Week 4 - Sort of Close to Homeless

So I lost my job, awesome. And no internet. Fine, sure. I've been going to the State Library a few times a week because they have free unlimited WiFi and I can't afford an internet cafe, also because last week it was HOT AS FUCK and the State Library has air con. For these same two reasons the State Library is also home to... wait no, that's mean... and the joke hasn't even been set up yet, so only I'm laughing at this point... but when I make the joke now you'll know what I was laughing at and you'll think I'm a piece of shit. Maybe I am? Maybe it's funny anyway... I've gone on too long now. The State Library is home to... there's a lot of homeless people in there.

No they don't live there, but they go there to use the WiFi and cool down. No I don't know how they have laptops. Yes you're right, maybe they are just guys with beards who smell bad.

Anyway.

On Tuesday I went in with my laptop and sat down at a table with three guys already sitting around it: a black guy, a hipster looking dude with glasses, and a man with a dishevelled beard who smelled of stale smoke. Smelled, a lot. The kind of smell that you don't even realize it's there until it creeps over to where you're sitting and you realize it's been a very real and present part of your life for the last fifteen minutes. You felt something undefinable nibbling at your conscience, was it that time you let down your housemate's tyres in 2010 because he stole your copy of Futurama Season 1 on DVD? No no! It's just the man next to you, dreadfully in need of a shower and a change of lifestyle.

I exchanged furtive glances with the black guy who was sitting directly to my right, and we both made “I-hate-this” eye movements at the bearded source of smell sitting to my left, but nothing could be done. This is a library. He got up to have another cigarette – this was after about forty-five minutes, thirty of which I spent with my shirt pulled up covering my nose. I didn't even realize I was doing it until it slipped back down and I was hit with another wave. As he rounded the corner out of the main room of the library and headed outside and out of sight, I calmly reached down into my bag, pulled out a can of deodorant (Rexona Original for the sporty hobo) and liberally sprayed Beardy's chair, much to the delight of my two table-buddies. Black guy even took off his headphones to share an amused chuckle with me – that was really interesting too actually, we weren't talking to each other at all, or communicating by sound, but the simple act of him taking out his headphones told me that he wanted to share in the joy of this moment with me. The shared recognition that yes, indeed, that guy smells like butts. (PUN!)

They are a scary breed, the homeless. The smelly, rotten rejects of our burgeoning metropolis, spat out by the system and left to sleep amongst the filth – I, as a human, find them distasteful. Is that too much? A little heavy on the ole “anti-poor people” rhetoric there? A little mean? Distasteful itself? “OF COURSE IT IS YOU PRIVILEGED BOURGEOIS FUCK!” I scream at myself, while ashamedly feeling my body recoil from the reeking smells of poverty.

It's easy – especially, I feel, for me – to forget that a person – some guy – sitting at a table in the library getting angry at his computer because, “I didn't WANT to watch the next video I WANTED TO STAY ON THE LAST ONE FUCKKK!” is not so different from me. It would do me well to remember that on any day I am only a handful of bad decisions or unlucky rolls of the dice away from homelessness, and then it'd be me sitting in that chair, wondering why the air around me suddenly smells like aerosol deodorant. I only went outside for a minute...?

The next day at the library I was sitting at a similar table, similar situation, only this time the bearded man (a different one) was sitting to my left. He didn't smell, but he was doing a good job of freaking people out as he beat his index finger down repeatedly on the mouse button on his laptop. He just kept hitting it, and hitting it... the table was actually shaking, but he wouldn't stop. I looked over at him with raised eyebrows as if to say, “really dude?” and he stared back at me for a frozen second before returning to his frenzied assault on technology. Giving his machine a solid beat-down. Aggressive!

I was re-writing my resume and applying for temping agencies because, as I've been trying to forget the entire time I've been writing this, I am unemployed. The library internet was working fine for me, and so I was in a good mood – a good enough mood to find some humour in the dishevelled plight of the man to my left. But what if my internet wasn't working? And what if my situation were even one degree more dire? Like if I wasn't able to borrow money from parents or friends to make up the three weeks of limbo between my last paycheck and my first Centrelink payment? What if I was behind on rent already? What if I had gotten sick that week? Or had been unluckily mugged? Had a big phone bill? What if my job was even slightly more important to me? What if I had lost something I actually cared about as anything other than a source of income?

Only one bad decision away. Only one unlucky roll of the dice. I could so easily be that guy, sitting at the desk with people around casting surreptitious glances across the room at me, the crazy man, beating at his computer with pointed fingers. The internet not working. The resumes I want to send, trapped. No hope.

I didn't stop laughing – to myself at least – because a guy getting publicly angry is still funny, I don't care what anyone says. But my laughter was tempered with cautious self-examination as I imagined a scene where I too might crack under life's pressure while being watched by tens of sniggering idiots. Because the others, looking on, ignorant of the whole situation, are always idiots. And I, the insane, furious, raging hero, am always, always right.

Do I smell? I need to wash my clothes tomorrow.

Peace, Taco.

Week 3 - For Shame, For Shame, For Shame

Sigh... okay, so I guess I'm going to tell this story... I remember as the events transpired – I really don't know whether to say that it's “something that happened” or “something I did”, so 'transpired' will do – thinking, “I can't WAIT to tell this to Luka and Blake when I get back to Luka's place, this is going to be HILARIOUS!” The difference between that and this though is that this is a blog that anyone – potentially TENS of people – can read, with not even an effort made at anonymity. So before I start this story, I'd just like to say sorry to my coach, my team, the club and all the fans, I've let you all down and brought shame upon us. My grandparents, aunties and uncles, some cousins, and of course my Mum. Dad... if you ever read this, you'll probably laugh your tits off.

Last Saturday night Luka, Blake and I drank (Blake doesn't drink but he was definitely there) a bunch of beers at Luka's house in Heidelburg and then went for a mission to the shops to buy ice creams around 2:30am. Luka and I rode bikes and pulled Blake along on a skateboard, and it was a magical evening culminating in the three of us sitting on top of a storage container in some sort of construction site car park, overlooking the lights of the city. We went to sleep around 5am.

At 7:30am Sunday morning I woke up to somewhere between the first and twentieth missed call from the boss of the four-man cleaning company I work for: we only have one set of keys to get into the venues we clean every day, so after our shifts we have to put those keys into a PO Box in the city for the next day's cleaner to grab. I had forgotten to do this – not the first time (FUCK FUCK SHIT FUCK) – and so was now charged with making my way into the CBD to meet with the Sunday morning cleaner and letting him into the venue, and then helping him clean to make up for lost time. No pay, no sleep, no happiness in the world.

I stumbled around Luka's house with extreme anger and volume until I had gathered up a rough approximation of 'my shit', and then started on the twenty-ish-minute walk to the train station. When I got there I arrived upon the grim realization that I needed to take a shit... BADLY (aside: I have thought long and hard about the wording of this admission, and rest assured, that particular phrasing was decided upon with no small amount of consideration). The digital screen thingo at the station said there were five minutes until the train would come, I ran down to the service station to see if they had toilets and the clerk pointed me in the direction of of some public toilets not on the premises which, as it unfortunately turns out, were imaginary. I had only one option left. Now I know you are probably all saying, “but Taco, there are plenty of options for you... why didn't you go and search for the public toilets? Why didn't you just hold it until you get to Flinders Street Station, where toilets are in sheer abundance? Why didn't you offer your supple young body as a bribe to the clerk in exchange for use of the staff toilets, to which he surely had a key?” No. I had. Only. One. Option.

So after I picked out a suitable bush in the parklands beside the tracks and pulled down my pants to relieve myself (I had decided before to wipe with some empty pages out of my notebook, como he hecho muchos tiempos en Bolivia), the lights for the train crossing started ringing. I was in a hurry, I needed to catch this train, I finished up, grabbed my shi... STUFF! I GRABBED MY STUFF, and without doing up my belt, ran to the platform. To find the train. Leaving.

I had to wait forty minutes for the next one to come.

I have done a lot of stupid things while drunk – smashed tram station glass windows, lit fires, yelled at friends, enemies, made poor decisions. But I think the most depraved and soulless part of any drunk's journey from Drink 1 to “below the legal limit” is that seldom experienced stage in the hours after the last drink, when the body's wheels are spinning in the mud, trying to begin recovery. Normally I'm asleep for this part, and my broken mind can flail around in dreams (interesting fact: I always talk/shout in my sleep if I've been drinking heavily before bed). On this day though, because I was woken up after only 2.5 hours sleep, I was fully conscious as my soul struggled desperately to gain a foothold in sanity... this is my justification anyway. On the tram I downloaded some porn, but I couldn't really watch it very effectively, even in the sparsely peopled Sunday-morning service, because I had no headphones. I lost them. I am a fucking mess, I know. When I got to Flinders I got off and then walked the three blocks to the venue I was supposed to meet the other cleaner at and, noting that I still had about half an hour before anyone would be in the venue, I... I... ok...

… I really don't know how to frame this, but I DESPERATELY want to somehow take some of the heat off of myself in the next sentence. I can't though. There honestly is no way I can possibly talk myself out of the responsibility for what this is, but I guess I just want to thank you all at this point, for reading this far, because as much as you now may want to, I'm sure the present sinking feeling in your gut is evidence enough to all of us that you are stuck here with me. We are all past the point of no return and what it is that happens next, sadly, now feels inevitable.

I jacked off in the toilets.

Not into the toilet, mind you, just in one of the cubicles, but that's neither here nor there. The door was locked, it happened in under three minutes, but it happened, okay guys? That's what it is, that's what I does. Did. Have done... breathe you a sigh of relief.

When I told the story later to the guys back at Luka's, Luka had the best punchline to this part of the story when he said that, “you did things in exactly the wrong order, you should have taken a shit in the toilets, and jacked off in the bush.” Now THAT'S comedy. I also thought of Louis CK's story on episode 111 of the WTF Podcast with Marc Maron where he bought a $1600 trumpet and only realized he had made the purchase out of anxiety after he went into a jack-off booth in times square and came on the case... years later his therapist told him that masturbation is a great way to relieve anxiety and stress, so I guess that's what that was... okay, I'll stop talking about it now.

I cleaned for half an hour until the guy – lovely German dude, a little quiet but probably just pissed off because I had fucked his morning – rocked up and we finished cleaning the place together and went our separate ways. The only real reason I had to go back to Heidelburg rather than making the much shorter journey to my own house was that I'd left the keys to my own house with my wallet at Luka's and it was 10am when I finished cleaning, the pub doesn't open 'til 12.

On the train back though, through a random series of events I found myself talking to a thirty-ish-year-old guy with a Razor Scooter (AHAHAH! Oh trust me, I KNOW) and a scraggly Ill Bill-type beard who was on his way from Dandenong (shitty area) to Heidelburg (less shitty, probably hour-long one-way journey) to take part in a poker tournament of around 700 people in which he came 14^th last time (second-best out of those from his Dandenong poker club) and hoped to make the top ten this time so as to take home some prize money, 10^th place offering $200... for some reason I'm good at remembering stats. He also told me that his two daughters were two of only five Australian children at their primary school in Dandenong (IMAGINE?!) and “everyone else at the place is Indian”, so he likes to play, “Spot the Aussie” with them, but has since been banned from picking his children up from school, on what he considered to be the wildly spurious charge of racism.

That last part is actually a very funny story in it's own right, but I am aware, as I'm sure you all are too, of the fact that we definitely peaked about three or four paragraphs ago and that this is essentially an epilogue. I couldn't end it back there though could I? No, no no no no. Very very not.

So that's it, that was my Sunday morning. Even as I write this I'm still not sure whether I'm going to send it out, but then, as I just wrote that, I thought to myself, “who are you kidding dude, a story like that? You don't have the humility in your body to deprive yourself of the attention this could potentially garner.” And you're right, Me, so up it goes. Into the ether. Oh god, this is it. What the in the fuck have I done?

Peace, Taco.

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.

Week 1: Finding Falls

The first bad thing that happened to me in 2014 happened at 1650 hours on the 4^th of January. I was pulled over and fined $289 by Leading Senior Constable T. Asquith (great name) for speeding. He had a moustache.

The first three and a bit days of this year have been some of the greatest days of my life, as well as the last few days of last year. In mid-November, Alice and Bella, two girls I met in the second half of 2013, asked me to come with them to Falls in Byron Bay and at first I was tentative – I am CONSTANTLY without money but am, somehow, meant to be saving for my trip to Europe in July. “No no no no no” ran my brain's automatic response system. But after asking myself the question “what else will I possibly be doing with myself on New Year's?” I told them I would come, a prudent aversion to sadness willing me to leave the previous question unanswered.

I don't really want to recap the events of the last few days, because I'm not excited right now, and the best time for me to tell stories is when I'm on a role and they seem to come out tied together like a magician's string of coloured handkerchiefs. Coming home in the car though – holy GODDAMN we drove back from Byron to Melbourne in like 28 hours after waiting in line in the FILTHY sweat and dust of the carpark exodus for four hours and then having a five-minute swim in the ocean... coming home in the car I started thinking of my life in Melbourne and the direction it is heading in. I started thinking about comedy specifically, and about everything that I want to achieve this year: Adelaide Fringe, Melbourne Comedy Festival, another comedy trip to Brisbane, France, Edinburgh Fringe, Spain... the only way I can ever hope to cram all of this into one year is to attack this thing head on.

For the four days that we were at Falls; camped out in tents surrounded by beautiful people that quickly became like a small town – for those four days, I felt invincible. I felt like I could do anything, and I don't know how or why, but now that I've accessed that feeling like the greatest, most charismatic part of myself, I need to have it back for always.

It's not funny. It's not even that interesting. I just feel (felt?) fan-fucking-tastic. Maybe I should pose myself a question, because I don't know whether just telling myself “I did it before, I can do it again!” is really going to be enough to maintain the level of excellence I felt within myself for those four days in Byron Bay. The question the question the question... how to bottle that euphoria and take it home with me. I am home again now, and I can already feel it slipping away. I was loud. I was happy. I was laughing. I was smiling. I was charismatic. I was fun. Maybe the reason people go to festivals like that is so that they – we – can have our chance at unlocking that secret door to the best part of ourselves, and letting it out for a few days while we still know how. But I want it BACK. I KNOW I can get it back.

Somehow...

Last year, during the Christmas party for staff, residents, and regulars at Station 59 (the Richmond pub I currently live above) a crossdresser named Mark (or on other days, Cassie) told me in a drunken slur, “I hate your guts mate, I'm cutting your internet off as soon as I get upstairs!” This would seem an absurd threat, if it weren't for the fact that due to the phone line running off of the street and into his room, Mark/Cassie actually does control the internet in our building. He wields this arbitrary power like an iron rod (whoops... PHALLIC!!) of injustice and forces everyone else in the building to pay extortionary monthly prices for use of his rodINTERNET!.. penis

He really did plan to cut off my internet... and that's exactly what he did.

A few days prior to this we had had a heated exchange in the hall where I like to think I – and I'll puff my chest out for this one – “PUT HIM IN HIS PLACE MO'FUKKA!” he left me the following note:

"Taco,
Here are the rules... Pay on or before the 10th of the month, or the internet will be cut off and never restored, PLUS come at me with that attitude you did today I will cut you off for good. I don't care if you think that is fair or not, but this is our new contract.

Mark
oneday [SIC] late and bye bye internet, suggest you start looking for your own."

I have since stuck this note to my wall, in front of my laptop and scrawled over it in pen three words of warning:

“NEVER BECOME SAD”

This is the other side of the coin. For days after that infuriating defeat at the hands of someone who I am SOOOOOO tempted to call my Mortal Enemy, I went around telling everyone what I was going to do to him when I got back. “This is war!” I spitefully proclaimed. How feeble of me, how petty, how just like him – I can hear that spite in my voice, even now as I try to banish it. But at Falls, none of that. I didn't think about it once – the dreadful mess of a situation waiting for me back at home when all the joy was over, and I sit amidst that situation right now. I am currently accessing the internet via my phone; I paid $20 for 1.25GB of extra data this month, and I know I know, that's a terrible fucking deal... if Falls has taught me anything though, (and the debts to my friends and the negative symbol next to my bank balance tell me that it really has to have) it is that there is no place in a happy life for anger, spite, and negativity.

Getting ticketed for speeding was the first thing to bring me back down off of my cloud and god did I hate it, I hated it so much. I DEFINITELY deserved it, and that made me hate it even more. It made me remember that the high I was riding couldn't last forever, but after moping for a while I realized that didn't make me feel any better either.

Smiling is free. And being happy. And laughing. It's all part of a choice.

I don't quite know yet how to actively make that choice, but at Falls Festival 2013/14, I had it clasped firmly in my hands. Now, my only job is to get it back.

Peace, Taco.