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.

Smokers are Jokers

Today I climbed to the top of Arthur's Seat with two girls I met last night in my hostel, and then on the climb down I ruined any possibly lingering chance of getting with either of them by engaging in a lengthy conversation about our recent sexual encounters. A fair trade, I guess, to find out what Tessa and Amanda (well, Tessa mainly) have been getting up to in the last few weeks. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband smiled out of her phone from drunken wedding pictures, as she told us about a Welshman's... eguh actually no.

What I really wanted to write about was smoking, I've been doing it again lately. Well, fuck for like two months now – it creeps up on you doesn't it, like friendship, or love for a small child. “Goo-goo-ga-ga I luv you I luv you”, says the cigarette.
       "I guess you can stay”, says the Me, “but ONLY for a few weeks!”
       "Goo-goo-ga-ga,” says the cigarette, clearly thrilled with the offer.

I said when I was enjoying the last weeks of my life in Melbourne that I'd just do it as a celebration: “fuck it, I'm doing everything else, why not now I've been off them for four years!” Well I'm still technically off them, I guess, because I haven't bought a packet, but today while climbing that small less-than-300m mountain (hill? It's not “a seat”, and in fact I have no idea why it's called that because it doesn't look like one either) I felt that tightness of chest and shortness of breath and Tessa ahead of me said “my smoking lungs need a rest.” I agreed with her, and at the same time admitted to myself that although she had paid for the pack in her backpack, we were in the same boat.

For shame, for shame. Smokers are Jokers.

Back in 2009 I used to coo that out to my friends while we were drinking at UniBar in Adelaide, out on the balcony with plastic cups full of Coopers that we were still pretending we knew how to like. “Smokers are Jokers guys AHAHAHAHAHAHA!” Exaggerated, mocking laughter. So they started putting cigarettes in my mouth to shut me up while I was drunk, and I took them because they were free and because I started to see why everyone thought they were so fucking cool.

They've really done a number on us these companies, peddling their wizard fire-sticks to us that burn our lungs and stain our fingers and make that gross paste-y stuff come out of whatever pink tube that guy squeezes it out of on the anti-smoking advert. They've really done a fantastic job making us think that these things are awesome, because that's what I genuinely believe. It's a beautiful cherry on top of that sloppy, Saturday Night Cake, late at a dingy bar with a pool table inside, beer in hand that I know how to like now because I taught myself... it really is great to have a cigarette.

So now it's a war between them and me. Between the people who would have my money off me, and the shirt off my back too I'm sure if they could, for some stupid little fucking fire sticks that hang out of my mouth when I'm feeling needy. It makes me angry to know that some company who wants nothing more than to use me like a plot of land to farm money off of has driven me so far away from my own self-interest that I know sincerely believe that this thing that they are selling me. This poisonous, addictive, pointless and utterly evil thing, makes me into a more interesting person.

Sigh. Cough. Sigh again. Smokers are jokers. Smokers are jokers.

It's tempting to say, “oh but smokers aren't the jokers, the joke is on them!” and that would be fine, and true, but it's too damn simple, isn't it. I'm sure there are some people that really enjoy smoking and feel like it adds something tangible to their lives, and is worth the years they are taking off of it at the end. I'm sure too that if smoking were not advertised as invasively as it is today and all the health risks were known, there would still be people out there doing it. Just like heroin, just like everything – there's a market for anything, and anyone will try something once.

So there's no joke really, there's some people trying to make money off of some other people like me, who resent being made money off of, and there are other people, maybe a less complicated folk, who don't find themselves bothered by these kinds of thoughts: not bothered – as I clearly am – with obsessions over power. Not constantly paranoid about it's role in their lives. From me, I say good on those people, and to the people trying to make money off of my weaknesses, I say fuck you they're mine, and get your hands out my pockets.

Smokers are Jokers... I think I might stop saying that.

Peace, Taco.

Forty-Eight Hours Later

When something happens – it could be anything – it's hard to say whether that thing that's happened is definitively good or bad. Even when you might feel feelings about it, and think a certain way, you can't tell whether your feelings are the right ones, or whether they're discoloured by some attachment you have to what's going on. Maybe there aren't even any right feelings, they just are. There. They just exist and you feel them and then they leave and who cares anyway because what the fuck even are feelings except thoughts made of fairy-floss for sissies?

And it's hard.

I promise this will make sense later, I'm not just telling you because it's funny, although that is one reason why I want to tell you that... yesterday, twice, I sat on a toilet and looked about in a panic, suddenly realizing that my cubicle had no toilet paper. Twice... some people don't even sit on a toilet twice in one day at all, but I guess I don't get to be one of those people. This is one thing I have feelings about.

The second time I was in a trendy bar in Liverpool and it was around 8pm, I had met up with Faye, a girl I met at a comedy show in Melbourne earlier this year, and another friend of hers to drink and be merry. I escaped my dilemma in in the toilet when I found a few scraps of paper on the windowsill. Afterwards we all left for her friend's twin sister's house, I played pool against some Liverpudlian (oooooh that's weird and fun!) guys and we got proper drunk. I woke up in the morning on a deflated inflatable mattress in a room that smelled intensely of mango-scented candles.

The first time I'd found myself trapped in a toilet was just after eating breakfast at some diner, it was £6.50 and fine – everything sort of tasted the same. I tore out a page from my notebook this time – reminiscing about Bolivia where I learned that trick – and then pulled up my pants from the floor to hear the unexpected PLOP of my phone dropping into the bowl. My knuckles may have brushed poop – it all happened so fast I can't remember exactly – but when I got it out it was broken, so an hour later I bought a new one.

Before that, in the morning, I went for a walk from my hostel, which I had booked for the wrong weekend but luckily, upon arriving the night before managed to secure a bed at anyway after five minutes of gripping terror at the prospect of having spent £21.50 to take a cab from one place I wasn't allowed to sleep at to another. The stroll took me through thirty minutes of bleak semi-industrial blocks, fenced off areas, and a highway without crossing lights, in the rain, which definitely became heavier the further I walked from shelter.

The night before I had been on a flight from Geneva to Liverpool which left at 9:45pm, I ordered a chicken soup because I thought it would be nice, and “some water” because I thought it would be free. Neither turned out to be true, and after paying £7 for the two and taking a sip of my water I contemplated the depths of my own righteous fury, which distracted me for the rest of the flight and well into Liverpool's John Lennon Airport, where I finally realized that I had left my three-pound bottle of water on the plane.

So yeah, these are all stupid things and mostly my fault, and I keep noticing myself in these situations and genuinely laughing at my dumbfulness... and then I get confused, why am I laughing? Phones cost money. Bums need to be wiped. Sleeping on the street on you first night in a new country is not a thrilling adventure, and £7 is a lot of fucking money... I am reacting strangely to this world.

Like right now I'm sitting in a dorm room at a hostel with five other guys, none of whom are talking to eachother, and one of whom keeps clearing his sinuses in that really gross INWARD-SNIFF way that I admittedly have been guilty of before, in my feebler moments. I am fuming with rage right here, but I can feel how unreasonable my negative reaction to this all is – I keep looking around wide-eyed like someone is going to turn to me and go, “I KNOW RIGHT! This dorm sucks haha! Let's go get cocktails!” But they don't, they just keep watching movies and scratching their various itches and that one guy's sinuses just keep needing to be sniffed clear while he sits on his bed eating CHIPS!!?

Really though I think I'm just feeling a little isolated, delicate, and precariously alone.

At the airport, in Geneva, just before walking through the security screening gate, where I would clumsily pull my laptop out of my bag and unwrap the towel that I keep around it for padding. Before I lost my first bottle of water and my almost-new can of deodorant to the border patrol. Before I hurriedly stuffed books in my pockets to make sure my hand-luggage would be light enough to travel after hearing that oversized bags would be turned away, and before I knew how stupid the next 48 hours would be. Before all of that, I shared a hug, and a kiss – the last one – with Mélanie Cartal, the girl I fell in love with three years ago, and have second-guessed ever since. We shone under fluorescent lights. That night we took one last breath, and then closed the book, and ended our story together.

It's... intense. You know? Because for three years I've held a tiny hope for me and her, and that doomed flame has kept me going at times, but that night we extinguished it, because if we're both honest with ourselves, it was never going to burn again on its own anyway. There is sadness there, but also joy because now for the first time in almost three years, in that part of me, I think I just may be right with myself.

I don't know why this guy with his fucking chips is making me brainstorm efficient strategies for night-time murder-suicides, or why I'm laughing while my life, which I have packed into two bags that both pre-date my high school graduation, is falling apart around me, those feelings confuse me. But thinking about the end of that thing that ended on Friday, strange and indefinable as it was, that's not confusing, it's just hard. It means that I'm feeling slightly shaky right now, because my heart is a little bit broken from doing the right thing for once.

Oh my god he just fucking sniffed again I'm actually going to burn this fucking place to the ground.

Peace, Taco.

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 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.

My Homework from 'A Brief Guide to World Domination'

Today I am in Adelaide, and like most days in Adelaide, I am spending this one at my parents' house doing nothing much and essentially waiting for something to happen. Is this what I want for myself? To wait? I don't know, that wasn't a rhetorical question.

Who do I want to be? I read something a while ago called 'A Brief Guide to World Domination' by some guy whatever who cares, which asked two questions that it said should be at the core of everything we do:

1. “What do you really want to get out of life?”
   
2. “What can you offer the world that no one else can?”
   

Tough stough... (just a little spelling joke there, before I start getting serious)

Okay, so number one. What do “I” want to get... out of... life... what do I want to get out of life? No holding back. Okay, what I want to get out of life, I think is... everything. No. Okay. I want to get everything that I want. I want to be able to have everything that I want at any given moment accessible to me as soon as possible. But what do I want? I think I want people to pay attention to, and like me. Pretty shallow huh...

I'm sure I can do better than that – the danger here though is trying to dress that fairly base desire just laid down there in careful rationalizations that make them look more altruistic... well I want the people that I care about to be happy. That makes me happy. But then, I do want their happiness to somehow involve me, like maybe I want people to be happy, BECAUSE of me. I want to make people happy. Yes. I don't want people to just be happy at random, I want to be responsible for peoples' happinesses – as many and as great as possible. That's right. Me! Taco!

That sounds realistically selfish while still being acceptable, doesn't it? The oft-quoted eulogism, “all he wanted to do was make people happy”, I feel can be translated to this selfish desire.

1. “What do you really want to get out of life?”
   “Well, Mr So-And-So Psychiatrist, I would like to be, through my own actions, personally responsible for as many peoples' happiness as possible. And it'd be nice if they knew about it too.”
   

Now what can I offer the world that no one else can? Fuck me, really? Ugh... okay... my blood? Fingerprints? This word - “Quertykoacquatlophyx”... ?

Stop being an idiot, idiot.

I honestly have no idea... okay, so currently, what I want to do with my life in the long term is I want to be a stand-up comedian. I guess that implies that I believe I have an unique point of view that no one else can offer the world. That doesn't really feel accurate though. Louis CK – arguably the best (Most original? Funniest? Most successful?) comedian in the world right now has quite a few AMAZING jokes about how if you're in your early twenties you are the most worthless kind of person and have nothing to offer the world. (“If you're twenty... okay... fine... we'll see.”) As degrading as that sounds, I can't help it from sounding pretty reasonable too. I have potential, but that's it.

But is that it? Potential? Eugh... Is the answer to question two that I have an unique potential, different from that of anyone else? I am now, being as I am at my wit's end with this question, going to attempt to unashamedly list what I perceive to be my positive attributes that I might better understand the nature of this disgusting 'potential' that is apparently so important to my happiness:

• I am good at communicating my thoughts
  
• I am driven and work hard
  
• I am generally likeable (queue sarcastic jeering)
  
• I am funny when given the opportunity ie. When I am sufficiently comfortable in a social situation
  
• I'm pretty good at mental arithmetic, and making lists
  

That's all, I think. I don't actually have any real tangible skills that have been cultivated or worked on, these are pretty much all either basic character traits, or things that I have developed over years interacting with people socially. But I guess the skill that I'm cultivating right now is stand-up comedy, which, for the uninitiated, is definitely a skill make no mistake.

So I guess that's it:

2. “What can you offer the world that no one else can?”
   “My potential, apparently, whatever that is.”
   

What is probably the most damning detail here though is that even after being so obviously affected by the two questions posed by 'A Brief Guide to World Domination', I couldn't be bothered remembering, or even looking up, the guy's name who wrote it to put in my blog. God damn it. I guess I'll have to reconcile myself with the fact that as endeavouring to bring happiness and fulfilment into other peoples' lives is an anonymous and largely thankless endeavour. But then WHERE DOES MY SELFISH PART GET TO COME IN??!

I guess, really, I only wanted to be famous.

Peace, Taco.


[if anyone wants to read the actual thing I'm referencing here:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/40787/worlddomination.pdf]

Pump the Brakes

After what I wrote yesterday, I don't really know what to say today... I wasn't even going to post it because it felt too inward-looking and I felt like no one would care about what felt like the whingeing life-updates of a megalomaniac. But people loved it, and now I feel really good about having written it, like, way better than I felt when I posted it yesterday. And that's strange as well, because apparently I only judge the worth of something based on other peoples' reactions to it.

Never mind that though, tomorrow morning I'll be getting on a plane bound for Adelaide and then spending the day hopefully catching up with a few people if they have time for me. Then Phil and I will jumping in his car and driving to my grandparents place in Lucindale, and then the day after, completing the drive back to Melbourne. Phil is moving here, finally, and as is the general theme of my life at the moment – more so than usual – I don't know what to expect.

I feel like he and I are in very different places at the moment, and I'm worried that once we are again living in the same city our differences in lifestyle will become clear and we'll drift apart. This is where I have to start applying what I was writing about yesterday though; so I could either worry that we are going to drift apart, or I could just live my life the same way I've been living it for the past eighteen months – the way that seems to be working for me – and make time for Phil around that... think of him. What does he want to get out of moving here? What can I bring to the table to make his and everyone else in that crew's lives in this city better?

I really need to stop stressing so much about what everyone around me is going to think about the things that I do, whatever they are. I need to relax. I need to go with the flow. I need to stop predetermining my actions. I need to get out of my head. For the next week, I'm going to try and make this blog be the retelling of a story from the previous day, rather than intense introspection. Goal, set.

Peace, Taco.

Hard Things Are Hard

Right now, for maybe the first time ever, I don't have a girl in my life, or any sort of open romantic attachment to anyone. Also, coincidentally, this week I feel strange.

I think I need to maintain this feeling... well, not maintain it, not cultivate it and hope for it to stay, because it doesn't feel good, it's not a positive feeling and it certainly isn't giving me energy at all. But I need to actively feel it, force myself to feel it. For my show '36 Hours' that I've been writing for the festivals I'm doing next year, I wrote the line;
“Once I decided to find the pain inside me that I'd been trying to run from and just experience it, I found that there actually wasn't that much there – at least, not so much that I couldn't handle it.”
I was really happy with myself the day I wrote that line, I think it speaks to something very true in my life, and hopefully in the lives of other people. I feel like it's something that I need to keep in mind right now.

What is probably going on here, is that for as long as I have been running around and chasing girls, I've been simply trying to distract myself from my essential loneliness. Oh... I mean, I'm not actually lonely... maybe that would be better as, my fear of being lonely. I'm afraid of being alone, of feeling alone, of feeling sadness that comes from being alone, so I try to plug that up with temporary human distractions, but then those people end up turning away from me because they know or at least sense that I am doing just that: using them as a distraction. It's a pretty selfish way to be, but it's not such a bad thing, I don't think. I'm not beating myself up over it, I just think it's important to acknowledge that that's what I've been doing so that I can put a stop to it.

I read something else yesterday with the title, “I don't think marriage is for me”. Classic mislead – the article was about this guy who's been married for a couple years admitting that he'd been a little selfish in his marriage, and that marriage isn't for him, it should never be for you, it should be for the other person. That goes with all relationships... but I think I've been living and thinking of my relationships with everyone around me in terms of what they can do for me, and that's why they continue to become stale and unfulfilling.

So what can I do from here, right now? Other than say, “I pledge to be more mindful of other people and to treat others with respect in my interactions with them every day.” Wouldn't that be be hilariously hollow... I don't know, like practically, I don't know. I don't know what this means or how I can change my actions to reflect this new realization.

I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know...

I wonder how many times I would have to write that before the letters would line up with the top line again? It'd be different once published on my blog, because the margin is different. I've stopped introspecting now, I guess I thought it all sounded way too hard.

I'm trying guys. I promise.

Peace, Taco.

Fights at Fishface

My parents are in town today... well, they're not in town yet, they're still waiting for their plane in Adelaide Airport apparently, but they're coming to town today, which is to be, according to all reasonable expectation, lovely.

Today I'm planning to catch up with Fleety for a beer (and hopefully to get the cash that I lent him yesterday back, although let's not go wild with expectation just yet haha), then meeting Mum and Dad at five or so for early dinner at Meatballs in town, and then catching a show at the Butterfly Club at 7. I've checked their lineup, and I think this cabaret show at 7 looks like it'd be a bit more broad in appeal than the show at 9. I can't remember what the 9 one was, and I don't really know what the 7 one is, but that's just the feeling I have, so I'm going with that.

Honestly I wouldn't mind going to Les Miserables, which I believe has started at Her Majesty's Theatre, but I doubt Dad would be too into that, plus it's probably a super-long show, and expensive too. I need to get out to see more theatre though. Tonight is going to be cool.

Last night at Fishface I had a great time struggling through an interaction with this chick in the crowd who was sitting at a table that did NOT want to be talked to, or it seemed to pay any sort of attention to the show whatsoever. They weren't being rude really, but they weren't watching, and in a small room like that, if I'm comfortable on stage, which I am down there, I'm going to try and bring them into the show. I like it when everyone is paying attention.

I was doing all new, so I opened up with what I had intended, and then said something to her and managed to get her to look at me and engage for the amount of time that I was directing my words at her specifically, but as soon as I started addressing the crowd again, she turned back around and continued talking in hushed tones to her three friends. After my next two bits I asked her whether she thought I was going well (I was going okay, maybe a 6-7 out of 10), and said something like “I want to yell at you, but I feel like I've used up our interaction credits and if I do something bad will happen.”
To which she responded, “yeah.”
Audience “ooooohs” – I was excited at this point and I launched into some random chatter with her, poking fun at how seriously she seemed to be taking herself. I ended up going into a routine about having never been in a fight to close out the show, and walked off feeling good and having made everyone except her and maybe the other people at her table (I couldn't see) laugh.

So I was pretty happy with that set... when I listened back though and reflected, it occurred to me that the only reason I was able to do what I did with her was that the rest of the room was already on my side, and the reason they were already on my side is because about seventy percent of that room was comic-friends of mine, and regulars who see me perform every fortnight and know me and my style. If that had happened in a club situation and I wasn't fully in control of the room I wouldn't have been able to react the way I did to that girl's distant aggression, it's just lucky that they were on my side, because my reaction was completely natural and in no way planned for or rehearsed. Maybe if I had been in a different position in terms of the crowd liking me I would have reacted differently, but I should probably reflect a little more and think about what happened and how I could have reacted differently so that if (let's be honest, when) it does happen again, I have other options, and don't lose the room.

I still haven't had a shower yet today, I should probably do that. Mums know when you don't wash, at least, that's what I'm led to believe. Maybe I should run the gauntlet and test this little theory. It is a nice day for science... well, I'll leave it with you guys to decide what you think I actually did. Happy Weekend, friends.


Peace, Taco.

Opportunity

Today I slept in a while, until eleven, and then went downstairs to the Side Door Cafe and practised making coffees with Swanny for a while. I've wanted to learn how to make coffees for ages, so this little opportunity is nice, and also with the uncertainty around the cleaning business, it's a good fall-back option to have.

The Side Door Cafe is a part of Station 59, the pub I live above, and so if/when I start working there I'll be able to literally jump out of bed and walk downstairs to work. They do barely fuck all trade though, and Mick (the owner of the place) seems pretty hesitant to give free reign to Swanny to put on any specials that might pull customers. The cafe around the corner – Tree of Us, one of my favourites in Melbourne – already has the twenty-dollar market cornered around here though, so the only real option to get people coming in is a cheap special. We live in the middle of a heroin basket people, no one is paying for smiles.

So the idea, I guess, would be to figure out some sort of cheap, easy special for people – Swanny's idea is a coffee and a toastie for $6 – and then make up flyers with that special, a map, and whatever else... maybe a clip art picture of a cake? Send those bitches out by foot to houses in the area, and local businesses, and BOOMBA-BIMBA, that's some possible local interest. As it is the place only does like ten fucking sales a day. What is there to lose? Nothing whatsoever. I could definitely see myself working in a place underneath my fucking house for cash and generating the business myself. That would be absolute heaven.

Since living in Melbourne I've found – other than my initial stint working bar at Yah Yah's which was doomed from the moment they put free drinks under my nose eleven hours a weekend – I've found that all of my jobs have come from random social opportunities, rather than actual concerted searching. That's the way it's going to be I feel, for as long as I continue to toil in the 'workforce'. Fuck trying to break into some place where no one knows who you are, or what you're about, and fitting in to the scene of the joint is based on a roll of the dice alone... fuck that right off. There are plenty of opportunities for hustling money around the place with people you get along with if you just keep putting yourself out there.

That's the trap of being born without affluence, I guess. For someone like me, who grew up around people who would end up running businesses and deciding their own destinies with plenty of room to move, it's pretty fucking easy to be in control of your own world. I could count on one hand, maybe even one finger, the amount of times when I've been really in danger of falling into a bad situation and having to look for help to pull myself out of it. And even then, for me, help exists.

So many people don't have these opportunities thrown at them on a weekly basis, not getting to choose which ones they like and which ones they can see themselves doing. Some people are still handing out resumes at thirty. Thirty-five. Hairs greying. Hope running out.

I'm really excited at the possibility of working at a cafe that sucks, because that means it's a blank slate, and I may be able to have a hand in making it into something worthwhile and profitable. That's really cool, and from where I sit, I feel pretty fucking lucky right now.

Peace, Taco.

Moving Out

 I'm moving out of Baker St today. There's something surreal about this day, I don't really trust that it's actually here, but it is, and I'm about to start packing up my bed once I can wake up Benny and ask him if he's still got my alan key.

I've been living in this house for over a year – by far the longest I've stayed anywhere other than my parents' house in Adelaide – and it's been a great year. When I first moved in I was just relieved to be out of the Melbourne Connection Travellers' Hostel where bed bugs tore through the night and my food was stolen from the fridges weekly. I moved into the house and the environment that I had always wanted to live in; when I was nineteen I pined for a 'party house' and lamented that the house I lived in in Clearview wasn't one. Brodie the Instigator proved to be the catalyst that my house had lacked, and so almost every weekend here there was something happening and my house was turned into a revolving door of beautiful drug people.

At first I felt at peace with the whole thing and felt that I couldn't be happier with my surroundings, but this is what went wrong: I am no longer an active part of that lifestyle. Sure I go out to clubs every now and then, like maybe once a month or so, but this household is predicated on the every-weekend lifestyle. Benny and Brodie live for clubs and clubbing and pounding techno music, but for me, the night is only a passing fancy. The ever-changing circus of people coming in and out of my house began to blur, faces coming and going like a merry-go-round, and I found myself adrift in a sea of strangers every Sunday morning. And I was a stranger to them too, a stranger in my own house.

So I've started to withdraw into my room and not speak, not move, never emerge when the house is alive and the air is full of basslines, because I know that if I do, I'd be greeted by a bunch of people who I don't know, and who are operating on a different level than me, because I've not been up all night and they have. I don't know them, as much as I want to and would love to, I can't, because I can't commit to that world. On Sunday mornings I really fucking wish I had been out all night just so that I could sit down comfortably and feel normal. Fuck.

So my ever-present scrambling to fit in and forcibly identify with some group of people has led me to this, moving out after a year of living at 45 Baker St, Richmond. It's been a good year, and although I've been less and less comfortable with it in the last few months, I'm glad that I have ticked 'live in a party house' off of my teenage bucket-list, if only so that now I have that book of stories to tell people too, full of embellishments and characters whose names I never knew myself. I can't help but be subject to a feeling of slight melancholy as I finish this blog post, knowing full well that as soon as I do I'm going to have to start picking up the clothes from my floor and packing them into drawers, ready to be carried the 300m and then up stairs, into the room that waits for me above Station 59, one block over. I think I'm finished here though. Actually, I almost certainly am. Now at least I can come back, after an actual absence, and be a part of this world on my own terms and surely be more comfortable. A stranger in a strange house, at 45 Baker St, Richmond.

Peace, Taco.

Have a Good Life

I just answered a phone call from John from Habitat Hostel in St Kilda, John was my contact down at Habitat during my year as a tour guide for Peek Tours – the best job I've ever had. He was calling me to ask how the tours were going... at least, I think he was, I didn't really get the gist of what he was calling about as our conversation was cut short when I told him that Peek Tours no longer does the free tour. We got edged out by the competition ('I'm Free Tours' /petulantspitting) and had to shut up shop. This would be our last phone call, oh the mildly shocking emotion.

The first time I met John I didn't really meet him, and for the first months of our relationship (is that the right word? Friendship? Not quite... professional relationship is too long, relationship is too... gay?) he existed to me only as a number saved in my phone: 'John – Habitat'. I would call him on Friday mornings when the groups he chaperoned on that day each week were late, or failed to arrive at all. “Anyone for the tour today dude?”
“Nah, no one was interested.” He would say.
“Aaite, cool. Catcha later.” And we would hang up. Click.

Our tour company suffered from a severe lack of promotional funds, and slowly but surely we were pushed from first to second position in the free tour market by I'm Free, but Fridays were as close as we had to a sure day of at least ten people. John – Habitat brought groups every week of fun tourists and backpackers, and after a while he started hanging out whenever I was on and chatting for five or ten minutes while his group lingered in the background acting awkward and not knowing to do with themselves. He'd usually ask my how my comedy was going and what I was up to, and I'd tell him, and then tell him my latest interesting story of some weirdo on the tour, or some shitty heckler at a show. Once a scary-looking, bedraggled homeless guy approached me in the Block Arcade while I was talking to a group of fifteen or so and yelled almost incomprehensibly; “LIAR! FUCKEN LIARRRR!” My group were fairly shocked and taken aback, and looked to me to resolve the tension and extricate us from the situation, I turned to them and replied:
“Okay guys, this is Dave, he's going to be one of our new guides but he's still training and learning the ropes, so everyone say 'Hey Dave!'”

I was pretty happy with that.

Whenever we talked on Friday mornings the conversations never strayed far from basic, surface level chatter, but I always liked how John – Habitat hung around for a little rather than bailing straight away. Maybe his job back at the hostel was a little boring, or maybe I was a little boring and he just felt obliged to make idle banter? Or maybe his job was great, but he just enjoyed talking to people. Or maybe he didn't work for Habitat at all? But was just a strangely motivated homeless man who would drag tourists who seemed lost from the streets, round them up, and take them to a free tour under the guise of working for an established hostel in St Kilda. Maybe, but probably not.

It's weird to think about how many people we meet in just one day, how many people you say “hi” to, how many people you make eye contact with, how many people you walk past on the street and share nothing but the air of an artificial city and the harsh streets covered in crushed-up rocks and chemicals. There are a lot of them. Our days are all a constant parade of changing faces dancing in and out of our tiny little personal worlds, some of them stay for a while, some of them leave before we learn their names. John – Habitat was a small part of my life for a year, and when I told him that Peek Tours was no longer running, we both understood that our professional relationship was about to come to an end.

I am very quick to attach undue meaning and emotion to these kinds of tiny events that, much like the aforementioned faces, crop up hundreds of times in every day. When we hung up the phone, I couldn't resist pointing out the harsh reality of this particular goodbye. What does it mean? I knew you for five minutes, every Friday for a year. Is that significant in any way? I'll probably forget your name in another year. Although John is a pretty easy name to remember... but then, it's John. Easy to forget too.

“I'll see you around them man... probably never.” he said to me as our conversation wound down and we prepared to return to our existences.
“Yeah man, have a good life.”
(together) “Haha...” Click.

Peace, Taco.

Taxi Guru

These blogs have been hard to write the last week, probably because I was away and my routine was completely different, but also possibly because I am running out of steam. Maybe? Eh, probably not. I think when I go away from now on, if I'm going to treat it as a holiday, then I need to stop writing the blog as well. This is something that I do seven days a week – I'm always 'working'. That's how I want my life to be, and that's fine, but I think I need to give myself some down time to recharge when I go on holidays like I did last week, or else the quality of the posts is going to suffer severely anyway, and what's the point of writing shitty blogs?

Last night I had an amazing cab ride; I met up with a crew of uni students and took them on a short pub crawl of Fitzroy, and then just after ten I left them to their easy Sunday adventure, and went home. I saw some guys getting out of a cab on the street, and leaned my head in the door to ask if the guy was free – he was, I jumped in. During the changeover one of the guys, as he was getting out of the cab, said , “enjoy” – just took it to be a random farewell from a stranger, but as soon as my cabbie opened his mouth, I guessed that it may have actually been a deliberate comment on what he knew I was about to experience.

The guy was old-looking – probably in his sixties – with grey hair and one of those old person mouths with lips that go in a little bit like the event horizon of a black hole. Softly spoken, but completely deliberate and purposeful, he started telling me that he was the master of all relationships, and that he had developed a philosophy which he intended to share with me in our short time together.
“Where are we going?”
“The Imperial first (I had to pick something up), and then Baker St in Richmond.”
“Okay, now listen.”

He started talking, and I immediately identified with the things he was saying about the self, and the need we have to know our selves so that we can be true to those around us - “only when we are true to ourselves can we give to the world.” (I'm paraphrasing of course, but these were pretty much his words). I wanted to ask him about meditation, but I decided to let the conversation be steered without my input; it seemed clear that he had practised this pitch before. That's what it started to seem like too, a pitch. I found myself becoming cynical as I wondered when he would whip out a clipboard and ask me to sign up to his mailing list. “Dr Benicci's Health and Personal Wellness Seminars only $29.95 a week, sign up now and get a free hat”. But no, no offer, no ask, nothing but an old man in his cab spilling knowledge into the world to an audience of one.

I was captivated, he slipped here and there into rhetoric, and so I asked him how I could put some of these ideas into practice – how do I actually apply this philosophy to the real world? I understand that I need to actualize myself, and that I can fulfil my duty to bring happiness to others and good into the world when I am working towards my truest desires, but how do I do all of that? Should I go home and watch a TED Talk? Buy a scooter? Learn to count in Russian? What?

He said that the great untapped resource of humanity is the unconscious, and then he gave me one simple tool to help myself become more focussed on what I want, and direct myself more towards that. He said that I should take a piece of paper, and on it, free-write anything that comes into my head that I would consider a desire of mine. Anything. What do I want out of life? What do I want to be or do or feel? I should keep writing on the piece of paper until I feel that my I have found the absolute NUMBER ONE thing that I want, my first and foremost goal. Then I should write this one thing down on pieces of paper and stick them around my house, and keep them on my person at all times. Every night before I go to sleep, the last thing I do should be look at this piece of paper, and in doing this as well as having the message around my house so that I am constantly exposed to it, I am training my subconscious to think about that thing. Putting it to work, effectively.

It reminded me of a TED Talk by John Cleese (I don't know if I was being sarcastic before or not, TED Talks are really great), where he talks about writing a script that he was really happy with, losing it, rewriting it from memory, finding the original, then comparing and finding that the re-written version was far better. He gave this as part-proof for the idea that the subconscious works on things after our conscious mind has decided that they are complete. My taxi driver's idea doesn't seem so far-fetched to be honest.

Today I have to go to my new room and start sanding the floors, and also probably hammer down a few hangnails, but before I do I'm going to sit here with a piece of paper and a pen, and set to work figuring out what my dreams are. Because there's always time for introspection.

Peace, Taco.

Mysterious Lady De-Mystified

She was the queen of the tram stop. Well, she was the only one there, sharing the bench with me in her worn, pink hoodie and smoking a cigarette while she screwed the lid back on her bottle of Carlton Draught. Eleven AM, even. When I first saw her she looked like a broken angel, breathing out lung-fulls of ashen smoke and looking around at her surroundings, eyes darting back and forth.

She didn't seem to notice me, but I sat with my back towards her so as not to intrude. She was in charge, and sat upright with her spine arched – postured like the queen. A stripper bag at her feet ('stripper bags' are the ones like businessmen have in airports, with the pull-out handle and wheels on the bottom; too big to be a backpack, and obviously full of clothes) made me guess that her life was not in order. No one ever carries that bag around at 11am with a clear plan in their head. She had either just finished work (no strip clubs in Richmond) or had been staying somewhere and had to leave. These were my conclusions, to my eyes, the bag said it all. She was smoking and drinking, but those were just plain quirks.

The tram pulled up, only five or six stops to the end of the line, but it's always quicker than walking. We got on, and I sat in the booth across the aisle from her, my eyes peeled to the left as she lugged her bag up the stairs, sat down, and then cursed as she remembered to put out her cigarette. No boundaries. Perfect.

An elderly couple waddled across the crossing while the tram waited for the lights to change, the driver signalled to them that he was waiting, and they waddled faster, shaky on wavering limbs. The man made it up first, his wife followed twenty seconds later – they were very old. I heard m'lady whisper. Something under her voice, maybe? Surely not speaking to me. No, definitely under her voice. Sharp. Hissing; “Don't think I can't understand you.”
Who? Who can you understand? The elderly couple? They seem to be speaking Greek to eachother.
“Fucken hurry up, you're gonna fucken die soon anyway you old cunt.”
That was definitely her, holy fuck, I think she's out of her mind – well that broke the spell a little...

So now I'm sitting there like, holy shit, this fucking insane woman is about to lose her shit because two old people have made the tram wait like twenty seconds at the lights because their old legs couldn't get them across the crossing as fast as she could. She's muttering under her breath at them. At the next stop an elderly Asian woman got on with her cart full of whatever, and pink-hoodie chick said the same shit, only worse, probably. Something along the lines of “don't fucken touch my suitcase”, when the elderly woman's cart bumped her stripper-bag as she hobbled up the steps. So much anger, so much resentment, so much blind spite seething out of her brooding form in the corner. She was no longer a queen, but a serpent hissing viciously with a piercing gaze. Still looked pretty though.

It's strange how much I want to like people who I can immediately see are in some way 'damaged' or at least from the areas of our society that are sick with something. Drinking from a bottle of beer and screwing the lid back on before midday on any day of the week is not an action borne of confidence and a life well going – she was scared to finish it and be left alone, it seemed. But the first thought I had when I saw her sitting proud and upright was, “what a woman!” I wanted to tell her that she was amazing, until she opened her mouth at least, when I wanted to tell her that her scathing half-remarks were “neither intelligent nor funny.” (quoting my own thoughts now)

The only action I took while watching the whole thing play out this morning was to stare openly in her direction. I don't know what I was trying to accomplish – maybe if she'd looked back I would have had to decide whether to fall in love with her or hate her for her spitefulness to her face – but now that she's gone, I'll never know. I will confirm this though: I stayed until the last stop, just so that I could remain a spectator of the performance, or maybe out of hope that she would glance. I honestly don't know why, but I know I could have gotten off one stop earlier.

Peace, Taco.

Saturday Introspection

 It's a hard struggle, that between the desire to live healthier and improve yourself – myself – and the responsibility to not become an ego-driven maniac. Sometimes in the heat of drug-induced introspection I have fallen into the trap of thinking that just because the ego can be a destructive force, it should be completely annihilated. I don't think that's true really, but sometimes in the vulnerable state that hallucinogens usually induce, the easiest way out seems to be 'admitting' that “I am a terrible person” – self-effacing to escape the torture of thinking about wrongdoings. This, however, is a false admission. Two reasons:

First of all, I'm not a terrible person, duh. Okay, I mean, maybe not, 'duh', let's not get complacent here, but to feel bad about something I've done wrong is a very good step on the way to being a good person, and so regardless of how bad something I've done may be, flagellating myself for it doesn't make it better. The danger in 'admitting' (and I use inverted commas here because really, an admission of something that isn't true is analogous to a 'discovery' of something that doesn't exist) that “I am a terrible person”, is that it leads me into absolving myself from whatever thing led me to this conclusion. So while I may behave for a while, sooner or later that guilt subsides and the cycle starts all over again. It goes from “I'm a terrible person”, to “I made up for that”, to “I'm doing sweet”, to “LOOK AT ALL THE IDIOTS, I'M AWESOME!” And then we're back to square one.

This then leads me to the second reason why simply reaching for the excuse of being a terrible person to justify past misdeeds is probably not the way to go; it leads on to the idea that the self should be destroyed completely. I remember a story John Lennon told during the 70s (if I remember correctly) about how he spent years following the Timothy Leary Acid Trip and thinking he was a worthless human being and should live his life hidden away within himself for fear of his dark inner nature wreaking havoc on the world around him. It took him years to realize that while the forces inside the human soul are sometimes destructive, they are also creative – the yin and the yang. We need both to survive, and to live lives worth living.

So when I reach out of well-worn reflex for the “I suck” card, I'm really being lazy and cheating myself out of an opportunity to improve. The self is required, as the whole of society, which is used as the basis for so many moral-political philosophies (“the most good for the most people”, “equal opportunity for all” etc.) is necessarily made up of multitudes of individual, indivisible 'selves'. The trick is to not let the ego run rampant and start sucking up too much attention and importance, it is a ravenous beast when allowed to run free and needs to remain as a player of equal importance as every other, lest it become, as Bill Hicks said, “another fevered ego tainting our collective unconscious.”

I don't know why I started writing about this stuff, but I'm very happy with my results, I just thought it all though as the words were coming onto the screen. I haven't done anything particularly wrong lately that I feel like I should apologize for – although if I had, this would be a great way of apologizing to my internal moral compass without having to do anything. GENIUS! But no, I was just thinking this morning that I haven't had any of those kind of self-effacing, 'Revolver' “my ego is ruining me”, I-just-fucked-up thoughts in a while, and I started thinking that maybe I was overdue for one. But then I thought, no, fuck that. I don't need to push myself back into another cycle of feeding and then starving my self of endearment, maybe I might actually be able to strike a bit of a balance for once, and maintain. Maintain. Ah, there we are.

The Struggle To Maintain.

Peace, Taco.

More Politics

Okay, so the election was yesterday. Far from detaching myself from the whole process, I actually got slightly emotionally involved, which was nice... and interesting to boot. I think I'm going to start volunteering for the AYCC on a regular basis, it could be a really cool opportunity to do some public speaking and put the skills I've been learning in comedy to an effective and noble use.

I think the key to engaging emotionally in political issues in the way that I was bemoaning being unable to in my post last week is that I just have to become more involved. Rather than just sitting around thinking about them and waiting for emotional inspiration to strike, if I start engaging physically with the issues and actually putting in work towards the goal that I know I intellectually support, then I'll be able to attach emotions to that work, and to the community around it.

I also think I'm starting to understand just what it is that is messed up about our country, please forgive me now for working through the ideas in writing here, for those who care, I'm sure you already know, and for those who haven't thought about it, I'm sure you don't care:

When I used to read TakiMag it always made a lot of sense to me because I had missed the foul assumption that all of those right-wing thinkers make when they talk about national government policy; they assume that they only have the responsibility to care for those within their own nation-states. Or states, or nations, whatever. That's why they can morally rationalize harsh immigration policy and low taxes supporting a consumer economy. But how is that fair? It's not fair at all. Our economy is supported and paid for by raw materials and cheap labour in the poorest regions of the world, all so that we can continue to spend money on the consumer purchases that keep our economies afloat. So then governments like the Abbott-led Coalition that has just been elected in Australia campaign on the idea that we only need to look after our own, without making mention of the fact that us and our own have been and continue to be propped up by the suffering of millions beyond our shores. It's selfish thinking, but by omitting all mention of the source of our wealth, right-wing, protectionist governments give the masses in consumer-capitalist societies a way of absolving ourselves from responsibility for the suffering we create.

This is where the often-quoted, always smilingly dismissed 'hippie mushroom-rhetoric' about seeing all of us as one and forgetting the arbitrary distinctions of nationality should become so much more important than it is. People seem to accept this thinking readily, and espouse it wherever possible, but no one goes on to live by it. I don't, neither does anyone in our society.

I don't know that I feel guilty, because I don't think it's realistic to expect someone who is advertised to every single second of their life to be able to make decisions like 'what should I have for lunch today' whilst considering the global ramifications for their choice of salad dressing. I am angry though, firstly at everyone who voted for Tony Abbott for not recognizing the weakness that exists within ourselves that allows us to discount the suffering of billions of people that we are partly responsible for. Also though, I'm angry at myself for not recognizing sooner that I should have been trying to do something about the cause that I am and have always been so passionate about, and only expecting that if I sat and thought about it long enough, a concise, and developed opinion would avail itself of me, and I would be ready to enter the world, a fully-armed crusader for truth.

Ah the complacencies of affluence... it's a nice day outside today.

Peace, Taco.

Engaging with Emotions

I really don't want to get dragged into this whole election thing... I mean, I do, because it's important, but also I don't, because from what I can see of this fetid election campaign, our country is fucked anyway. The circus of Dreadful Mediocrity versus Frightening Evil continues, and no amount of last minute self-education or concerted voicing of opinions can help. We're going down, folks, hold your loved ones and scream through tears and dangly mouth-saliva.

I don't know why it takes so much effort for me to engage on an emotional level, I've been trying to get to the bottom of this question for a while. I get a little jealous – although that's not really the word – of people who can convert their concern for our society into tangible passion about politics and issues of governance. I wish I could bring myself to care more, to do more, to get angrier and more proactive.

Yesterday I received a call from a random number – not blocked, just not saved to my phone – it was some guy whose name I have forgotten but who introduced himself as the co-ordinator of Power Shift, a climate summit I went to a month or so ago. I didn't have the most amazing time at this summit, mostly because I didn't really know what to do with it as an experience, and because I'd been up all night on one of the worst benders in recent memory, and attended the event without a wink of sleep... but the co-ordinator was calling, he was on the phone right now. He asked me whether I'd had a good time, and I lied poorly and said, “sure”. Then he told me about the AYCC's plans to man polling booths giving out information about the major parties' positions on climate change on election day, and asked what my plans for the 7^th were. I lied again, and said I was busy all day. Why?

This is the same thing I'm talking about, right here. I don't even know why I lied, and why I decided that I didn't need to get out and do something to support what is probably the closest thing to a cause I legitimately care about in our political landscape on the most important day of my voting life thus far. If this election really is looking like sending our self-destructive patch of dirt down the tubes like I so resignedly fear it is, then shouldn't I be ready to act? Shouldn't I have jumped at his opportunity without a second thought?

I think the reason I am so reliably distant from my emotions when engaging (or failing to engage) with the Australian political landscape is because my emotions towards it are so overwhelmingly negative, exposing myself to them would wreak nothing but havoc on my mind. “Why bother?” is the overarching theme of this story. Why bother trying? Why bother caring? Why bother hurting myself and damaging my psyche when the slithering worthless cunts of the world armed with PR campaigns and professional liars in tow will undoubtedly do it for me regardless? Why? Why? What's the fucking point?

Well, the point is probably that me and my apathy represent a large section of young people in the electorate, and it is highly likely that me, and people like me, are one of the main reasons that I can go on Facebook and read status after status after tearfully frustrated, screamingly impotent, devastatingly hopeless status struggling to comprehend how Tony Abbott – the hideous face of democracy gone foul – will be running our country in under a week. From the 1200 Facebook friends I have, I've not seen a single pro-Liberal opinion in the last month, and know of only one person who might MAYBE hold one. Every young person I speak to says the same – that they are scared for our future, and wish there was a way out – so then how are we in this situation, drifting towards destruction, when everyone seems to be pushing the other way? Well, because no one's pushing. No one cares. Everyone has given up, and it's so heartbreaking that we can't even bear to think about it. Because we know we've betrayed ourselves, and come September 8^th, I challenge any one of us to look ourselves in the mirror and not see what we have become. Shudder in fright, friends, this is our tomorrow.

So I'm about to call back that unknown number, and speak to the man whose name I have forgotten, and tell him that actually, yes, I will be there on Saturday, handing out flyers and talking to the masses. Because I should. Because I have to. Because we all have to. We're still going to lose, but to be honest, I had only planned to sit in and watch porn anyway.

Peace, Taco.

A Faraday Cage and Facebook

I'm sure sometimes I write things just to write them, just to have written something. This blog is the perfect example of that, but more than this blog, I do this on Facebook and YouTube comments. The ease with which I can say something to (potentially) thousands of people really is intoxicating sometimes, and often, what seems like a great thought to immortalize online at the time of thinking, does not prove to be so.

This is no more true than today, when I stood in the elevator at Little Hunter (the restaurant I clean four days a week) and watched the number tick down one floor while holding my breath so that the smell from the bins I was taking down in the lift with me wouldn't make me dry reach my stomach lining onto the lovely polished steel interior. I went from the ground floor (GF) down to the basement – front entrance (BF), and the similar double meaning of both these acronyms was – as it is on most days – glaringly apparent. 'Girl Friend', 'Boy Friend'. This was my idea for a Facebook post:

[photo of the elevator display reading 'BF']
Caption: “Wow this elevator sure is keen LOL! Sori elevator, I dnt swing dat wai LOL JK!”

Not great huh? Pretty fucking TERRIBLE ACTUALLY – even if it was meant to be satirical (for the record, yes, it was, I'm not a 14 year old boy). But now, if you go on my Facebook wall and look at the posts on today, the 30^th of August 2013, you can clearly see that no such post exists. I don't like deleting old posts, as I think it perfectly reasonable that I should have to be held accountable to my former thoughts and ideas, however deranged or idiotic. So how did I manage to dodge this bullet?

One recollection from my time in year 12 physics with Mr Turnbull that has continually puzzled and frustrated me for five years since my graduation, is the Faraday Cage. Apparently, so our wise master taught us, a Faraday Cage is a closed three-dimensional shape (cage), composed of conductive material, that forms an electromagnetic field through which electromagnetic signals cannot pass. The cage doesn't have to be completely solid, just the frame, but it does have to be closed. In our lessons he always used to refer to something like the body of a car being a Faraday Cage, and using this to justify why using a mobile phone in a car is a bad idea – because the EM waves that make up the phone's signal are 'trapped' within the car, thus subjecting you and your passengers to far greater doses of radiation than normal. This never made sense to me cos... like, if the signal can't get out of the car, then how does your phone work at all? Okay sure, I'll accept that the radiation might be greater within the car, but a pretty decent amount of those charged particles have to be able to leave or else the phone's signal would die. Yes, the radio antenna is on the outside, but not the phone... its a phone. Ummmmm... anyway, I passed year 12 physics and did really well ACTUALLY, so there! For those five years I've been content to tell Faraday and his dumb cage to SUCK IT! Ha.

Until now... so while I was in the lift today, safely (although still not happily) breathing bin-air in through my mouth and writing what I at the time was a cutting piece of social satire, my phone lost signal. The elevator, as previously mentioned, has an interior made of polished steel – not a great conductor even, but still okay considering the completeness of the cage. So while I was there, with my half-asleep brain at 6:45am trying to post my photo onto Facebook, something inside me said, “wait, dude, someone is trying to tell you something here.” I was already unsure about what I was posting – I guess just like to post when I wake up – and this little hitch thankfully pushed me over the edge. “Nooooooo Taco, no postey postey, this attempt at satire isssss DUMB!” I closed the window, and when the elevator doors opened, I grabbed the bins, and left without ever having uttered a word to the world of social media.

So thanks, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Thank you Michael Faraday and also to your lovely cage, dumb though it still may be, you have saved me from widespread embarrassment and the shame of less-than-three-likes that draws the piteous stares of wall-scrollers the world over. I felt I should do something to repay you for my five years of disdain and dismissal, so I wrote you this post, and HEY, look at that I even learnt your first name. Good on you.

Peace, Taco.