I Can't Focus

The world is so fucking hard to take in. In the early hours of yesterday's morning I was drunk and sent a message to the effect of “comedy is hard, life is hard, agh agh AGH! Sadthings HELP!?” to Melanie in France, and after passing out, awoke at midday feeling hungover but contrastingly happy about life. It was sunny in Edinburgh, and I went to the park to enjoy a sit in the warm grass, the length of which should surprise every weatherman in a 10km radius. After grinning while watching a young couple be in love with each other and giving them a round of applause as they walked off hand-in-hand sighing into each other's eyelids, I checked my phone to see that I had a response from Melanie. A beautiful, thoughtful, and concerned response to my saddened messages the night before.

“But I don't feel like that anymore?”

The relentless up-and-down sickness of day to day life is... well it's relentless is what it is. If ever I manage actually pin down one specific feeling at any moment in a day, I've learned that the best bet is that that feeling will be gone the next time I have the chance to take stock. It's like being below deck in a ship during a storm, and the light keeps flicking off for long periods of time, only coming on for a few minutes at a time, and during those minutes of valuable clarity I quickly scan my surroundings checking the position of the bed, desk, chair, chamber pot, stove, various spoons etc. The storm doesn't stop, but at least when the lights go out again I'll have something to go by. And they go out again, and again I'm tossing and turning below deck in the dark, fumbling around for a spatula.

That's why it's so hard to grasp at any particular thought for an extended period of time and flesh it out. That's the most frustrating thing, it's what keeps these posts flailing around the 1000-word mark, and what keeps me sending messages full of emoticons to the phones and laptops of friends across the world telling them that I just found a penny.

I read something yesterday about a guy who spent 18 months without a phone or computer or anything, and he made a great point that I've heard made before about how the internet is another dimension of our world. It's amazing that we are able to traverse this new dimension, full of information and entertainment, and connectivity to other people, but while we try to focus on this new dimension, the physical one we already occupy is still all around us, so we can never fully BE in one or the other. We're stuck in limbo, with one foot in each of these worlds, and therefore never experiencing anything. That's why these thoughts that I keep having come and go like lightning strikes, so bold and clear one minute, then racing away the next. A flash, a shadow in the sky, and then gone.

I had two great gigs yesterday, and met some cool people in my dorm, but I also read about the outbreak of police brutality and attacking of protesters in the US town of Ferguson. So I made new friends, and then was made angry by something happening overseas. And then I went for my walk, and witnessed young love, and clapped, and then it rained and my shoes got wet, and then I did some great gigs, but before that I had to flyer in the rain and someone was a dick to me. And I remember it all so clearly, I must have been up and down three or four times, and that's worrying because I know there's always a danger that with too much colour in a palette it can all start turning to grey.

I guess I just need to slow down a little with this life shit. Don't want to blow a fuse now. I'm wearing a really bright shirt today, for no other reason than the guys in my dorm were drinking Jim Beam at 10am, and I wanted to match their enthusiasm. I wish these blogs would turn out better, but they're really not right now, they're just coming out like quaint little travelogues, but I guess that's just one more thing that I'm going to have to be okay with.

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.

I'm Arrived!

So I arrived in Paris. “J'ai arrivé”... which apparently is wrong; it's “Je suis arrivé”. It didn't take long for the memories to start flooding back: being alone, in a foreign country, where you do not speak the language, is not only terrifying, and a source of constant embarrassment, but also potentially very fucking boring.

The journey was from the plane, to airport, to regional train, to metro train, to street in the centre of the 10th district of Paris. First there were bi- and tri-lingual signs, and announcements in French, English, and Spanish – it's as if this country could tell that whenever I hear a language other than English, my monkey brain reaches for the only other thing I know, and starts spouting spectacularly adequate Español. This includes while ordering at a French restaurant, and while talking to Parisian police officers. Dickhead. Slowly the industry and dirty train-yards give way to dense residential flats, French graffiti, French people, French signs. The announcements were in French, and French only. I began to rue the last few weeks when I had continuously put off making a start at learning this god damn language. Je ne parle pas français... and feeling like a piece of shit.

The hostel was named 'Friends Hostel' – I'm still trying to figure out which linguistic category this name occupies. Is it irony? Is it a joke? Is it just completely irrelevant? The best analogy I can think of right now would be if you started working for a lawn-mowing company called 'Friends Lawnmowers'. Sounds descriptive sure, but then on your first day no one speaks to you about lawnmowers, or at all, and after telling you that you'll be sharing the keys for your lawnmower with five other people (lawnmowers have keys), you walk into the Lawnmower Room (LR) to find that actually all of the lawnmowers start on their own and the key has disappeared anyway. And then you go on break, even though you haven't done any work yet, and there are a bunch of other people in the break room who look like they have also just started today, and no one knows where the boss is, or who he is, his name, or what he even looks like, and for some reason everyone is speaking Spanish. When you finally get back to the LR (picking up the industry slang ('Jargon' – OOOOH!!) quickly) you find that the lawnmower you were supposed to be using is being used by someone else, but not to cut grass, they're just riding it backwards like a dumb, stupid horsey-horsey, and you're like, “what even is this fucking company? I don't hate it, in fact I'm having quite a good time... but I feel like this is not the way things are supposed to work, and I'm sure someone, somewhere, is mucho is disappointed.”

Well that's what 'Friends Hostel' in Paris was like. That, and they have a lot of stairs.

It was a in a pretty shitty area of town, and it wasn't until my second day that I actually realized this wasn't all that one of the most famous cities in the world had to offer. Honestly, for about a day and a half until I ventured into the tourist district with all the museums and statues and junk, I thought the whole city was full of criminals (or at least dudes whose eyes move quickly) splashing themselves with water from the road because it was a little hot out. The whole city. It's not just that though, there's also a river... ha. ha. ha. Okay I promise I won't do that again...

It's strange going from the clearly demarcated and meticulously planned cities of Australia to somewhere that has evolved over several thousand years. There are no neat, parallel roads and parklands dividing the CBD from the suburbs... I got lost on Magenta and Stalingrad streets for seriously about an hour. Walking around in circles. I went into some huge church – Eglise Saint-Laurent – and listened to some French priest deliver his sermon for about twenty minutes. HA! I'm sitting here right now laughing at myself sitting there trying to attain some sort of peace from sitting in this huge building while a French man droned monotonously about Jesus Christ. To be honest, it was just nice to sit down... maybe that's what church is about? I'm not as anti-religion as I used to be. I found myself appreciating it on SOME sort of weird level and the whole experience is still a little obscure to think about.

I'm getting off track.

Highlight of day two was drinking two bottles of wine with Katie from Wollongong who I met on the walking tour I did in the morning. We sat on the banks of the Seine with all the other French hipsters and talking about life, comedy, writing, boys and girls, and the cheese that I had left in my bag since our first leisurely drinking session that afternoon: she refused to eat any as I had no knife, and was cutting it with my South Australian driver's license (FULL Drivers License, thankyou). Then I got lost on my way back to the hostel, and thighs chafing red as the rose we had drunk in the sun that afternoon, I wandered the Northern parts of the 10th district of Paris, France, past the homeless sleeping under the train line, and finally made it home in time to pack by 2:30am and set my alarm for 5:30. Trains to catch in the morning.

Also I walked down the Champs-Élysées, climbed the Arc de Triomphe, saw Napoleon's tomb, the Eiffel Tower, and the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Getting swindled by Parisian grifters was better though, but that's a story for another time. I'm going to lie down now, I'm feeling a little tired.

Peace, Taco.

Okay Okay Okay! I'm Leaving Already

This last week has been probably the best week of my life.

From going out to a horrible bar at 1:30am on a Thursday, after having two great gigs that night, and meeting someone amazing, to reliving old memories with old friends from Adelaide in a loud nightclub on Friday, driving around until 10am on Saturday, and passing out in my room surrounded by friends. Saturday night, the best comedy night I've been to out of a solid pool of around 500 or so in my last two years in Melbourne – a night all about ME(?!) no less, oh the gratuitous ego-stroking. My parents were there, and everyone DESTROYED and I was reminded how lucky I am to have found the community of people I have in Melbourne and the friends that surround me. Rob putting a smoking log from the fire inside his jacket, me selling Mark Bozworth's washing powder to the highest bidder in a final, deliciously sweet act of revenge. Getting a frankly terrible portrait made of me by a girl in a bar who “[doesn't] smoke, but I do smoke weed, because I'm an artist.” and showing it to people in the line at KFC at 4am. Sleeping on my floor again. Waking up with a numb shoulder and fear in my heart, realizing that everything was almost finished.

Listening to a history podcast about a Manson-like siege in a German village in the 1530s while lying sprawled on my rug-covered-with-fitted-sheet and waiting for 3:30am. Watching Germany win the World Cup. Getting drunk again, and again, and again, and again, and thinking my body was about to give up as I danced on the beer-soaked floor of the German club until 10am Monday morning – someone painted their flag on my face, and for a few hours I didn't care, I just wanted to be part of the celebrations.

In theory, I hate conga lines.

Seeing my fam – Mum, Dad, and Brother – off with a throbbing hangover and jittery from the shakes as we sipped coffee and prepared our goodbyes. Giving my Mum a Hug.

I found the best fucking laundromat in Melbourne that night, it has a cafe and phone chargers and a communal laptop and WiFi and Blackadder playing on the TV and a back yard smoking area and you take washing powder for a dollar a scoop, and you put the dollar because no one is looking and you don't want to feel like a bad person. I had a great conversation with my ex-girlfriend/divorced wife Rachel, and she is doing great. I had a solemn goodbye to Jess, who is having a hard time right now, but I know she's gonna pick it up, cos she a strong, modern lady. And boy, that chica can SING!

My last gig was on Tuesday night, my last night in Melbourne, and I had a good one. And then Oliver Clarke CRUSHED the room and closed by singing a frankly moving love song to a sandwich and I could not stop laughing. Then we went to Noodle Kingdom and acted out noisilly, and a busker played No Woman No Cry on the street so I sang along with him, and the homeless man next to us didn't quite know the words. Some guy in the toilets at Exford put his phone in his mouth to do up his fly, and I commented on the brilliance of his move, because I'm always scared if I try it the phone will fall out, to which he replied, “yeah man, I've got a pretty deep mouth.”

Of course you do...

This last week has been the best week of my life.

Now I'm sitting here on my bedroom floor, looking at the writing on the walls that Luka, Blake and I painted ourselves nine months ago, scrawled on a handful of drunken nights, messages to myself from these last frantic days in Melbourne. I'm sure I can be forgiven for feeling very, strangely scared. Out into the abyss again... just when it was all getting to feel comfortable.

Thankyou to everyone who has been a part of my life for the last two years, it's been amazing. Don't worry, I'm leaving already, I promise I'll stop talking about it soon.

And now I will quote from one of the great poets of our time, the inimitable Prodigy, of Mobb Deep: “To all my niggas: get the money, frontin' niggas: get deceased.”

Sorry for cursing.

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!"