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.