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.

Daydreams

Today I was eating a banana and daydreaming on the tram on my way down to lunch with a bunch of comedians. I had already finished my first banana and chucked the peel in the bin before I got on the tram, but I was about to be faced with the problem of what to do with the second peel: there are no bins on the tram, and it was looking like a solid ten minute wait between my projected banana finish-time and my stop, where I could get out and find a bin. Ten minutes holding a banana peel? Pffft... not likely, so I thought about throwing it out the window.

The tram coasted past the police station on the corner of Church St and Bridge Rd and I imagined throwing the peel out the half-open window and it landing on the bonnet of one of the three police cruisers parked on the side of the road. Glorious, I could see it there. To throw it out of the window accurately and make sure it landed on the car I would probably have had to stand up, turn around and aim my throw carefully, but if I did it deliberately then I'd run the risk of someone seeing – it was broad daylight and the tram was stopping at the lights and opening its doors. If someone – a police officer maybe? – saw me throw the peel intentionally onto their shiny police car, then I'd be in trouble. They probably couldn't pin me with much, maybe a fine for littering or at worst some trumped-up vandalism charge, but regardless, I don't need that right now. The fine for littering is probably over a hundred dollars, and I need to pay rent god DAMN it.

I imagined the police officer, just walking out to his car after grabbing a coffee or whatever police do in the station, when he sees a young, dark-haired, olive-skinned youth wearing a red Adidas jacket intentionally throw a banana peel out of a tram window at his vehicle. He would yell, “OI!”, drop his coffee on the ground and give chase. “Stop the tram! OI! YOU!”
At this point I'd be sitting in the tram, fretting and trying to think of how to get out of my fine, the cute couple sitting across from me would be smirking at me, having seen what I'd done, and now knowing they were about to see me get caught. I would run up to the front of the tram and beg the tram driver to keep going; “Pretend you didn't hear him! Please dude, just go!”

And he probably would go, because he's cool. He doesn't like cops either, and it's perfectly plausible that he didn't see or hear the police officer, who is now just an angry, but receding figure in his side-mirror, yell 'stop'. After another couple stops though, the tram driver would tell me that I had to get out, I couldn't stay in the tram – he'd be remembering his responsibility here, plus what if the cop called in another car to intercept the tram? He wouldn't want to get involved in this thing. But all the while I'd be reassuring myself that it was only a banana on a police car – how could he possibly care that much about a little, frivolous act of trivial civil disobedience. I'm sure police get that shit all the time...

I get out of the tram, and wonder where I'm going to walk now, because I still need to get to lunch, but before I can really do anything I hear more shouting, and see the angry, yelling figure running up the slight hill on Church St. Running right towards me. WHAT THE FUCK?! Overzealous motherfucker... so I run. Bolt down a side street and into the suburbs, but I know he saw where I was running, so I know I have to get away. I need to hide somewhere, I need to blend in. I stumble upon a sunny park at the end of the street with a playground and two single mums playing with their kids. Some guy in skins is doing laps of the oval before lunch and a girl is sitting on the hill reading a book with the midday sun on her back. I run, panting, up to her and sit down, still looking over my shoulder.
“We've been talking all morning.” I try to run her through my alibi.
“What? Who are you?
“It doesn't matter, look, we've been talking all morning, okay? I've been here with you all morning.”
The shouting comes from behind us and the cop charges over the little hill and runs down it, straight at me and dives, arms out and face red with fury. Tackle. He lands on top of me and we both go flying a good couple metres along the grass before he pins me to the ground and shouts something about a little prick. My ribs feel broken, I can't move, everything hurts.
“What the fuck?!” the girl jumps up and screams, looking accusingly at the officer.
“This young man is under arrest for wilfully vandalising police property! THE CHASE IS OVER BUD!”
“What chase, what are you talking about? We've been sitting here all morning!” She sticks to the script perfectly, and at that precise moment, I fall in love.

During the lengthy court proceedings that draw out over many long and arduous months, I learn her name, and her birthday, and her likes and dislikes and all her favourite things as we fight in the halls of justice against police brutality. I even remember the colour of her eyes: green. She is my witness and with her help I win a victory worth millions in compensation for the injuries I sustained, I was an innocent bystander randomly attacked by a deranged agent of the law. My injuries keep me from work and I lay a spurious claim to a life-long disability pension. Me and my beautiful witness kiss outside the courtroom, and then go off to spend our millions on eating, drinking, and being merry. I propose to her in the park where we met and for the rest of our lives we are happy, and in love.

I imagine this all, while I am sitting on the tram holding the now-finished banana peel in my hand. I imagine it, but it never happens, because I am way too scared of getting caught and fined for littering. Instead the peel goes under the seat, and I brush my hands clean, before pulling out my notebook and writing the story I am not yet brave enough to live.

Peace, Taco.

...aaaaand we're back

Two weeks exactly since my last post, and things have changed quite a bit in those two weeks, but I don't even want to talk about those things. I just want to sit. I want to write something. I just found this mixtape by a dude called Joey Bada$$ whose name I have heard around the place in the last few months, but as is always the case with new music, I've been way late to jump onto the new stuff coming out, even if it is TRAGICALLY up my alley. Basically the idea behind this guy and his crew (Pro Era) is that they love the 90's New York hip hop sound, and they are making music in the style that came out of the greatest city in the world during the Golden Era. I cannot express how much I would have absolutely lost my mind over this about eighteen months ago. Two years ago. This would have been the most amazing thing in the world. Now, it's just a nice surprise.

Today has been a nice surprise, sunny outside, and at ten-thirty I woke up after getting to bed at four-thirty in the morning, and felt great. I felt so great, in fact, that I went for a run with the Vintage Beatlab Podcast number twenty pumping through the headphones I found at the Workers last night. Luck luck luck motherfuckers, it's coming in through the windows.

I've been stressing this week about the looming rent day on the sixteenth, which is tomorrow now, and I was about ready to cruise down to the bank with a pocket full of coins and fifty bucks I'd borrowed off of Benny to pump my account up to what would have been about fifty cents above the required amount. Shit was deep. Things were getting thingy. But then, just as I was finally contemplating the beginning of preparations to leave, I saw an email come in – PAY SLIP. I'd forgotten about my pay from the one night I worked at Yah Yah's on the weekend. That's A-Hunned-and Twenty-Fo' of them sweet sweet dorrah ladies and gentlemen. Crisis averted. The lucky streak continues.

Tonight I'm going to kick the football around with Rich and Mick in Flagstaff Gardens – and yes, by football I do mean soccer ball... oh how I await the day when I don't feel the need to clarify on that point. Then, after a bit of social outdoorsing, I've got a gig at Stomach Ache in Collingwood where I'm OPENING of all things, and have a seven minute spot. I've written a bit of new shit over the past few days and am actually feeling okay about it. This week is going to be all about new material. Heaps of new. I've been getting a bit lazy on that front I think.

Okay, so maybe I will talk about what's been happening lately, I guess I kind of can now, I feel okay about it. Not great, but okay. Rach and I broke up. I mean, we talked for ages and it was shaky and we couldn't come to a decision, but I think I've sussed out that I need to be by myself. Yeah. That's what's going to happen. Who cares. HAH! This music is so fucking good. The 1999 Mixtape by Joey Bada$$ – it came out in June last year – so about the time that I was heading over to Melbourne DAYM SUHN... but I'm recommending it now. Listen.

Wow that feels good, finally, something written down. Stay tuned, whoever is tuned at the moment, I feel a resurgence coming on. Fuck, I just jinxed it.

Peace, Taco.

What was Two-Thousand and Twelve?

Last year started with a crusty-eyed glance out of a second-story bedroom window in the Cactus Hostel in La Paz Bolivia. As I focussed my vision and adjusted to the harsh light coming in through the thin, high-altitude air, I saw a condom – mine, fresh from the early-morning ,sloppy, drunk frecking only a few hours before – dangling off of an electricity cable over the street and dripping Nobel Prize Winners onto the pavement below. Two-Thousand and Twelve was a good year.

When I came back from Bolivia it was the middle of February, and I had a girl travelling from France – the other side of the world – to Australia to come and be with me. No story has ever begun more beautifully, but it only took me five weeks between her decision and her arrival for me to ruin it... not that I'm bitter or angry at myself, these things just happen, and the luxury of time passed allows me to speak so frankly about it. But I messed that one up, and hurt a lovely girl quite unnecessarily in the process, she really was lovely. She really is. Lovely. We were together for two weeks full of shame and falsity and when everything unravelled it took only a few days to destroy a summer's worth of good memories. They weren't destroyed forever, I look back and smile now, but when it was happening, it was tough. Easter was tough. I bawled my eyes out after she left in the side-street behind the Cranka just of Rundle, but after that I couldn't cry anymore, which surprised me a little. Two-Thousand and Twelve surprised me.

I stayed at uni for another semester, but you know me – and by you, I mean me, because let's face it, I'm talking to myself here – I sat around and did the minimum required to feel fulfilment at the end... that's two years of a three year degree finished, but I can't see the final year materializing in the near future to be honest. I volunteered at a Salvation Army store because I thought it would look good on my resume and I couldn't think of someone who would give me a nice reference – OH! That's the other thing, I spent like six months desperately unemployed – the first six months of this year. Jesus that was terrible, I don't ever want to be that unemployed again, lucky I turn twenty-two in a month and qualify for Centrelink (YES!)(Yes?). Two-Thousand and Twelve was skint, and really, really slow to get started.

I finally landed a job around June selling energy door-to-door for a joke of a man named Nathan in his AIDA franchise in Adelaide. That job lasted for two and a half weeks and was easily the worst stretch of employment I've ever had, even if it was also the shortest... a few funny things happened at that place though: getting screamed at by the office pussy for lighting up in the back of his brand-new car and spending the day at the pub instead of knocking doors. Roaming the streets of some shitty suburban region of mid-northern Adelaide belting out Ed Sheeran's 'The A Team' between houses and sitting by the river under the bridge in Black Forest hiding from the boss... not everything about that place was terrible. The people and the routine got me out of the house for about twelve days, and the brutal stupidity of my situation for those two and a half weeks finally pushed me over the edge and into Melbourne. Two-Thousand and Twelve was dumb.

I just remembered that we're supposed to be pronouncing it 'twenty-twelve'. Sorry guys, too bad, looks like the programming hasn't quite sunk in has it? Two-thousand and Twelve. I'm not changing just because it's quicker – I'm going to need a really clever piece of marketing directed at me from 180 degrees backwards and wrapped in chocolate to get me to kick this inefficient habit of pronunciation. Two-Thousand and Twelve sounds sexier.

Melbourne has been a constant firestorm of new faces, busy evenings, words, pictures, and no pedestrians... that doesn't really sound like a firestorm does it? I think I'm trying to be over-dramatic... but Twenty-Twelve was a bit like that as well... inconsistent. I found a calling this year – maybe that's a bit over-dramatic as well, but it sounds ok to me, not completely superficial. Stand up comedy has given me a place to go where before there was only the night stretching out past sunset and it has filled the void that used to bring so much dangerous introspection. I finally feel like I am going somewhere, and doing something with purpose, not just because I know it's healthy for me to be filling my time with things. Two-Thousand and Twelve has given me something that I am going to be able to carry around with me for the rest of my life – a purpose. Don't ask me what that is just yet, I'm not that far, I'm still figuring these things out, but Two-Thousand and Twelve helped. Thanks Two-Thousand and Twelve, cheers for the hand.

Quote of the year, although I think I might have actually heard it last year to be honest, is as follows:

There is no way to happiness,
happiness is the way

That's Buddha, apparently, but it doesn't really matter who it is, just what it says. After everything that's happened in the last three-hundred and sixty-five days, I feel like that quote could sum it all up pretty near perfectly – the whole year, and all of the years before it, I have only been having as much fun as I have been willing to admit. And now that I'm over in the most hyped youth destination in the fucking world, it's almost like I have to report back that I'm having the time of my life... it's no coincidence though, that I really, completely am having that time. The best time ever. And whether it's because I came to a place that was supposed to be brilliant, or because I found that place within myself, and then happened to move cities, it doesn't matter. Two-Thousand and Twelve was Happy.

Twenty-Thirteen?... let's go for 'spontaneous'. Sorry about the sappy, seriousness of this post for anyone wonderful enough to have made it this far. Thanks for reading, whoever you are, to be serious for a second, if you have ever taken the time out of your day to read anything that I've written and pushed out into the ether, it means more to me than I can put into words here. Thankyou.
And I promise I'll put more funnies in next time. Until then, dicks dicks dicks. Big fat willy. Asses.

Happy New Year everyone.
Peace, Taco.

The Last Two Weeks of the Year

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

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

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

Fuck I hate this double enter thing.

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

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

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

Peace, Taco.

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.

Spring Rocks and Julie is Fat

Every year for the past three or four (I really struggle to remember anything clearly from before I reached drinking age and I'm sure that somewhere in there there's a pro-alcohol argument waiting to be fleshed out) it seems that the first half of the year contains the vast majority of shitty happenings and a whole bunch of fretted damage control, while the second half – from about midwinter onwards – just fucking rocks. Down here in the southern hemisphere we've got spring and summer to kick us into the Christmas and New Year season and while the sky rises in the sky, so too do spirits seem to soar, but the utter brilliance of the tail ends of the last few years has led me to believe that something else – some more hidden, more other force – is at play here.

I have yet to directly ask any of my Northern-Hemisphere facebook-friends about their feelings on the second half of the year, so I don't know whether this vibe that I keep getting around August every year is universal, or if it is confined only to the bottom half of our globe, but I'm sure it's not just an Australia thing because I was in Bolivia last October to February, and those fuckers were joyous. And I'm not just describing a lift in spirits here either... I mean sure, once the first few real days of spring come through – those days when the sky is clear and shirts are optional – people start to get optimistic. I could bury myself in a pile of useless copper if I had a penny for every time a tenuous September conversation fell on the crutch of “I can't wait for summer”, but the change in attitude is only part of why I love August to February, there is another, more mysterious piece to this puzzle.

I reckon about seventy-percent of my sexual encounters have happened in the happy months of Spring and Summer – and I'm not talking about that tired 'okay, if you really want to' shit either, we're talking mad, rowdy, crack-the-bedpost-and-set-off-the-fire-alarm fucking. Springtime fucking – way more common in the spring. Add to that the fact that almost every relationship I've ever had have started between August and February, and they all tend to end around March. Huge moves have been made in my life in this part of the year – my trip to Bolivia, my first pair of good shoes, the time I lost my virginity, finishing school, starting stand-up comedy. While the other half of the year – springtime's ugly, overweight half-sister; let's call her Julie – has played host to job firings, two arrests, almost every one of my breakups, squatting in a crack-den in Clearview; Adelaide, depressed friends, and countless instances of arson and petty vandalism which only went unpunished by the sheerest of sheer luckiness. Julie, Julie, Julie... but why, people? Why does it always seem to be like this?

As I put to you before, I don't buy into the simple explanation that the sun shines brighter on the face of man, making him happy and cheerful and glad... not a fucking chance. Many of the brilliant things that have happened to me in the springtime have been completely separate from any human interference, and a whole slew of the bad shit that goes down on Julie's watch is down to my own stupid choices... what, is some behavioural scientist going to come up here and try to tell me that clouds make people angry? Rain drives youths to cover cars in petrol and turn them into towering infernos in the deep of the night? Piteous posturing! Why bother with nonsense hypotheticals, when a simpler, rational explanation sits right in front of our noses?

Birds.

Birds are great, and birds are plentiful in spring. As my housemate just said then when I asked him what he liked about birds, “they look so majestic when they fly.”... Uuuh... fuck, yeah ok guys, look, I'll come clean with you, I really can't think of anything else to write here. I was going to go on a bit of a tirade here about how birds have magical powers, or something, and how it is clear that while the springtime possesses it's own inherent charm that makes people happy and renews vitality in our hearts and souls, the birds are what really make this time of year special. I was going to be clever, verbose, and very very satirical. Ironic. Facetious. It would have been funny... but I can't, I can't think of anything, this piece just fell flat on its face. You are now witnessing, live and uncut, what happens when I try to write something special and it gets knotted up in its own specialness... speciality? Specially.. spe... fuck this, it's sunny and I'm going to play outside.

Frustrated, yes. Beaten, not yet.
I still love the springtime.

Peace, Taco.

An Idle Thought

If I were a cynical person I'd probably say that life can be fairly reduced to a series of desperate, frantic attempts to invalidate our own profound loneliness. These attempts vary in ingenuity and design but the basic question – the cry that sits at the core of everything we do – is always the same. 'Please accept me!' The scream rings out and cuts through every moment of our lives. 'Be with me! Think of me! Care about me!' We want to be loved, and so we long to find people who will love us while we struggle to disbelieve, or even forget if only for a second, the brutal fact of our ultimate aloneness in death. Then we die.

I think that's what I would say if I were a cynic.

Ugh, Sunday.

Peace, Taco.