Week 2 - Failures

[Thursday 9/1]

And so continues my week without money, I woke up this morning to the realization that I have lost my phone charger and need to either: wait until 4pm when the pub opens and use their charger; or find around $35 and buy another. This grim realization really happened in two parts. Last night when I went to bed I saw that I didn't have my charger on me, but I assumed I'd left it downstairs yesterday, plugged in from when I was cleaning the pub in the early arvo. Only once I woke up did I remember that I had taken it to the library after cleaning with the intention of watching the new episode of Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, not because it's a particularly good show, but because this one features Louis CK... only, just now, as I write this, I'm remembering that that actually happened on Tuesday, and so my charger is, in all probability, still downstairs where I left it yesterday. Look at that folks, that shit was in REAL TIME!

I'm still poor though.

[Friday 10/1]

I find myself today thinking about my friends from back home in Adelaide, the guys I came up with (aside: I want to start using that phrase more often, it's such a solid, street kind of phrase and is so fun to say, makes me feel like a big man. EH?!). I've been thinking specifically of my friend Sketch, a guy I've known for the better part of ten years, and what he is up to. Honestly, what he's up to can probably be fairly described as 'not much', but I love the guy and I think about him often, even if I only see him once or twice a year nowadays.

The fact that I would so readily sum up the contents of my friend's life with the phrase 'not much' is hardly a friendly thing to do though hey... I mean, I think I'm being honest, and I even think if pressed, Sketch would probably agree with me. But who am I to say that my life is going so swimmingly? Who am I to so openly assess that of someone else?

I had a terrible fucking gig last Monday – maybe my worst ever upon reflection; although when I came off it only felt like a 2, after running over it again in my mind and experiencing the shame and hurt that emanated from it for at least two days afterwards, I might re-evaluate it as absolute bottom of the pile. Zero out of ten. It was at the Cornish Arms music open mic night, which I've performed at before and done well at before. I went on after not having done – and barely having thought about – comedy for two-and-a-half weeks, and decided that the best thing was to try new stuff mixed with riffs. “I might just talk.” I remember saying to the bar girl as she asked whether I was going to try new that night or what the plan was. GENIUS! No. Idiot-dickhead. That cockiness creeping in always signals impending doom.

I've had a long week and a few gigs to reflect on Monday's terror-performance, and I've been rebuilding my ego and slowly recovering confidence... a bad gig like that one really does something to you – it did something to me. It shook me, and made me question my position in the comedy scene and my validity as a comic, it made me wonder whether what I am doing and have been doing is good, whether I deserve (a dangerous word) to be here pursuing this or whether I am just parasitically coasting along on charisma and the hard work of others. In short, Monday made me take a long, hard look at myself.

But now my mind drifts back to Adelaide...

The last time I crossed paths with Sketch was in a shed at a mates place in Adelaide last January; a bunch of us sitting around smoking bongs. He started telling some story that I've completely forgotten now about how he took four tabs of acid and had to do something serious or something something something... I told you I'd completely forgotten it. But I remember after he'd finished telling it though – and after I had finished having my mind BLOWN out the back of my head with amazed laughter – that another of our friends turned to me and said, “now THAT's the kind of conversation you should be recording.” We'd had plans to try and turn the experiences of our group over the years from 2008-2012 into a collection of stories/book/novella/something of mild interest. Those plans are all but gone now, or at least, they are fading away into the background as slowly but surely members of our old team fall away one by one and we all get older. Until we drift apart.

The way that this connects – these memories attached to those times spent running aimlessly around the streets of my hometown with old friends I hardly see anymore – to my life now and to the terrible gig I had last Monday, is that these are the aimless days I am running from. That old life is the life that I'm afraid of. Much like the three hours I once spent roaming around Old Port Road in Semaphore, losing my mind on acid, repeating to myself the terrified drug-mantra, “it's not hard to be a Fuck Up”, that terrible comedy-death in front of five tables of underwhelmed strangers gave me fuel to run my work on. Something to glance at over my shoulder and think, “that's why I'm moving forward.” I don't want to go back there because it felt so terrible... or maybe it didn't even feel THAT terrible while it was happening, but now, as they fade in the distance, I know that those places are nowhere near where I want to be. And who am I to judge? Well, I'm me, and I know what I want for myself... wait... hmm... well, I know enough about it to have eliminated SOME options.

And so the conclusion? Push on. Accept that these bad experiences, these deaths, these little failures – overwhelming though they may seem at the time – are necessary, and ultimately beneficial. As certainly as I understand on an intellectual level that I need to keep working and improving my craft – in comedy and in writing, and anything else I do – to get to a place where I can sustain my life through it, I also understand that sometimes I get lazy, and so sometimes the hot hammer of failure needs to come down and put the fear in me. That wild fear that drives the machine, and keeps me running towards the light.

[Monday 13/11]

Today I checked my bank balance: $103.30 in the negative.

Yep, still poor.

Peace, Taco.