I Got Rejected By A Homeless Lady

A few weeks ago after a show I was standing around on the street with a friend having a smoke when a homeless lady approached us and asked for some money. There are a lot of homeless people in Shoreditch, and while I was living in The Dictionary Hostel we'd get asked at least a handful of times every day for coins or food, but every situation is different.

If I'd thought about this sort of situation a few months ago: being approached in the streets by beggars multiple times a day, often by the same beggars, I would have guessed that the tendency over time would be towards hard-heartedness. Less, “sure thing man, good luck”, slowly giving way to more, “Fuck OFF! Why would I PAY you to interrupt me?!” If I'm honest, there have been times when I've thought both – of course there have or else I wouldn't have been able to think of something to say for both examples. Overall though, I think being asked more has actually made me more likely to stop and listen to one of these guys in any given instance, and more often than not give them a little money.

So when this lady walked up to me and my friend outside the Comedy Cafe in Shoreditch, and asked for money, I gave her everything that I had in my pocket – 14p. That's not a lot of money, and I was looking forward to my first paycheque the next day, so the fact that it was all I had really didn't matter that much to me. After the previous three weeks of serious day-to-day poverty and walking to work and gigs because I couldn't afford the tube, and stealing food from the hostel kitchen, and counting the cents in my tips jar, finally my first pay-day was coming tomorrow: at this point the next twelve hours was just a Victory Lap. It still meant something though. I knew from my walks to work and careful area-scouting that the off license just after the Old St Roundabout sells oranges for 29p, I knew that because I'd been eating those oranges every morning on my 55-minute walk through central London to work. 14P: it's not much, but every penny counts.

Except maybe not, apparently, because as I handed her the coins, the lady held out her hand and looked down at them, then looked up at me and said, “look, I don't know what to do with this.” Then she held her hand back out, and gave the money back.

I have a lot of feelings about this, my first instinct right now is to write a big “FUCK YOU!” But I think after a bit of reflection that the reason I want to react that way has more to do with the fact that I felt personally slighted by her not accepting my charity.
       “What do you mean YOU don't know what to do with it? I've been buying oranges with only twice that amount every day for the last three weeks motherFUCKER! Are you calling me homeless? I'm not HOMELESS! I'M A MAN!” Etc. Etc... the first thing I felt when she gave the money back was that it bruised my ego, and I wanted to take her into a muted room and sit her down on a couch and communicate to her how that made me feel inside, and I thought maybe I should do it with puppets?

Okay that's dumb, sorry.

After a few days of thinking about it I realized I was being a self-important douche and that I needed some other people's perspectives on what had happened, so I decided to go straight to the source and ask the other homeless people around Shoreditch what they thought, so I did. A few around Shoreditch, one guy near my work in Soho, and another guy I chatted to while I was drunk at Old St Tube Station (is chatting to a homeless person while you're drunk condescending? I don't know? Do they want to be chatted to? Fuck, being liberal is hard... I'm tired of constantly flitting between feeling evil and feeling like a pussy... anybody?). My survey turned up pretty much identical responses the five or six times I asked, that this lady who asked for money from me but then when she saw the amount of money I had to offer turned it down, was rude, and awful, and possibly addicted to drugs. That sounds like I'm joking, I'm not. Honestly, that's what they all said, only two or three of them suggested the drugs thing, but they all said Fuck Her, basically, and that she was a piece of shit.

So back at the Fuck You thing again huh? Although now for a different reason than I first thought. And now for a joke:

“She gave me the money BACK!... are they ALLOWED to do that?! I didn't know homelessness was a profession open to wage negotiation, how do I contact the union?”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!! Oh man! Phew, fuuuuuuuuunnnnYY!

Seriously though, once I tried to get away from my feelings on the issue, and started thinking about it more in terms of how it could affect other people as well, what I came up with was this: begging is a pretty sad thing to have existing in the world. Asking for money from strangers, it's a pretty awful thing to have to submit yourself to, and so when you happen to be that stranger, it's a pretty shitty spot to find yourself in because you're then in the position where you basically have to (get to?) decide whether someone else is 'worthy' of your aid. It's shitty on both ends, and so it goes pretty much without saying that to initiate that sort of behaviour, you'd have to be pretty desperate, like, totally desperate. Begging should pretty much be anyone's last option, they do it only because they need to. Have to. MUST! (*POW!* Synonym!)

If this lady really needed to be begging out there that night, if she was really so desperate for my money, or someone's money, some stranger, just any money so that she could keep on living, then she WOULD have taken my 14p. But she didn't, which means she didn't really need it, which means that she's out there begging when she doesn't need to be. I'm not going to guess at what her reasons would be for doing that, but I will say that there are plenty of people out there begging for the exact reason that I've just described – they have no more hope left in them, and they are all out of options. To disguise yourself as one of those people, and then run around Shoreditch asking for money on false pretences is pretty fucking disgusting. So yes Homeless Lady, Fuck You. Fuck You for effectively stealing from those people. Fuck You for effectively stealing from the people you've accepted money from. And Fuck You for making me think about you for A WHOLE FUCKING MONTH! FOR MAKING ME THINK ABOUT YOU MORE THAN I'VE THOUGHT CERTAIN ABOUT GIRLS I'VE DATED AND SLEPT WITH. I do not want to sleep with YOU, Homeless Lady, so FIGURE THAT OUT!!

Phew... finally, some righteous anger. Oooooh that felt really GOOD.

Finally though, a few weeks later I was walking down Shoreditch High St and saw a guy under the overground bridge, sitting on a milk crate, sobbing bitterly against the wall. Clearly homeless, broken. I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him what was going on and he started railing off against people on the street that would come up to him while he was talking to someone like me who'd stopped to offer him some help, but then interrupt the conversation angrily saying that he didn't deserve their help.
       “ 'He's here every day!' they say” - is what he said, tearfully recalling how people who were about to offer him money had been persuaded away by other folk who apparently see him all the time. “But I only need 8 pounds to get into the hostel for a week and they wash your clothes and give you food and everything!” he wailed bitterly. I went across the road and split a twenty, then came back and gave him a tenner, meanwhile thinking “what the fuck hostel is this dude talking about and how have I not heard of it? I'm paying 15 a night... do you HAVE to be homeless to get that deal?...”

I've since heard from a bunch of people in the area that he is in fact under that bridge all the time. As soon as I stated telling the story about a crying homeless man at a party that night up the road in Seven Sisters, they knew exactly who I was talking about, and now that I remember him (ooooh that hurts, because before I made the effort to he was just white visual noise playing in the background. Ouch)... now that I remember him, I see him there all the time too. Crying bitterly, just like he was before when it made my heart hurt to look at him. But it doesn't anymore.

Homelessness is something I still don't fully understand. Of course I don't, how could I, I've never been homeless. I have read 'Down and Out in Paris and London' by George Orwell, which is a bloody great book by the way, you should all go read it so we can feel self-important together.... ugh STAY ON TRACK!

I've never been homeless, but I feel like I can empathize with feeling stuck in a shitty spot. Or feeling like money just keeps flying away from you and not knowing where the numbers go. Or feeling a little hopeless... so when a homeless guy (or girl, bitches can beg too!) comes up to me with sincerity in their eyes and asks for some help, if I have some coins in my pocket I'll probably, 50% of the time, grab those coins and hold out my hand. Because I still hope that out of all of them, someone is still trying.

Eugh. I'm an idiot aren't I? I'm paying for beer and heroin aren't I? Who knows man.

Peace, Taco.

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!"

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.