It's Been Too Long

It's been too long, so I have to write something, three weeks almost, but what to write? Updates? Last week I had six gigs – one Sunday, two Tuesday, one Wednesday, one Thursday, and an MC spot Saturday. One of those went okay, three went very well (I'd at least say well, but at least two I was quite happy with), one went to shitsville and was me eating dicks for five and a half minutes, and one (the MC spot) went averagely for the first half, but then pretty well for second half. Now that I'm breaking it down like that, that's a pretty good ratio – and I think I'm being fairly honest with myself there.

That was a good week, not just because of the volume of gigs, but also because of the quality, those three that went really well felt great while I was doing them, and with the solid five minutes that I've got on me now, as well as with the twenty or so minutes of other material, I'm feeling fairly confident going into my run of ten fifteen-minute spots at the comedy festival. Also this week I printed off my flyers for the festival – eighty A4 sheets each with four flyers on them – so that's three-hundred and twenty A6 flyers ready to be given out to people that I meet in the next three weeks... I think I can do it. I'll be pretty happy with myself if I can hand out all of those flyers by the end of the first week of my run.

What else, what else? I'm going to Adelaide for a few days (Tuesday the 5^th to Saturday the 9^th) which should be cool, doing a spot at the Ed Castle and hopefully catching up with a wide array of crew down there during the fringe. The fringe is going to be sick, and I've got a few cool shows lined up that I want to see as well – Wolf Creek the Musical should be sick. Rhino Room Late Show should be sick. Grills at Phil's and jumping into WOMAD, it's all going to be sick. When I get back I'll have to sort out this Centrelink Bullshit that I'm too confused and tired to go into right now, but suffice to say that it needs to be sorted, and quickly, or else I'll be sitting in a room full of lifetime fuckup losers learning how to write cover letters and 'effectively present myself' for job interviews.

This has been an update from Tugzy, your pal, out in the midst.

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.

Last Night I Had a Good Gig

I'm heading out to do my first MC gig in a second, but I thought I'd sit down and write something first before I slide into the engulfing black that promises to be Saturday night. After I finish writing this, I'm going to change into my new jeans – hoping they fit properly – and walk out of the house with my notebooks, wallet and phone. Then I'll go get some fried rice from Loi Loi, around the corner. I love fried rice. I've been practising eating with chopsticks.

This MC gig – it's at Voltaire, a little upstairs performance space in North Melbourne that hosts an open mic every Sunday – isn't a comedy night, oh no no no. It's a burlesque show, so already, things are looking interesting. I'm excited though, because the fact that it's not a comedy show means that the audience, and even the performers, will have never heard any of my material before. I have a completely clean slate. Add to that the optimism that I've been feeling lately about my pool of material as a whole – I think I might almost be up to twenty usable, if not killer, minutes of stuff – and this gig is looking like it might just go okay.

Last night I had a spot at Fishface comedy in Footscray that went fucking brilliantly, which was nice. I tried a couple of bits that I've written in the last week and hadn't performed yet, as well as a bit that I did for the first and second time this week, and my bit about birdwatching and my mum that is turning into a pretty strong opener that reveals something about my personal life. The two new bits: last and second last, both killed, but the last one did especially well. It involves me yelling and screaming 'DUH DUH DERRRRR' whilst stomping around the stage for about a minute, and I'm really excited by it because I think I may have managed to write a bit that breaks out of the normal formula of 'stand on stage and say something funny' that stand up threatens to be trapped by, whilst still containing a conventional 'set-up, punchline' structure at its heart. I think I'm being a little pretentious here, and maybe reading Stewart Lee's book where he analyses three of his shows with liner notes has pushed me over the edge and into a pool of self-congratulatory wank. Hopefully not, friends. I need to remain vigilant.

All I think I'm trying to say here, is that I'm really looking forward to this MC gig, and I'm hoping it goes well and I get to do a good amount of material including some new stuff. I'll have to work on winning the crowd over with some of my more bankable material and then coming out with the weirder stuff, whilst still making sure that the stage is set for the burlesque acts themselves. Seven at the start of each bracket... wait... are there brackets in a burlesque show? Eh, this will all be a strange learning experience. I just want to get on stage, to be honest.

Feeling dangerously selfish, maybe? Over-confident after a good gig? Only time will tell.

Peace, Taco.

Living on my Birthday

Yesterday I met the most ridiculous person I have met in a long time... jesus shit! I went to some writing club meeting in South Melbourne with little expectations considering the previous meeting in December wasn't so much a 'writing club' as it was a bunch of people who share writing in common meeting up for a drink. I mean, that could be called a writing club, I guess, but it wasn't really what I had in mind... it can't have been all that terrible though, because I went back, albeit half an hour late.

So when I walked in some lady – who I later discovered was a 'writing guru' (someone else's words, but not difficult to believe) – was talking about journalism and a writers' group/course thingo she'd set up and I sat at a stool on the far end of the table and proceeded to crackle in a violent ray of sun that was beaming through the front door of the bar. A sun-tan indoors – well life is just full of surprises? Tee-hee-hee. Anyway, Mrs Guru (Valerie, her name was) was interesting and she had some cool stuff to say, but the ridiculous person that I met wasn't our speaker, no no, she was a lady by the name of Samantha.

Samantha was a early/mid-thirties (I hope that guess is accurate) writer who had been sending off a few bits and pieces of comedy writing to competitions and doing quite well, but what grabbed me was when she said to the group that her preferred method of writing was sitting down with a bottle of red wine and headphones full of hip hop. YES! My People! She told me about her writing, and then her life before her writing, which had consisted of about a decade all around the world (Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Egypt, South America) as a tour guide for a travel company. She had been taught how to play backgammon by Sean Connery and serenaded by Alanis Morissette, and received a donkey from native people in some far flung corner of the world... the details elude me at this point, friends, as I stand in awe of a person who has truly stepped up to life and nutted the beast between it's piercing eyes. She said that at twenty-three she was engaged and stuck in a dead end job, but one day she woke up, looked at her fiance and said, “I really don't like you”, and within two weeks she was off. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. These are the people that we all need to know, my friends. This is the person that everyone should be.

And then, a few days before that, there was another lady, this time someone I met on a tour, who was originally from Adelaide (of all the promising beginnings) but had lived in South Africa for twenty-five years including the apartheid era and Nelson Mandela's release from prison. She told me about how many households, including her own, had had black slaves during the era of segregation. One day, after a law had passed which would have nullified the black/white segregation of beaches within six months, she and her kid went to a whites only beach. They also took their slave's (I think she used a different word, but I heard slave) kid along, and the kid would have been no more than ten years old at this point. So while the segregation law was due to be repealed in six months – the decision had already been made and passed – for the time being the beach was still 'whites only', so when they got there a police officer saw the young kid and told the mother that she had to take him off of the beach or they would all be arrested. That's right, that shit happened. Imagine the kid – how confused. Imagine the mother, and the looks, and imagine people actually abiding by these laws and legitimately believing in their righteousness to the point where they knew they were going to be defunct soon, but until then the plan was racism as usual.

She talked about Nelson Mandela and the rugby game depicted in that movie Invictus and she talked about the feeling of national pride and togetherness when Mandela walked out onto the field wearing the national team's jersey. She told me about his ex-wife, who was apparently a part of some underground group and used to send her harems of male entourage on assassination missions. Mandela had to leave her and distance himself from the warring clans – the divides between different groups of black people in South Africa were apparently just as pervasive as the one that we heard about on the news. She lived through that, she saw it first hand. What have I seen? Maybe I've been a part of something important already, I just don't know it yet... maybe the eyes of history will look back and see Melbourne, 2013 as a strange pocket of human existence... maybe. Maybe not.

Crazy, disjointed thoughts on this sunny February day, this day that happens to be my twenty-second birthday. Samantha, this outlandish specimen of a person, has forced me to look at what I am doing and make absolutely certain that what I am doing with my life is exactly what I want to be doing. How can I possibly spend one single day doing anything other than that, when there are people out there in the dankest pockets of existence being given donkeys by villagers and playing board games with James Bond. Not a single second, my friends, not a solitary fucking moment can we afford to waste. Wring with all your strength, and drain this life for every drop. Be sure, it can be done.

Peace, Taco.

On Humility

I just went on the r/StandUpComedy subreddit and had a look at a post by a comedian who said he'd been doing comedy for about a year and was asking everyone to reply to his thread with what their biggest achievements thus far in stand up had been. Proud moments, goals for the future etc. This thread excited me because while I go onto this subreddit every now and then, I don't usually stay for very long because it seems to be mostly filled with people posting videos of gigs and asking for feedback or people linking to comedy specials by comedians that I don't find terribly hilarious... and just a quick aside: I don't have a problem with people posting footage of their gigs and asking for feedback, in fact I think it's great, but I'll get to the slight problem I have with it which may not be a problem at all but just me being a dick... in a little bit.

Anyway, so I went on to check out this thread and straight away I was pleased to see a bunch of long responses, and I started reading. After reading all comments though (only sixteen, but they were all pretty lengthy) I was a little disappointed. I had hoped to find... well actually, I don't know what I had hoped to find on here, and maybe sharing comedy advice on the internet just isn't the same as sharing it in person, but I'll say now that I didn't find what I thought I had.

To me, the way the thread came off was just a bunch of comedians, in similar positions to myself, becoming excited by the invitation to talk about themselves and the growth they have experienced in the first stages of their 'careers'. It seemed like a bunch of egos competing for screen time, basically – fevered egos, you might even say (Eh! Eh!). None of the long comments had replies underneath them, they were all just individual replies about the particular poster's achievements and goals which basically said to me that these people weren't reading here to exchange actual advice, they were just looking for a forum to gloat upon... actually I lie, there was one comment that started a conversation: one between two comics, the first comment had called a particular city's scene 'cliquey', there was a friendly disagreement, and then plans to meet up with a slightly back-peddled explanation by the original poster. Fevered egos really, but who am I to judge?

I'm not even sure about the reasons that I had for coming on to this page? I mean, to be completely honest, I had no intention of posting my 'achievements' or 'goals' on there, but not because I don't like bragging... just because I don't really care about bragging to people that are in no position to get me anything for my hard bragging work. But I had a bit of a think about the reason why some of the advice that these people were handing out for free over the internet was that I sort of half-resented, half-dismissed them as idiots. Petty. Pathetic. I found myself thinking, “who the fuck is this cocky tosser? Thinking he can dole out advice like this when he's only been doing comedy for *re-reads start of comment* TWO YEARS!!!” That may be the problem with comedy advice over the internet... it's all well and good to talk about the giving and receiving of advice in person and there is a valid point to be made about the fact that it doesn't matter whether you think a comedian is good or not, advice is advice and should be taken gratefully. The fact of the matter though, is that it is a narcissistic reflex to reject advice that comes from a source whose credibility you don't have positive proof for.

There is a reason piano teachers give recitals and put themselves last, there is a reason that past football players often slot nicely into coaching roles, and it is the same reason that I don't feel comfortable being told about 'the industry' or given tips on witing by some fevered ego sitting behind a keyboard on the other side of the world. It's because we are all the same fevered egos, and we only like to be told what to do by people we know can do it at least as well, or hopefully better, than we can. Well... I don't know, maybe you're not all that shallow. All I know is the day I can come onto a forum like this, read the comments, and take a meaningful piece of advice from something someone has said without requiring proof of their talents; on that day I will finally have learned humility.

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.

On Stragglers

I remember a conversation with Brodie a few weeks ago about Adelaide, Melbourne, and the dozens of people who seem to be stuck in between. I couldn't put an exact figure on it, but there would probably be at least ten people that I know who are caught in some premature stages of moving over to Melbourne, or saying that they are moving, or thinking about moving, or wanting to move but not knowing how. Some of them I trust when they say that they are coming, I know that they'll get here when they are ready, and some, on the other end of the spectrum, I know are just sitting around puffing on pipe dreams, and I'll be lucky to see them down here for a weekend.

Brodie and I were talking about this while we sat out the front of our 3121 abode, he was smoking cigs and I was probably eating stir fry of some sort, it was probably around six in the evening. Tommy Martin was supposed to come over and live with Lolly and Tim, but he's doing something at uni now. Phil is still sorting his shit out in Adelaide before he makes the jump. My mate Jayden, and to a lesser extend his partner in shit-talking T. Wood, have talked about coming over many a time, Jayden even going as far as to say that he almost has a job lined up. Chris... well, Chris is a bit of a lost cause at this stage. But there are plenty more, people who are 'coming' to Melbourne, just not yet. Just not now, just wait, hold up while I get my shit sorted.

This isn't some post railing against those people and trying to paint them as lazy, or dumb, or useless, not at all, and I know that sometimes you need to lay your plans properly before you hatch them or else they'll go sour. A few people who have said they are coming have my genuine trust, I know they'll make it over here, it's only a matter of time. But what Brodie said in the midst of this idle list-making struck me as a bit of fair warning to anyone who has ever had even the most cursory thought about leaving Adelaide and coming to join the youth of the world in Melbourne. “Yeah, maybe they'll make it down,” he said, “but it won't be for a few years at least, and by the time they get here the party will be over and we'll all have moved on to bigger and better things.” He said it like it wasn't even news. Like that's the way things were always going to be, and it was as obvious as the colour of the sky, but I had never even considered it that way.

The party will come to an end, eventually, but not because anyone says it has to, it'll just come to pass, some moment will fly by and the Melbourne vibe will be finished with. I've heard Chris, several times, bemoan his lateness in arriving to the town scene in Adelaide. “I can't believe I missed those few years of partying with you guys, I don't even know what I was doing?” I've heard him spill these words out after again hearing the stories of climbing cranes or lighting fires or Block Party or stupid, one night absinthe fling-benders. So why are you missing it again, then? I don't know... just know what you're doing, I guess. If you have a plan and you're doing something, make sure you know why, or at least have a fair idea. Don't be putting off what you really want to do in favour of what seems easier now, because what you really want might not be there forever.

Peace, Taco.