Wednesday, July 31, 2013

A Morning Failure

I just got back from leaving the house for no reason... okay, there was a reason initially, but much the same as has happened on multiple occasions in the last month or so, that reason quickly evaporated upon my arrival at its supposed source. Ooooh, look at that! I managed to keep that introduction pretty general, ey? Pat on the back for me.

I was supposed to have a tour this morning, but no one showed up. That's pretty much what I was trying to say. I got up at 9:20am and ate breakfast, had a SUISSE ULTIVITE ™ and was out the door by 9:55am. I had The Herd's 'The Sun Never Sets' in my ears, more specifically, 'Effortless feat. Braintax'; Urthboy's verses on that track are, as always, PHENOMENAL. As I power-walked up to Fed Sq I saw that it was unusually empty considering the nice weather – fuck me I'm sick of making excuses to tourists for why there is no one there. “Oh it's just the off-season.” “It's a bit foggy today, maybe people thought it was going to rain?” “Master Chef ran 10 minutes long last night, people are probably still tired after having their schedule thrown out.”

Ugh.

But when I got into the square I was feeling good, and today I wasn't much up to having a tour anyway, so I was grooving along to my tunes, both earphones in, dancing in the beam of sunlight that is reflected off of the gold plate on the Eureka tower. Two old ladies looked lost so I asked them what they were looking for and directed them to the lower entrance of the ACMI – they were going to the costume exhibition. Another lady looked lost and asked if I was the guide for the 11am tour – I'm not, that's the Fed Sq tour. I told her that normally I'd conscript her into my tour which starts at 10:30am, but it wasn't looking like we were going to have one today. She asked if my tour was the same as I'm Free... I breathed a dejected sigh, and said, “yes”. She had been in bed with the competition, and walked away with a figurative post-coital glow shimmering over her head.


A bunch of school kids walked past... actually it was probably more than a bunch, how many is a bunch? There were about fifty of them, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old? I was dancing, and while I didn't make eye contact with any of the vermin, I continued dancing while they walked past not metres from me. I was pretty proud of that. Don't break stride son, no one is around, no one is looking, this is your world.

At 9:36am I packed it in and walked back to the tram to go home, the morning a technical failure, but an emotional victory. I didn't really want to give the tour anyway... If business doesn't pick up in the next few months I'm definitely quitting and doing a bunch of medical tests in Adelaide before Christmas. Fuck yeah, stick your needles in me, but leave my asshole alone.

Peace, Taco.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Something to Read

Three books came in the mail today, in a little box, so small that even though I knew they were all coming at once, I thought for sure they had left on out. They didn't: 'If Only It Were True' by Marc Levy, 'Naked Lunch' by William S. Burroughs, 'Roughing It' by Mark Twain. I'm still re-reading the game though, and Blake the seventeen year old comedian wants to borrow it next, so I should probably either shit or get off the pot by the end of the week on that one... I'll probably give it to him on Friday. The book, not a bag of poo.

Today I went out to Fed Square thinking I had a tour on but Claire was already waiting there talking to tourists in her red Peek Tours shirt so I quickly threw up my hands and said, “You can take it!” followed by something along the lines of, “WOMP WOMP!” I came along with her group for the first forty-five minutes, and then bailed to come back home and start reading the Marc Levy book which I bought on recommendation from French Girl Overseas. When I got home I opened 'On The Road' and continued typing that out.

After about an hour of 'On The Road' my fingers started to get a little inaccurate and lost time from revised spellings and adding words to dictionary was becoming a source of frustration. I stopped, ready to red some Marc Levy, and thought I'd tell France about my package this morning and let her know that I was about to commence... but I fumbled, and gave myself an out, saying, “I'll probably start it this week.” What else had my distracted mind concocted for me to do in the interim?

I spent probably half an hour in the poisoned haze of Facebook, and then closed my laptop and picked up 'The Game' by Neil Strauss and opened to where my worn-out bookmark told me I was up to. 'The Game' is a book that can really be opened at any point – I read it cover to cover the first time, and am doing so again this time, but I know that I could open it to any page and start reading and still learn something no matter which chapter I landed on. It's sort of like (well, it's exactly like actually) the book Winston gets from the Inner Party Guy in '1984'; he says almost these exact words of the book which was allegedly from Goldstein and details the 'true' state of the world as opposed to the Party line. He opens it at random and reads. 'The Game' is a phenomenal book, everyone in the world should be made to read it.

Oh! I forgot! I ordered some clothes too, that's right, a pair of jeans and a pair of pants from Criminal Damage, a site that Fiji Anderson recommended me a few weeks ago at lunch with Phillos Portellos and Todd on Brunswick St, I had a focaccia, Phil had a Turkish Breakfast or some shit, can't remember what Fiji or Todd had, I nearly left my jacket there after picking it up from Richie's (Fiji) place after leaving it there the previous Friday night because I was wearing too many layers and was getting hot I didn't get in to any clubs that night that was when I decided I need to change my wardrobe around which lead to me buying some new shoes and shirts and the purchases today and some future purchasesarecomingimexcitedaboutgettingawholebunchofnewclothes...


Stop procrastinating fuckhead...

Okay, I'm starting the Marc Levy book now.

Peace, Taco.

Monday, July 29, 2013

Frantic

SO FRANTIC SO FRANTIC SO FRANTIC!! GAH! It feels like every Tuesday is like this, but I like it, the mayhem is almost relaxing. Tuesday is gig night – BWaHWaGWa... at the Rochester. I've just done about an hour of sending messages out to people to book spots and MCs and make sure the events on google calendar are up to date so we don't have nights like a few weeks ago when our MC pulled out. It's 4:08. I'm about to leave the house with the poster I printed yesterday and head to the Rochy with flyers and start hitting the street. I feel like I'm about to leap out of my skin.

Good developments today though; I just swapped my Wednesday morning cleaning shift to Tueday, which also pays twenty-five dorra more than the Wednesday for what I consider a negligible amount of extra work. BONUS DING DING. That switch though, means that I can hang out at the Roch for as long as I desire now, every Tuesday. So we can actually make this a 'stay and hang out' thing. Good for business. Good for culture. Good for developing the crew.

Phil just sent me the link for Mark Ronson's Boiler Room Mix... yes yes and yes son, that was a fucking great mix. Fit the mood perfectly. I thought Mark Ronson was some club-house DJ, so when he dropped The World is Yours off Illmatic with some cruisy space-beat behind it I lost my fucking mind... not just a few words from the hook either, THE WHOLE VERSE. Yes oh yes oh yes. And Wu Tang, and Action Bronson, and loads of others that I've forgotten. Some of the whirrs and whistles freaked me out a bit though, but I guess that's just what happens in LIFE! Your favourite songs get interrupted by mic-feedback and you go, “Dude, what are you even doing? Was that intentional? Did that even come from the music? Is my phone ringing? Why do I have chopsticks on my bedside table?”

Shit's tough.

I just got distracted... god damn it. New Mission: Don't get distracted. I'm going to leave now. Off to paint the streets red with blood. ('paint' = 'stand on'; 'red with blood' = 'and hand out flyers') Okay? Okay. Lovely.

Peace, Taco.

Hair Revelations

I've been growing my hair now for almost as long as I've been living in Melbourne – I remember the last time it was cut was by the girlfriend of some guy from Perth that was living in my hostel last year. She shaved it down to a number three in the basement TV room and I left my towel on the chair. A year of growth has it at a length at least as long as it has ever been, although I think it's probably longer, and in the past few weeks I've finally been able to tie it all back into a knot if I make sure it's up pretty high to catch all the hair off my fringe. Fuck yes.

I never realized all the shit I could do with hair this long, it's fucking great, I just took down after having it up all day as I charged around the city printing, writing and completing a six-month lie to centrelink... and when I took it down it stayed back. Way back behind my ears, held in place by the magic of fucking WHO KNOWS! If I swish it forward I can have one side over my face and the other side stays back – I would have killed for this knowledge when I was nineteen. As it is now, I don't really want to swish it over my face and provoke already-prevalent cries of “Bieber” or “Fucken Poof”, but it's nice to be aware of my options.


My stand against product continues. No gel. No hairspray. No dumb fucking wax bullshit that I have to wash out of my hair every day; get fuwarked L'Oreal or whoever makes that sticky rubbish. My hair can stand up all by itself.

Peace, Taco.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Rant 002

I just pre-ordered Patrice O'Neal's new album 'Unreleased' on iTunes, and fuck did I resent having to get an Apple ID just to be able to pre-order it. Fuck Apple, seriously, I have lived the entirety of my life as an internet denizen without submitting to Apple's vice-grip, why the fuck should I have to sign up now? WHY DON'T THEY RELEASE THE FUCKING ALBUM ON ANOTHER PLATFORM? There's nothing even good about iTunes anyway, and how do I know that when I download this album it won't be in some fucking bullshit Apple-only format that I can't put on my Android? Eugh. Vomit. I feel so dirty.

It's another nice day outside though – not that it matters much to me sitting in here with my hoodie on only soaking up about 1m x 50cm of light that shines through my window... I think I might go out today, out into the world and write some things. I need to get some sunlight into my body and get away from this soul-sucking internet portal. My computer.

THE SKIES ARE BLUE AND BEAUTIFUL. God damn it.

Some tics I've noticed that I have developed with regards to word-processing:
  • I have started always shift+entering instead of just entering, I think I do this to preserve nice formatting in open office as often a regular enter will engage some auto-formatting option which fucks with my OCD
  • I can't handle red underlines on words, even if I know that's exactly how I want the word to be and I'm not going to change it, I still have to right-click and add the word to dictionary or tell open office to ignore it – my choices as to which never ceases to confound me... “I'm 'ignoring' “tics” but 'adding' “bullshit”? Sure, why not
  • Full-stops at the end of these bullet points... get fucked

I can't think of anymore... and I don't want to get tied down into making lists here, I'm just trying to get my creative... eugh god, don't use the word 'juices' you fucktard... I'm just trying to start writing again. Nothing good will come of this new blog for a long time. What a struggle, what a grindingly terrible slog. I just found a gross piece of dead skin on my desk. I brushed it onto the floor and it fell down in a beam of light like a snowflake, a gross, dead, fleshy, DNA-filled snowflake. Down on the floor now waiting for that rats that want to clone me.

I just remembered I need to go to an appointment at PVS Workfind today THAT WAS LUCKY WASN'T IT. Nearly missed that one didn't ya cheechy? (Cheechy is me, I call myself that sometimes in my head). I think I better get outside now, time to go Tugboat. (There's another one)


Peace, Taco.

A New Assessment

It's been a while since I've written anything not to do with standup... I think that's a bad thing. It's probably a bad thing. I don't know at what point I became lazy and started telling myself that the workload I had accrued for myself on a weekly basis had become too great to accommodate any writing time, but whenever that point was, it was the start of a period of decline. I always talk about these periods of decline, but I don't think I understand them very well.

It's raining outside, that's good. I like being in my room when it rains. Inside my sanctuary.

I always say – or at least have been intermittently exclaiming for the past three years or so – that every year for me is broken up into two rough halves; one of growth, and one of decline or stagnation. I think I need to try and understand a little better why I think this is though, or at least define what each of those could possibly mean. Right now I feel like I'm in a period of decline/stagnation. I'm tentative to call it out-and-out decline for the simple reason that there are still areas that I've been improving in for the past three or four months (most obviously, standup) but I would say that in general, I feel like I've lost a bit of momentum. Or maybe that's just now? Is my need for structure and order what is driving me to split up my life into segments like a real-time historian? Maybe I'm just having a bad day?

The rain just got heavier. Fuck yes. Rain you angry motherfucker.

The good periods are when I talk about my theory most frequently, probably because it's in those times that I feel most inclined to tell everyone how awesome I am. “Check it out, I'm doing FUCKING BRILLIANT right now, I'm in an 'up' period!”

Uuuuugh, this post really is going nowhere. Finish it dude, finish it. Finish something. I've started a story that I probably won't finish recently, or maybe I'll try and have another crack at it... I'm in that difficult middle passage in the narrative, where I don't really know what's going to happen... maybe I just need to do some hardcore storyboarding. Shit needs a middle.

I feel like I'm in a middle passage of this period of my life right now too... I've been in Melbourne for about thirteen months now – so let's call it a year – and in the first year I accomplished everything I could have ever hoped to accomplish. Let's take stock, shall we?

  • I became single and stayed single (doesn't sound important, but is)
  • I found a place and a good circle of close friends
  • I got a job, then got fired from that job, and then got some more jobs (I have an income)
  • I did a festival show and a whole butt-tonne of standup (maybe 150 gigs)
  • I took some drugs but not too many (YEAH!)

Okay, so that last one is a little silly, but everything else is good, I've done some good things here, now comes the harder part: what am I going to do in the next year? Let's say this next period will be from now until when I leave for Edinburgh next year (mid-July 2014). What do I need to do until then?

  • Sort out the situation with Peek Tours and figure out how I'm going to maintain the level of income I've enjoyed up until a few weeks ago
  • Stay single
  • Write my show and make it good – commit to my show rather than just getting on stage in front of friendly audiences every now and then and trotting out half-written stories from a show that doesn't yet exist
  • Stay hungry
  • Write every day
  • Drink less and take fewer drugs (BUT STILL SOME YEAH!!)


Okay, that seems like a pretty decent list. I wonder if anyone's reading this... it's always nice to have an audience huh... well that's me, for this one, this time. Sitting in my room, 45 Baker St, Richmond, 3121, Aidan Jones, in effect, looking at the set list from the shitty gig he just had that he wrote on his hand. Feeling Fragile.

Peace, Taco.