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.

I Don't Care

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

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

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

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

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

Peace, Taco.

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.

Paying Fines is Shithouse

There is something that instinctively irks me about bureaucratic hoop-jumping. Centrelink, taxes, court dates, fines, rent, uni enrolment; it all seems so over-complicated and every time one of these makes an appearance in my life I find myself walking down the streets muttering swear-words and sulking. Today, this happened.

A month and a half ago I was the unhappy recipient of a fine from the transport people, whatever they like to call themselves, for resting my feet on the seat of a train as I made my way out to Footscray to hit up a comedy gig. I gave them my ID (SA Driver's License) with my Adelaide address on it, and the conductors explained to me that if I just contested the fine as soon as it arrived then everything would be sweet and I'd be let off with a warning. That all seemed well and good at the time, but when Mum Dawgz called me the other day to let me know that my fine for two-hundred and seven Australian Currency Units had arrived, I shuddered with bilious anger at the fresh realisation of the exercise in futility that I was about to embark on – I was shaken from my peace.

I trudged into town, infringement notice in hand, to fix this shitiness – I am not paying a two-hundred and seven dollar fine for putting my feet on a fucking chair, this is the future and I REFUSE to be needlessly oppressed. First stop library: I went in to print my carefully worded letter at the library as my home, inhabited as it is by four young drifters, each in varying stages of emotional decay, does not have a printer. The letter contained phrases like: “to whom it may concern”, “excused having regard to exceptional circumstances”, and the always convincing, “I apologise for any inconvenience and I hope that this matter can be brought to a satisfactory close.” Filthy grovelling, really. I felt dirty, I still feel dirty in fact. I wrote those things, and I can't un-write them now... also I forgot the data cable to connect my phone to the printer, so things weren't looking up.

After obtaining a library printing card, putting a dollar of credit on it, re-typing the letter in notepad in a font that resembled a Soviet military dossier, and printing the thing off, I asked how to work the scanner. “Sorry, you can't scan straight to the photocopier, you have to scan to a USB and then print a copy from that.”
“Why?”
“That's just how it is.”
That's just how it is dude, just leave it – my internal monologue, always the voice of reason – that's just how they do things here. Just let it go... twitch... shudder... *%### … ok, so I left the library and went around the corner to Officeworks where I got another printing card, onto which I put another dollar, and printed off a scanned copy of my drivers license (my excuse for contesting the fine is “I'm from Adelaide, and I didn't know that 'feet-on-seats' was an offense here”... details, details). Armed with my two pieces of contesting evidence, I walked with purpose to the post office, arms swinging, eyes burning, and coins jangling in pocket.

After making it to the post office, past the big red sign hanging on the corner of Little Bourke and Elizabeth that says 'Shopping as Usual' (I could vomit a lake of dark sludge and still not be purged of my deep hatred for this consumerist placard, but that's neither here nor there is it) I wrote the address on a postage-paid envelope and sealed my letter within. I considered not paying for the envelope, but then I thought that maybe when you pay for the envelope they put some special stamp on it which validates it – what if I don't pay? My thingy won't reach the place this will all have been for naught!! – so I paid, because I'm a pussy. Turns out I was right, they do stamp it. Crime doesn't pay kids, stay in school.

I flushed it down the chute of the red mailbox after performing one last OCD-check and then it was gone. Finished. Now begins the extended waiting period while my appeal is processed and re-processed through the dripping annals of the machine before being rubber-stamped by some hooded beetle-man behind a desk in the Transport Department. Hopefully my name will be cleared and I will be merrily released from debt. I guess if I do eventually escape a two-hundred and seven dollar fine then all that running around and frustration at having to deal with the mind-numbing inefficiency of a system where appeals have to be submitted in written form and reasons are called 'excusory clauses' and and every telephone is answered by the same machine... if I get to keep my money then all of this hoop-jumping will have been worth it. I can't help being angry though, even though, if we're honest, it's my fault for not following the rules. What's so fucking precious about those train seats anyway?

Peace, Taco.

Socks: History's Greatest Monster

(NOTE: This post was originally written for The Aristocrat comedy blog and can be found here)

Socks; what a racket to get into. Those little, cotton foot-pouches that stand between your skin and the abrasive inside of a shoe. You can wear them high – even up to your knee with rainbow coloured hipster-stripes. You can wear them low – those little ballet affairs that barely cover the heel. You can wear them just above your ankle, over the calf, hell wear them on your fucking ears right? YEAH! Socks people, what a wonder of modern comfort. What a mainstay of Western sophistication. Indispensable and Priceless; socks are the only thing that separate us from the beasts. Without socks, where would we be right? WRONG.

You are being oppressed.

No one invented the sock – at least no one that I can find on Wikipedia – which is annoying, because the lack of a definite target for the lynching that is sure to ensue after this vitriolic piece of hate-speech reaches the masses is, at best, worrying. I know for a fact my readership consists mainly of crowbar-wielding, high-blood-pressure knife enthusiasts, and I like to give you all what you want. Scapegoats, we hunt them by the dozen. But NO! No traceable lineage for the inventor of this idol of capitalist oppression exists for us to direct our rage towards, but come with me, my people, and we will find our villain.

Socks are shit. I buy about fifty of the fucking things a year. (ok, probably fifty individual socks, so maybe twenty-five pairs... and to be fair even that is an exaggeration, but fuck off who's counting?) No sooner do I get them home from whichever store was in my line of sight when I realized that my shoes were carving flesh-holes out of the bottoms of my feet, than they start to fall apart. Socks aren't built to last guys, they're not long term investments... and yet they cost SO MUCH FUCKING MONEY. Why do you think homeless people spend all their time sitting down, mournfully propped up against shop-fronts on busy metropolitan streets? Is it because they are so weak from lack of energy, and the depression at their sorry situation pervades their souls so completely that they cannot bring themselves to fight against gravity for another second? NO! WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?... the homeless are no stupid few, they are some resourceful fuckers. They refuse to walk, to stand, or even use their feet, because they KNOW that as soon as you put pressure on your three-dollar cotton bonds, they'll wear through and you'll be back in the line at target, forking out another five dollars for a piece of material barely worth half as many cents.

I bought some new socks the other day. “Why did you buy socks Taco? What's the deal with that? You sit here and rail against the capitalist oppression of superfluous pedalian apparel (pedalian, it's an adjective, it means foot. LOOK IT UP!) but you can't even give us a solution? WHAT KIND OF REVOLUTIONARY ARE YOU?” I didn't know when I bought them; the lightning bolt was yet to strike me, but strike it did, and from the ground up too – like a huge mass of electrons being discharged from the surface of the earth and dispersing into the atmosphere. (oooooooh clever) I have it people, it was all so simple.

Why wear socks, which always, always, ALWAYS fucking break or smell or get lost and then you only have one left and your housemate goes “hey dude why are there all these odd socks under the couch in the living room” and you say, “THAT'S NOT EVEN MY SOCK DUDE WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”... Why let that happen? When there is a perfectly accessible and reasonable substitute sitting just under our noses. I'll say it once, and only once, and you can all try it for yourselves. Baby Powder.

Just let that sink in for a second. Allow yourselves to be swept up and carried off on the wave of understanding. The tide of knowledge. The inevitable winds of change... they blow, my friends, and the blow for us. Why should we pay fucking eighty dollars a year for socks that will inevitably frustrate and infuriate us when they are lost, will become thin and pathetic after two washes, and will smell like SHIT, when you can just sprinkle a little baby powder inside your shoes before you chuck them on every day? I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'm going to give it a shot. An honest shot. No revolution was won in a day, comrades... I'm willing to take the plunge.

If any of you are still loyal to your precious foot-gloves, then by all means, keep beating your heads against the steel girder of planned-obsolescence and pay, pay, pay to the overpriced overlords that control our society's sock supply. But if you, like me, and so many others before us, wish to affect REAL, TANGIBLE, PALPABLE CHANGE IN THE WORLD IN WHICH WE LIVE... then throw away your socks today. Go out and buy some Johnson and Johnson baby powder, and begin your life anew. And to make up for the sock's other use, guys... stop being a lonely weirdo and do it into an empty bag of chips like the rest of us.

Peace, Taco.

Starship Troopers: An Attempt at Persuasion

Lost in deep cover
"Dear John," said his lover's last letter
Emptied a full clip to feel better
Slipped a rung on Jacob's ladder
Desert boot camp deserter got stung by death adder
Don't get mad get even madder
A10 tank killer fodder
Interrogate? Why bother...
My brother for a last cigarette, no please not yet
One last dance, lest we regret
Look me in the eye, GI, and tell me you're not tired
I'm tired to death sir, I'm tired till it hurts
But when you thought it couldn't get much worse
Well it may...
We march at the break of day
Come what may, rules of engagement say
We will stand to the very last, shrapnel blast
A casket goes home...
Sons and daughters wrapped in stars and stripes to keep 'em warm

("Give peace a chance... that doesn't mean anything"
"It's like give peace a chance")

Under an orange dawn we draw the line
And those on the other side must stand and fight
Tracers like fourth of July in the night
Lighting up like Hiroshima
The perfect sight

I'm a Starship Trooper
This is my letter to dad, transferred from Saigon to Baghdad
And now I'm dead
An allied soldier, with skin boils from Ebola
I'll bring you back a souvenir of what we stole

I was only nineteen
Joined for the pay packet
Now my full metal jacket won't take one more hit
I don't give two shits about oil interests
But depleted uranium, just gave Joe a fit
Captain Kurtz said, "fight till the hurt stops"
Yet all I can see is burned crops
And mates shell-shocked
Morphine under lock and key
Their AK's talking to my M16
Pray for friendly fire
Haven't seen a priest, but plenty of funeral pyres
Triage nurse is dying
My name in the paper
Next to a faceless dictator
And another flag to drape
Here's the commanding officer
A total mess again
Crying in the mess tent
How to make mice or mince meat of his men

I'm a Starship Trooper
This is my letter to dad
Transferred from Saigon to Baghdad
And now I'm dead
An allied soldier with skin boils from ebola
I'll bring you back a souvenir of what we stole

I'm a Starship Trooper
This is my letter to dad
Transferred from Saigon to Baghdad
And now I'm dead
An allied soldier...

Those are the lyrics to 'Starship Troopers', a bleak, eerie song by The Herd that lays an impassioned image of the futility of modern war. I have always loved this song – I feel it has, along with Apocalypta from the same album (The Sun Never Sets), much more replay value and deep passion to be had than many of the other songs on the album, despite it being far less accessible a topic than, for example, a young man's relationship with his grandma (Under Pressure) or even their more popular war song, the cover of Redgum's 'I Was Only 19'.

When I was in high school – now that I try and remember I think it was year twelve, so I was seventeen – I wrote out the lyrics to this song, along with Apocalypta, and put them in an email which I sent to my English teacher at the time. I don't know what I was trying to accomplish at this point; we'd been studying poetry and I think I just wanted to show someone who I vaguely looked up to that I really was interested in what he was teaching, while at the same time also showing off a bit of my own knowledge coloured with the contemporary style of 'poetry' (hip hop) that I was familiar with. I don't know whether he received the email, although he must have, the teachers' email accounts were assigned by some formula or another and I was seventeen, sure, but I wasn't a fucking moron... but I always kind of wondered whether something had gone astray, because he never replied. Isn't that strange, that I still remember that even, and not only did he never reply, but he never even spoke of it to me... I found that really weird because he was the kind of dude that I thought would be completely stoked about having a kid in his class send him some shit that was kind of to do with what he was teaching, completely of his own volition. Apparently not though. The email went unread and I never got to share the song with anyone.

This was by no means the first time that I had tried to share a song that I loved with someone, and it definitely would not be the last. I have a long and proud history of being extremely forceful and single-minded when I get the idea in my head that so-and-so would like to listen to such-and-such song. I obsess over it. As soon as I see the person next, I'll have my phone ready with headphones and ambush them like a music rapist, before making them sit in complete silence while my anticipatory stares burn holes in the side of their head... appreciate or die, I can't help it guys, I just really want you to listen.

So anyway, I thought of all this today, because I started the afternoon off by listening to some Urthboy and reminiscing of the ethereal spring of 2009, and then, once I remembered how Urthboy is the best lyricist in Aussie hip hop, I moved on to a quick revisit of The Sun Never Sets, (easily top three Australian albums EVER by the way... cheers) and without fail, whenever this album makes it into my headphones Starship Troopers is always the standout. Every time. This song... fuck man, this song is like... I was listening to it on the tram home not fourty-five minutes ago, slowly building up the idea of writing this blog in my head, and thinking of what it is that I can say about it. What do I like about the song? What makes it good? What makes it stand out from the rest of the album? I don't know, it just fits together so brilliantly, and Urthboy's lyrics, especially the fifth line “desert boot camp deserter got stung by death adder”... I mean that's fucking brilliant. Seriously. The image of the desert and the allusion to operation desert storm. The alliteration on the three strongest words of the line; 'desert', 'deserter', 'death'. The rhyme of adder with ladder – Jacob's ladder, an allusion to the bible story where Jacob ascends a ladder to heaven in his dream. The deserter slipped though, he didn't make it to heaven, he was stung. Dead. Fucked. Fuck. Fuck. AAAAAAAAGH. I was listening to this song and walking down the darkened streets out of the gritty Asian streets of North Richmond and I wanted to scream out at the top of my lungs. Not anything, no words, just scream. Just to release some energy – thins song makes me edgy and stirs up turmoil within my body's walls. Please listen to it. Please. I don't know what else to say.

I can't force you physically, but fuck. If anyone can persuade a bunch of internet readers to listen to some song off of an eight-year-old Aussie hip hop album with only furious words and lot of swearing, it's me.
Because I'm fucking brilliant.

Peace, Taco.

Make Me Angry

So it's looking like I'm going to be moving in with Brodie and Desh in the next week or two as Tim moves out of the Richmond place and in to his own sex-nest (my words, not his) with his lovely lady-friend Lauren. Logistics for this move will be tricky and Ill be recruiting my main main Philly P for transport duties when he drives down from Adelaide next week, hopefully with my queen-size mattress fixed semi-securely to the roof of his car. Bond is only seven-hundred-and-something dong so that shouldn't be a massively stressful ordeal, and seeing as rent is taken out monthly by direct debit I'll just have to make sure that my bank accounts are set up nicely so that more than enough is sent to my net account each week so I can't get at it with my evil plastic money funnels. I'm definitely looking forward to being out of this hostel and into a room of my own where I can crank beats and kill the light at any hour I desire, although I will miss the communal feel of this place and plan to come back every now and then to kick it with the few friends that remain... god damn it I feel really boring today, is this really all I have to say? 'really' twice in one sentence... I can't even string a sentence together. AGAIN? REALLY TACO? REALLY?

Fuck, should I get fired up about something? Uuuugh... This morning at knock-offs after work conversation turned to the now-recurrent theme of government and civil rights and I must say the fact that this is becoming a regular topic is both scary and exciting. Exciting because it's nice to talk with people about the shit that gets me really revved up and ready to debate, but scary because I know, before even entering into the discussion, that my frequently held position as devil's-advocate may not sit nicely with my work-mates, including managers and owners of the venue. Nevertheless, when we started talking about minority rights and the three other people sitting at the bar all begun the ritualized back-slapping that is common to people who are prepared only to energetically agree with eachother and sit back in comfortable chairs while the world's problems solve themselves, I could see exactly where things were headed. I raised the point that while affirmative action and quotas may hold a part of the solution to problems of, specifically, gender inequality, their implementation could conceivably, and from experience, does, cause resentment and feelings of tokenism among the non-minority groups. I'm not claiming to have a better solution here, but I would rather be a part of a debate where unfinished ideas are fleshed out and considered openly than sit back as one side's unfinished ideas are presented as though they are complete and uncontested, and then accepted as truth.

God damn it, still not really getting riled up here am I... What is wrong with me today? I don't feel blurry or anything, although Remi, my French room-mate, did just ask if I was hungover today, so maybe I am a bit worse-for-wear this morning (7:13pm) than I thought? I'd start on another topic here for the sake of attaining the magical number of three different ideas for this blog, but I really don't see the need... or have the impetus or energy. Yesterday Rachel and I went to Alex's new place in Coburg where they had bands playing in their basement and a fire going in the back yard. The place is fucking enormous and promises an amazing summer of backyard parties and lazy Sunday afternoons... but I'm finding it hard to gather up the furious excitement that I know that place deserves right now, so even with this hot at hand, I'm going to leave you guys waiting. I'll tell you about it next week.

Feeling half-faded –
sad, unenthusiastic.

That's me, signing off.

Peace, Taco.