist – The Used, or Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, or Bullet for my Valentine, or whatever guitar-saviour you happened to stumble upon when you needed help. They are responsible.

The next thing that I've started to understand a whole lot better, and I realize now that there are only two 'things', even though at the start I said that there would be 'a few'. Oops... the next thing is that thing that comedians tend to say about comedy, that they, “feel like they can be themselves when they are on stage.” Nothing sounds more cliched and over-sentimental, I recoil at the thought of ever saying those words to someone without a meaty preface and some damn strong context, but it seems that they are starting to become true. For me. That's right. When I first thought them I thought the speakers were trying to say that they don't have the courage to be themselves in other situations, or trying to imply that they are somehow being brave by getting up on stage and 'being themselves'. Those explanations don't really make complete sense though, and so when Rach and I were in the middle of an afternoon-long 'talk' ('talk' as in 'we need to talk' talk) and the conversation came round to my love of standup, it started to hit me. On stage, it's so much easier for the things that I say and the way that I am to align with my internal monologue – that ever-present voice inside my head that represents the way that I would ultimately like to express myself but that I can never perfectly match because of the limiting distance between my brain and my mouth. On stage, there is no one talking back, and diluting my thoughts with their silly external opinions in real time: this is both a good and bad thing. It's a good thing because I can get whatever thoughts I have out there without interruption, even if, admittedly, at this stage the thoughts that I'm 'getting out there' aren't that groundbreaking or important (“it's not so easy for guys to pee standing up, you better RECOGNIZE!”). It's a bad thing though because sometimes it's good to have someone else keeping my thoughts reined in, in real time, because if they are allowed to run wild and unchecked then there is the very real possibility of my unrestrained ego having a field day and saying something stupid and regrettable. Something that I don't really mean, that maybe seemed fair at the time, after five straight minutes of me, me, ME!!!

And I think that's just about enough of exactly that, for now. I downloaded a pretty cool skip-hop/ambient mix yesterday from the Friends of Friends mixtape series, and it feels like my day is amping on the up-and-up. Day time. Yes.

Peace, Taco.

No More Comedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Taco.

Failed Organization

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Taco.

Waiting for Inspiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Taco.

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.

Comedy Laundry

My Beautiful Laundrette is on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, contains a number of washing machines in varying sizes and dryers of varying noisiness. It is a pleasant, if bare environment, and always seems to be kept at optimal room-temperature by fans – I haven't counted how many – positioned in above eye level and hanging from the walls or ceiling. I go there every couple weeks to do my laundry (duh, fuckhead) and... wait... hold up... ok, what the fuck was that?

In the past months I've become increasingly frustrated by what I have started to understand is the biggest problem with my comedy. As much as I pet and cajole myself after every gig, and as much as I mentally prepare myself beforehand, I can't seem to reliably win the audience over. Every now and then I'll have a great gig, but that's nothing to celebrate – everyone gets lucky every now and then. For the majority of my mediocre spots I seem to have the audience steadily suspended somewhere between vague enjoyment and frightened annoyance and as great as this may sound, it really is not gold comedy territory. So I've been thinking about why this is and what I can do about it, and I think I've hit upon a small something... hopefully? Maybe? We'll see I guess.

Firstly, I mentioned that I've had good gigs, but I mentioned it dismissively, and with good reason – it seems to me that most, if not all, of the really good gigs I've had have been mostly down to luck, and I say that not because I'm trying to get down on myself, but because it's true. The approach that I've been taking with comedy has been very much along the lines of “write material; decide whether it's funny enough to do on stage; do new material on stage; decide whether I should keep it; compose predetermined sets from bits of new material that worked mixed with old material”. I guess there's no problem with that approach, in theory – ah those beautiful words – in theory it should be fine. In theory I can continue to push through a wall of silence after my opener falls flat, or receives a lukewarm response. In theory I should just keep going and try the next joke. Maybe they'll like this one better? Maybe that was just a false start? NO! That's a stupid fucking theory; comedy isn't about theories, and comedy isn't about robots getting on stage telling joke after joke after joke and crossing their fingers in the hope that a few of them stick... fuck... FUCK... COME ON...

I had noticed that my gigs had been falling in quality – maybe a better way of putting it would be that they have been lacking in consistency or predictability – and I tried a few things. You'll notice up top there at the start of this piece that I reached out for anger and attacked you, my gentle readers, when I realised that I had gone three sentences into my intro without cracking one joke – I got nervous and lashed out... it was a cheap shot borne of fear, and I need to dead those cheap shots. Put them away, and start really reading the audience. Connecting with them. I need to tell them – let them know? – that it's ok, that I'm in control. Maybe first it would be nice to actually be in control, but hopefully one will beget the other I guess... ugh, thinking about comedy is hard. Comedy is hard. Look guys, all I'm trying to say, and all I will say for the moment, is I've realised that in order to regain control over the quality of my gigs, I'm going to have to go out on a limb and break the fourth wall. Break it, smash it, shit on it, and eat it for breakfast. The audience need to feel like they have some control over what is happening so that when the comedian jumps out and surprises them from behind his cleverly placed misdirections and traps and cleverly constructed sentences, they aren't so surprised that they turn on him. They need to trust me. Trust me audience... please?... Ok., working on it.

By the way the laundrette really is quite nice. Four dollars for a wash cycle, one dollar for fifteen minutes of drying, and everything I said about the room-temperature was true. My Beautiful Laundrette Brunswick St, Fitzroy – I recommend it.

Peace, Taco.