Love Note to No One

I open the door to my room which has no lock and barely any need for a latch, either by kicking it mid-stride or flinging my right arm out, fist balled up, to strike it. There was supposed to be a lock put on the door just after I moved in but I can never be bothered stressing Mick, the owner of the pub, to do it. Four months here and still nothing missing, every day fills me with unearned confidence in my neighbours. There's a fire alarm on the roof that beeps intermittently because it is low on battery; it has been doing that since I got here and even though Mick gave me a new battery to put in it so it wouldn't beep, I haven't done shit.

Sometimes the kick or punch I deliver to the door doesn't open it all the way, these times are due to the latch being caught on what is left of it's hole in the door frame. On these days I hip-and-shoulder the door open once I am face-to-face with it, and inevitably I make my way inside. It's night time usually. My shoes are the first to come off after I sit down in the chair I found on the side of the road in Glandore, Adelaide, the suburb where I grew up before leaving in July, 2012. 5037. Taking my shoes off isn't a huge priority, but it always feels nice, and the time it takes usually coincides with the time it takes my computer to turn on or at least come off of sleep mode after I sit down. The chair creaks – I have never had it checked for disease. I wiggle my toes after removing my socks and making a quick calculation concerning whether they are clean enough to wear tomorrow. Yes or no: on any day this is a fifty-fifty decision.

Internet, depending on whether or not I have it at the moment. Sometimes I'm in luck and the router downstairs is turned on so I can sneakily piggyback off of the pub's internet (I'm not supposed to be, but the password is c37636e6 so how could I not?). Often the router is turned off though, and in those cases I either use my phone as a router and stick to text-based websites, or stay off line and play some music. I take my pants off next, and then my shirt, and turn the music up a little as the air settles, the window was probably already open unless it's been raining but it's summer at the moment and it's been summer for months now. If I leave the door open a nice breeze flows through the window and cuts the stillness over my bed which has been drenched in sunlight all day. Over my chair and out, I leave a shoe on the floor to stop the door from slamming shut.

At some point I will lean back on my chair almost far enough so that it will fall over, but not quite, because I have pretty good balance and I trust myself, but when I pop back up I feel all the more tired, and ready for bed. I don't like sleeping with light on, and that includes a computer screen, but I do like having something to listen to that will lull me into my unconscious. I shut the door because I like to sleep naked. Plug my phone in, climb into bed, put my phone on the dresser, set an alarm for the morning – if I don't have work, seven hours from now is a good time to wake up. If my hair is tied up I take it down and put the hair-tie on my table, somewhere easy to find. Look around, one last time, flip my pillows over, flip them again, find two that combine their height to make something like a nice, comfortable head rest. Settle in. Kick the quilt off, pull it back, poke my feet out the end. Yawn. Open eyes close again, open, close, open, droopy. Feel my legs twitch a few times in a state of half awakedness. Awakening? Awa...kened...full... Questions questions... silent thoughts...

and then I think of you.

The Happiest Birthday

Dear Diary, this week I have had the most exciting and eventful week EVER! By golly, so many things have happened, unexpected surprises, fun gatherings, laughs, and many memories. That's right, Diary, My Birthday Week has surpassed all expectation. Wistful Sigh.

Ha.

On Tuesday I woke up and wandered hazily through the hallway at Station 59, into the kitchen (kitchen?) area and stuck my water bottle under the tap. As I turned it on I remarked to the ever-present and always half-asleep Jake lying sprawled and homeless on the couch, “dude what the fuck is that smell in here? It's not bad, but it's like... not good either.” It kind of reminded me of cheese?
“I don't know what you're talking about bro.” He replied from a dream before rolling back over and continuing his care-free existence. I love that guy, the guy who always seems to be there, always hanging around, somehow managing to cling on to a life that exists behind the closed doors of possibility. Where are your clothes? Where are your belongings? Where do you keep your toothbrush?

Tuesday night at the Rochester for my birthday was one of our best nights yet, Mitch crushed it as MC, heaps of crew turned out, and I had more fun on stage than I've had recently doing twenty minutes as the headliner. And then we got drunk. Before the show Luka and I went to a shaving store where he bought me my birthday present: a $40 shaver – FOR MY FACE AND SHIT – and when we got to the Rochy I went upstairs to the disused bathroom to give it a spin. It was great. You should all touch my face.

The thing about getting drunk is that you wake up hungover, the world is dulled, and you notice nothing, mind numb on the plod to the nearest water source. Stumbling like a dying camel through desert. In the middle of summer the heat makes you feel alone. It's stuffy. Jake was there again on Wednesday, and again on Wednesday I could smell something thick, heavy, hanging in the air.

That night Corey White – just having moved down from Brisbane – came with us to the Great Britain Hotel open mic and met a beautiful lady who he fell so madly in love with that he proclaimed to the world out Luka's back window: “I want to suck her ankles!” She played mournful piano tunes with singing and everyone felt her magic. Before that Corey had bought me a 30c cone from McDonalds, and afterwards Luka dropped me off at the office I clean every Wednesday night. On the walk home I walked past the brothel that I can always tell is open during the night because of the dim and otherwise-superfluous red light that stands out from the bored Collingwood back streets filled with warehouse windows, red brick, and shatter-proof glass.

Thursday was a journey through the city in a day containing rising waves of visible heat and my exodus from a home that continued to emit some random odour – it must be seeping out from the walls. No Jake today to bounce ideas off of. Then Friday we went to Doug Gordon's BBQ and tried to make cigarettes out of the tobacco that a friend of a friend of a friend (NO LEGAL CULPABILITY) saw fall (made grow) off the back of a truck (in his backyard). Apparently it's super illegal, but I can't really see why because even after two or three weeks drying the stuff out it didn't taste much different – maybe a little like a cigar – and definitely wasn't the hit of the party it had the potential to be. Doug's table setup was toppled by a drunken Dick Wakefield, and we left to go home but stopped off at Mentone Beach to have a swim and ended up five guys dipping skinny in the moonlit water throwing a frisbee. That is not a euphemism... well, maybe 'dipping skinny' is, or a metaphor, or whatever, but I'll tell you now. We are DEFINITELY not gay.

But I challenge anyone to have a more hilarious time with four mates and no women than swimming naked at the beach at night. The gauntlet has been thrown down.

Saturday night at the drive-in cinema Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit was playing, and even though it seemed like it was going to be an absolutely terrible movie, it defied all expectations and was merely awful instead. We found out that Rob doesn't know how to do a cartwheel and Tamara and I talked about maybe moving in together in May this year if we can find a cheap place but I didn't want to think about money. Of the forty dollars worth of cheese, meats, and crackers that Luka and I bought for that evening, half of it is still sitting in his car days later, probably rotting, and definitely foul. That's funny to me for some reason.

On Sunday I had the best night of all after working all day as a promo guy dressed up as a pretend paramedic trying to administer Oak flavoured milks to people at the St Kilda Festival who we deemed to be suffering from 'hungrythirsty'. We did a bunch of high-energy act-outs that I'll proably include in my audition tape for Play School, and I drank a lot of chocolate, ice coffee, strawberry, and the new flavour whose name I forget. Fuck Vanilla. That night I called up a lovely lady and we had a fantastic evening drinking while drinking for and subsequently dancing to Art vs Science – a band who I have heard are phenomenal live but have missed twice in the past. They didn't disappoint and at the peak of the performance, some guy managed to stand up in the crowd with his feet at everyone else's head-level and flash his wang to the band, what a genius. Seriously. That is absolutely fantastic. After the show we had more drinks, danced to a great DJ playing current club bangers, and then made our way to some random pub somewhere, watched a great band, and I managed to get up on stage and rap. Fuck yes. Fuck yes. Fucking what? What was that night? What were the last seven days? How fucking good is my life right now?

Sitting in a chair at my parents' house with a tissue stuffed up my left nostril because I tried to pick it forgetting that my blood gets thin in hot weather, I can't help but be a little impressed with what I've managed to do with myself in the days since I turned twenty-three. I haven't even stopped to say Happy Birthday to my smiling face in the mirror yet, not that I've ever done that before, but maybe I should. Maybe that's something I need to start doing, just a little congratulations for making it through another year. Don't laugh, and don't begrudge me this small pleasure, I think I'm being serious... okay, I'm about to go do it.

Oh, and I hope you're all doing well too.

Peace, Taco.

Continuously Rolling Can Continuously Rolls, Continuously

When I saw the can rolling across the empty car park of Preston train station, it was dark with the night and illuminated only by the lonely flood-lights hanging from metal poles stuck in the ground and rooted there. I felt a surge of energy come from inside me. In the fifteen seconds it took me to decide to pull my phone out and record it, my spirits had lifted, gone from half-smiling and peaceful, melancholy resignation, to excited. Onward to ecstatic. Happiness. Authentic joy. OH! The catharsis!

Of course, things hadn't been going wrong entirely.

Ever since getting back from Falls and Byron Bay I've been feeling a little off. It always takes a while to acknowledge these kinds of things, and then a while longer to start acknowledging them to other people – for me anyway. This up-and-down beast is still something I'm coming to terms with, I'm sure everyone feels it at some point: sometimes we're happy, sometimes we're sad, sometimes we're manic, sometimes we're inert, sometimes we're jumping on bins and sometimes we're lying in bed wishing the day away. Sometimes the guy who lives two rooms down from us and who we hate because he cut off our internet for no reason other than that he thinks we're a dick walks past our open door at 1am in the middle of a 5-day heatwave and casually looks into our room to find our embarrassingly naked body sprawled out on our bed as we try to catch the remnants of wind through the window in the hope that we might fall asleep. Sometimes life throws us a curveball.

On Australia Day I decided to try and describe my feelings of late to a few of my close friends for the first time, thereby also acknowledging them myself. I said that, normally, what I'm used to experiencing in cycles of varying lengths are dizzying manic highs and depressing lonely lows, but normally the highs feel high, like maybe eight out of ten points above zero, and the lows feel average, like maybe four or five points below. Lately though, it felt like the ratio had been flipped, so my highs were like fives out of ten, and my lows were at negative eight. I don't know whether this was accurate, or still is? Or what part of it I would change if I were to change some, but it did honestly feel like I hadn't been myself for the better part of three weeks.

Naw :(

Normally Australia Day is one of my favourite – if not my ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE day of the year. Maybe New Years beats it out, or the first day of Winter, or the first day of Summer, or maybe the day I meet the year's coolest person, but for me Australia Day is always a highlight. It's got nothing to do with the whole nationalism schtick, at least, not directly for me, it's just that everyone is always in a good mood on Australia Day. Everyone is always down for fun, and everyone has the day off, and everyone is happy and excited, for whatever reasons they each might have. And this excitement is infectious, because there's nothing better than good vibes to bounce a smile off. This year though it seemed like my Australia Day was headed for bland mediocrity as I failed to make any plans and spent most of the day moping around my room and the bar in ever more hopeless alternation.

I took part in the debate, “There's Nothing Funny About Australia” – a shameless nod to an embarrassing event from 2012 that I am sure no one but about three people continue to care about. I played a few games of pool. I fell asleep in a sunbeam, and somehow failed to enjoy even that. I had a quick Skype to my ever-faithful and dear friend Melanie in France, who lifted my spirits briefly.

At around 10pm Alice and Jaimie came around and picked me and Kev up and we went to Carlton Gardens with the soccer ball, met up with Luka and Beau, and then after another short while the girls left. Beau, Luka, Kev and I ended up chalking out a four-square court on the brick floor in the Exhibition Centre, taking off our shirts, and playing like primary school kids for around an hour until something like 2am. It was absolutely fantastic, and I felt like my day on the 26^th of January had been finally salvaged. Saved, and redeemed, against all the odds.

Turning points never really feel like 'turning points' when they are happening. Maybe that's because the very idea of a turning point is a wishful and impossible concept, because life doesn't exist in simple one-way trajectories of up and down, good and bad, happy and unhappy. Emotions are things to be felt, and in every moment a cocktail of conflicting thoughts – reactions to life at large – is mixed together to bring about the distinctive, unique feeling. Moments can never be purely good or bad, but somehow because we can only process one thing at a time, the aggregate of feelings inside of us tends to express itself as one single point, somewhere on the happiness scale. From Australia Day, and for the next twenty-four hours or so until my trip on the train the night after, it felt like the scales were tipping, and so in the useless tradition of backwards-looking introspection, a turning point is what I'll have to call it. Because right now, I feel happy again, just happy. And I can't bring myself to try and break that down into its constituents.

When I got on the train on the 27^th, I had no idea that I was getting on the wrong one – I had never intended to go end up sitting in a car park at night, waiting for my lift and staring into the fluorescent-lit darkness. But after sharing a laugh with some fellow travellers over our mutually futile appreciation of a beautiful girl, I didn't much care. I got off at somewhere, and backtracked to Preston where Luka could come to pick me up. As I sat on the steps writing joke ideas in my notebook, I spied a baby cockroach scuttling along the concrete, and seeing an opportunity to do some good in the world, went over with my thong brandished in hand, and killed it. The attendant at the ticketing station saw the whole thing, and so I looked up at him after my successful good deed, and gave him a quick, hearty thumbs-up, as if to say; “Stay strong, brother. Together, we can win this war.”

And then only a few minutes before Luka finally arrived in his car, I saw the can rolling across the empty car park, dark with the night and illuminated only by the lonely flood-lights hanging from metal poles stuck in the ground and rooted there, and I felt a surge of energy come from inside me.

The video below encapsulates that moment, and I consider myself very lucky to have found the presence of mind at the time to record it, in all its realness, bare and untouched, I will smile when I remember. The wind blew that can for two solid minutes, and for two minutes there was only happiness, nothing but joy in the mix.

Peace, Taco.

PS At the end, the person I said "hey man" to was a cop who I realized had been watching suspiciously about ten metres behind me as I lost my mind at this can. He turned out to be cool, exclaiming, "it just kept going didn't it!"