I've Backed Myself Into A Corner

Today in the Gold Coast: sunny, sweaty brows, twerking womenz, and 1.5L of Ice Break sloshing around in my stomach. The sun woke me up at 5am, but I got to lie in bed until 6:40 which was seriously one of the highlights of the last few months for me after having either five hours of sober sleep, or nine hours of drunk blackout-time, seven days a week. Eight hours of sleep... yes, yes, and yesyes again.

We got to the field and set our shit up, then started pumping deep house out of the speakers and calling to people walking past. “Win $100”, “Come play the Ice Break game”, “when are you guys going to have sex?”. Real obnoxious shit. It's weird having the microphone and being in charge of bringing people over to the tent; the system is loud, and my voice is playing over fifty to a hundred people at a time. We had people coming back for repeat tries at winning the daily prize, and people hanging out and chatting for most of the day. We watched the games, I commentated poorly, and at the end of the day one team of girls twerked in unison when we put on a song called 'Ass” (actually I think it might be spelled 'A$$', I'm not sure).

I'm sitting in my room at the hotel right now drinking a sparkling red with a strawberry in, and in a second I'm going to go down to the pool and have another swim, and then I'm planning my set for tonight. I have a spot tonight at The Loft. That's kind of scary, none of these guys have seen me perform before, or know anything about what my comedy is about, but my gigs lately haven't been so good, as I've discussed previously, so I'll really need to pull it together to nail this one otherwise it's going to be an awkward morning. Pressure, pressure, FUCK, this is what I've gotten myself into.

Brad Oakes told me when I had lunch with him the other day that I should (or at least 'could') open with my 'room mate' joke – it's a good joke, but a little blue. I've got a good tag for it now, and then three more jokes involving my family, they're all a little risky and if they don't pay off then I might end up in a little bit of trouble, but I don't really have anything else to open with. This is frustrating. Once I get into it I can do my 'Girls' bit, and then the 'BrisTrain' story, and probably close with 'Herpes', I just need to get started. Eugh. It'll be fine, it'll be okay, I'm going to have a good gig.

Enough motivational self-talk, I'm off to have that swim.

Peace, Taco.

Evil Impulses

I'm not sure whether everyone has these mad impulses like I do.

When I was in primary school at BFPS in Adelaide we had a main road out the front of our school, and so every day after school I'd have to cross the road to get home. In year six we were trained as 'crossing guards' and we would have to stand two on each side of the road with a rope across the crossing and when the light went green we'd pull the rope back across and let everyone pass. After school the crossing was always PACKED for twenty minutes or so – maybe thirty or forty people (kids and adults) on the school-side of the street waiting to go home. I used to ride my bike. I used to wait out on the side of the crossing with my bike, along with all the other older kids who rode home. And I used to think:

“What if I pushed my bike out into the traffic?”

Sometimes when I'm in important situations with people I don't know very well who hold major decision-making power over my life – job interviews, meeting friends-of-friends, some sort of reviewer-interview (that one is made up I think... I don't know, I have a particular image of this one in my head, hopefully it will become clear) – I tune out to what the other person is saying. I have trouble maintaining concentration at the best of times, and often catch my mind wandering in the middle of a conversation in which I am having to do a lot of listening. Sometimes I think people can see it in my eyes. I'm sure they can, but no one ever says anything. Some of the time, when the window to my soul gets cloudy, this is because it is being spoken to by the most reckless part of my brain, and that deranged corner of me is urging, begging, pleading with the screaming laughter of an imagined possibility.

“Kiss them.”

Eugh. Sickness, that's what these thoughts feel like. When I catch them like butterflies in a net, I always reel back with horror, but also chuckle a little inside for a second, remembering that part of myself that still wants to start the fire that burns down the city. Self-destructive. What would the point of leaning in with eyes half-closed to kiss a bank manager accomplish? Absolutely nothing. I'd probably get thrown out of the bank, and maybe have to pay some sort of Kissing Fee.

Today while I was sitting next to the pool at our hotel and reading my book – 'Naked Lunch' by William S Burroughs who shares my birthday, and whose apparently seminal, beat-masterpiece is causing me no end of grief. My attention was failing, but I didn't want to flip ahead and see how long the current chapter had to go, because that would just be shamelessly displaying my urge to finish the book like a chore. I should be enjoying it as an activity in and of itself. I am glad that I am able to read books. I like reading. I like that I bought this book. I am happy with myself. I am happy. I am a good person.

“Throw it in the water”

FUCK OFF! FUCK! FUCK! NO!! PLEASE! I DON'T WANT TO THROW IT IN THE WATER. I had to stop. I let out a quiet sob, caught myself, and went back to peacefully reading. No one saw.

I don't know what these thoughts mean, if anything. Anything? Probably not. They are just brief flashes of madness that should not be indulged or pursued, and to be honest, should probably not be given any more thought than absolutely necessary. Writing some six-hundred words about some perverted desires to act like an insane person is probably not a good way of dealing with those perverted desires... at least I haven't tried to kiss anyone though.

Peace, Taco.

Gold Coast: First Impressions

This morning I got up at 4am after a five-hour sleep and caught a cab to Southern Cross Station, a bus to the airport, a plane to the Gold Coast, a $70 taxi to the rugby field, and now am back at the hotel at 2:22. Our massive inflatable thingy that people throw rugby balls through to win money while we yell at them through the PA system fell down – the wind was fucking with it and it wasn't inflated at a high pressure, so we packed up shop at about one. Here I am now, wondering what to do.

I tried to contact a guy about a gig on the Gold Coast that's going on tomorrow, but he hasn't gotten back to me and I'm not holding out high hopes for my chances of getting up, although maybe if I just bring the whole crew from this job and tell the guy I've brought people he might be lenient. MAYBE. That's the plan from where I stand right now anyway.

What else? It's hot up here. I have to keep re-tying my hair, and my body feels sweaty. The people I'm working with are dope, and there are heaps of students playing the actual sports around the place as well, so no shortage of faces to meet and adventures to get up to no doubt. Richie has been down here for a few weeks now so I might link up with him on Wed and do something, and also my mate Michael is down here playing ping pong (OF ALL THINGS) and we said we'd do something one afternoon as well.

I think me and the girls I'm staying with are about to head out for some lunch after the early finish today. I can hear birds outside, although I'm not sure that they specifically remind me of nature as much as they just remind me of birds making noises. This place feels very nice, that's for certain, but there's also a white, bricky plastic-ness to the buildings set against a clear blue sky that is slightly disconcerting. Like, does it really look that nice? Is this scene being rendered by the GTA: Vice City engine? Is Ke$ha about to jump out from behind a palm tree and start sing-raping passers by? Who can tell really, anything could happen, it's only Monday.

Undecided. Eyes open. Ready to make something happen. Gold Coast, you're all right.

Peace, Taco.

Gold Coast Pre-Departure

I'm going to the Gold Coast tomorrow for this Uni Games thing, and I'm super excited about it. It's still not really sunk in that the thing I'm going to do in order to earn $1000 is something that I would probably do for free if I wound up in the place anyway, and didn't have anything on that afternoon. Being the centre of attention? Yes please. Talking to people? Holding a microphone? WEARING A PROMOTIONAL T-SHIRT!!! All great stand-alone activities, this week is going to be great.

Today I'm running a pretty tight schedule – the fact that I've still remembered to write this is pretty impressive of itself. After I finish writing I'm going to head off to the laundromat and do my washing, most of the clothes I'm taking away are still dirty, and I think I need to buy a new pair of socks as well. Then I'll be heading straight to Little Hunter to clean there for a couple hours and finish working for the week, then to the Melbourne Central Lion to MC the 100% Nuts show there, after which I'm doing '36 Hours' again. I'm not too confident that there'll even be an audience for the second show, and to be honest I'm kind of hoping there isn't, as much as I want to do the show, because I'd like to get as much sleep as possible ahead of my 6:10am flight tomorrow morning.

My fingers and hands aren't working very well today, they feel sluggish and non-responsive, so I think I might leave this post here – another short one. I need to find some time to squeeze in some meditation today as well, maybe once I get to the laundromat. New setlist tonight. New jokes. Writing. Reading. Errands. Life. Busy, busy, busy.

Peace, Taco.

Too Inebriation

Late night blog huh... okay, not even late night, it's 5:18am on the day after. Nope, actually I can't write this. I'm pretty drunk.

How did HST do it? All those years, drunk out of his mind on Wild Turkey and disgusting drug-cocktails. He didn't think they were disgusting, but that's not what made him able to do it. Drugs effect the mind, change people's bodies and brain cells from normal, functioning organs into distant relatives of the status quo. I can't take drugs – or drink – and write normally. Look at this. This gibberish. What am I talking about?

If nothing else, this post will serve as a warning to the future versions of me who wistfully fancy that they might be able to live out their life (my fucking life, more like it) as a high-functioning substance abuser. No chance. My body and mind cannot take such incursions on a weekly basis, let alone hour after hour, day after day, as long as my eyes are open.

No thankyou.

I'm feeling really tired now. I was feeling really tired before too, but I am now also. Not more so, just tired. Still tired. Still writing. Still tired. I don't want to do this again. Writing late-night notes is a bad idea.

I think I'm done now.

Peace, Taco.

Impregnated With Wonder

I love thinking about the future. I just read an article about Japan's K Computer that, in August, took forty minutes to simulate one second of human brain activity. (http://io9.com/this-computer-took-40-minutes-to-simulate-one-second-of-1043288954) It wasn't actually organized to simulate human brain function, just the volume of processing power, or at least that's what I understand from the article. Fuck man, I love this shit.

Before I was reading this article, I was reading something else from Reddit about how the Curiosity Rover just found water molecules on Mars – the estimate now is that about two pints of liquid water in every cubic foot of Martian soil (fuck off with your dumb imperial measurements, NASA, why change it to stupid-metres for the press release?). (http://gizmodo.com/nasas-curiosity-rover-just-found-water-in-martian-soil-1403908591) Apparently a manned mission to Mars is still a long way off because the levels of cosmic radiation astronauts would be exposed to would give them an untenable risk of developing cancer, so they either need to develop better radiation shields, or make the journey faster. One commenter suggested hijacking an asteroid and building habitation inside it before propelling it as a makeshift spacecraft to Mars and disembarking there. Fuck yes, I love that shit.

One of my favourite Reddit stories is the one about the guy who played a game of Civilization II for over ten years, and go to a point reminiscent of the global political situation in Orwell's '1984' (I should get make a tattoo-tally on my ass for each time I reference that fucking book IT'S SO GOOD!). (http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_playing_the_same_game_of_civilization_ii/)In the game there were three civilizations vying for global dominance, stuck in a state of eternal war with extremely advanced technologies and democracy having failed. Scary, foreboding stuff. Civilization, as a simulation, may be flawed though, and we have no way or knowing whether that guy's game is a scary omen of things to come, or just a curiosity with no bearing on the real world. Well... we have no way, right now... (cue music – DUN DUN DUNNNNNNN)

Moore's Law states that “the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every 18-24 months. This means that processing power doubles in that time for a machine of the same size. This means that the K Computer capable in forty minutes of processing an amount of data equivalent to that processed by the human brain in one second, will be able to do the calculations of a human brain, in real-time, in roughly twenty-two years. Two human brains two years after that. Four two years after that... in sixty-six years, a computer capable of simulating the operation of eight and a half billion human brains in real time will be as large as the K Computer is now. That's assuming Moore's Law holds, which it probably won't according to the current theories. Growth may increase at an increasing rate, making the time even shorter. It could do that, or alternatively, the time span could be reduced, so it could simulate an entire human lifetime in the blink of an eye, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of human lifetimes...

So what does any of this wild posturing by a twenty-two year old comedian who dropped out of first-year university physics to 'study' goon in Adelaide actually mean? Well, what it means, is that whenever a computer exists that is powerful enough to simulate a human life in the blink of an eye and retain all of the information accumulated over that life for analysis, we essentially would have the data available to predict the future. Run simulations on the past. Recreate events, or see how events are going to play out.

Suddenly Sid Meier's 'Civilization II' becomes the ancestor of a real-life program that could be used to determine the trajectory of current world events, with every reasonably possible variable accounted for. World Peace talks taking a sour turn? Run the simulation, see where this chain of events is leading us. Nuclear War imminent? Run the simulation. Climate Change Sceptics still busy talking about how the entire solar system is heating up and 'historical variance' and bullshit, bullshit, unfounded, rhetorical bullshit? Run the simulation. Oh look, your house was swarmed with angry, starving climate-refugees and while you were busy taking a shit. Unlucky for that Mr Bolt, lucky for you, here in the real world, that it was just a simulation, now how about those solar panels?

AGH! There's no way of telling what the future will bring, I know that. I'm not banking on any of this happening, but it's so much fun to speculate, just for now, while we run around on errands and the world spins.

I've been listening to Pete Holmes' album this week, it's called 'Impregnated With Wonder'.

Peace, Taco.

Comedy Musings 002

I've been feeling like the last week or two have constituted a relative drop in the quality of my gigs, which is super frustrating... I guess the fact that it's happened during Fringe time isn't really that terrible, and if anything could be seen as a bonus as now more than ever, no one important is watching my sets. This decline in quality may even be because of the fact that it's Fringe time, but whatever it is, I'm going to work through it... NOW.

So first of all I want to say before I get anything else out here; Melbourne Fringe kinda sucks. Well, I don't know how much money they have to work with or what kind of angle they're going for with it, but as far as comedy is concerned, I see little to no point of putting a show on outside of one of the truly established venues. Even though we (Line Up Comedy) are at the Portland – a venue at the heard of festival comedy in Melbourne – very few if any people are aware of our existence. Flyering the streets before shows we might as well be flyering for a regular, stand-alone, ticketed showcase. No one I've talked to knows that the fringe is on, or even what it is. The bars in Fitzroy are conspicuously lacking any Fringe promo posters or even guides, and the laundromat I go to every week, with it's full wall of free promo material, magazines and give-aways, has nothing either. Today on the 109 tram I saw a lonely A5 poster for the Melbourne Fringe in one of the frames on the wall, and rather than assuage my pessimism, it only served to make me feel sorry for the people staking some sort of reputation or hope on this lonely, forgotten carnival. Never mind though...

In the month or so leading up to the Fringe I promised myself I'd stop writing so much and concentrate on making the material I have work well so that I could consolidate a strong ten-minute set. The bits I was thinking of including in the set at the time were:

• Girls: about how I'm never going to pick up doing comedy
  
• Dog: a pun that turns into a rant at the audience about living lives devoid of wonder
  
• Anal: story about writing a bit on the tram and having a girl see the word 'anal' in my notebook
  
• News: “I don't like the news” going into a political bit
  
• Herpes: fabricated story about a friend's new girlfriend, that ends with a strong, jokey punchline
  
• BrisTrain: story about a train billboard in Brisbane that pretends to be intellectual before ending with a dick joke
  

Of those bits, I still do all except the 'News' one, which I had to drop after I tried doing it post-election and discovered that it was only really floating along with the political maelstrom leading up to September 7. 'Girls' is now my opener, after Beau Stegmann and Brad Oakes both said it's a good joke – I trust their judgement and sort of understand their reasoning, but I think I'm still trying to come to a complete agreement with them within myself. 'Dog' and 'Anal' I feel are fairly similar, in that they contain parts that I like very much, but neither ever really fleshed out to become a solid bit to rely on. 'Herpes' started out as my best joke, but lately has been receiving diminishing returns, possibly in part, I've been thinking, due to the fact that I've been getting a bit vague with the setup, or partly because I'm sick of it, or partly because it's a bit blue for no reason, or maybe all of the above. 'BrisTrain' started as a silly idea I had – it took me two months from writing it down before I even tried it – but I'm growing to like it more and more with time and I think it provides a welcome respite for audiences amidst a lot of my rather intense attitudes/jokes/subjects.

So the reason why my gigs have been a bit shit lately though, I still can't quite put my finger on it. I mean, my expectations haven't taken a sudden jump upwards... I don't think they have. They are constantly rising as I continue to improve, but never in big jumps, they just rise to meet my last ten or so gigs and where they have left me. It's possible that not writing so much has left my act slightly stale, although the reason I wanted to stop writing was because I wanted to figure out how to perform more effectively, without the crutch of having new bits to invigorate me. The situation with 'Herpes' is the most interesting, I think, because it's been, and continues to be, a reliable bit, although I think it was working better as a three-and-a-half minute bit with a long lead-in, rather than just a quick one-and-half-minute thing out of nowhere. Launching in to a story about “my friend's new girlfriend” might shock some people and appear bitter and pointless. Maybe that's it?

Also I've been focussing on writing my show – although 'focussing' really is a generous way to term it. I've been thinking about the show a lot, but only in the last few days have I come to some conclusions about what is to be done to resurrect what only a week ago seemed to me to be the flailing carcass of a good idea executed with not enough skill and experience behind it. I just need to work at the thing, and I finally have some ideas for where to start.

So yesterday and today I've written some new jokes, and I'm trying to bridge the gap between my 'material' material and my 'show' material, by writing observational bits specifically for my show. It needs to be funnier, and I need to be working on it week in week out during my spots or the months will fly by and I'll find myself all of a sudden at the Adelaide Fringe with the same show I have right now, and it'll suck, and I'll be embarrassed. And fuck that. Fuck that right off.

Peace, Taco.