52 Days: 2018

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

The End

        I had tickets to a music festival over New Years, but after that Christmas bender the thought of going away and partying again for another few days made me sick. I ended up working a glassy shift at The Workers on New Years Eve and having a few drinks before the year changed, so if you want to be pedantic, I guess I failed the challenge. Rach came to meet me at The Workers after midnight. We went home together, and it took me another month to break up with her.
        No one was mad at me for being a fuckhead, they were all used to it, but it felt like the whole point of going to Melbourne was to be different to who I was before I'd left. Going on a 4 day bender, sleeping with an ex, insecurity and paranoia – that wasn't different, it was exactly the same. I committed to Melbourne, and threw myself into stand up, and it was only five years later that I went back for Christmas 2017 and could finally see my hometown with different eyes.
        You've got to go away to come back.

Day 52 - December 25th

        In the three days from when I got to Adelaide I'd managed to catch up with all of the main groups of people in my life: The Lost Boys, The Melbourne Boys, Phil, and my family. I got home to my parents' empty house from Phil's housewarming on the morning of Christmas Eve and went to sleep. When I woke up I could barely move.
        My family had all gone down to our holiday house in Marion Bay, a three-hour drive from Adelaide. I'd planned to head down there with Lucy and Phil, but after his housewarming, Phil decided he wanted to stay in Adelaide and spend Christmas with his family. Lucy didn't want to go just the two of us after we'd slept together two nights earlier, she said it'd be weird.
        I spent Christmas Day 2012 alone on a couch at my parents' place watching movies on my laptop. At one point I spilled my pint glass full of water across the keyboard, and thought it might be broken. That would have been so perfectly awful, I'm laughing at the memory of my terror as I write this.
        I stayed on that couch for 36 hours. Every now and then I'd try to vomit into a bucket, and I kept up a few conversations with people online with people I'd barely spoken to before or since. The kind of people who are up for an earnest chat while they sit in the bored haze of Christmas, I told them I was sad, and we talked vaguely about life, and adjustments.
        My parents' mate Fitzy came by in the afternoon with some food from his place and I meekly thanked him. Also Lucy came by, but I was upset with her for not wanting to come to Marion Bay, and upset with myself for putting partying ahead of my family. I cried bitter, lonely tears after she left. I can't exactly recall when, but I remember the sobbing being painful.

The next day my younger cousin Ian drove us up to Marion Bay, and I spent a night with him and the rest of my family before we jumped back in his car and drove back. Twenty-minutes into the return journey I realised I'd left the DVD of 'Community' my Mum had got me for Christmas back at the place, and after enduring a few minutes of my sulking Ian turned the car around and we drove back to get it in silence. When we finally spoke again he asked me about comedy, and what I thought my plan might be. I tried to sound serious, talked about what I saw as my flaws – selfishness, lack of control and direction. We hugged when he dropped me off, and I caught the bus back to Melbourne the next day.

Click here to read the last part - The End

Day 51 - December 23rd

        Phil had just moved into a new place and this night was his housewarming. I had a great chat with James (Brodie's brother) about how I thought I might have to break up with Rachel when I got back to Melbourne. She'd come back from her trip just in time for us to have one quick catch-up at my place before I left, but even after just that it was clear, if I was honest with myself, that I wasn't in it the same as I was before she left. I padded around Phil's backyard in the afternoon, thinking about what I'd have to do when I got back to Melboune. I drank by myself for the most part while everyone else was busy organising things for the party, making plans and calling people to see where they were at. I didn't want to wait.
        I was was tired from two days of partying, and at one point I passed out on a couch. When I woke up someone had drawn all over my face in black marker. I was feeling insecure after the gum thing, and took the drawing as another attempt at specifically and deliberately disrespecting me, so I got all upset and stumbled around the party asking people if they'd done it. Nobody knew anything.
        I was sure it was Brodie, but no one else seemed to care. I let it ruin my night, and went to sleep unfulfilled.

Click here to read the next part - Day 52 - December 25th

Monday, July 30, 2018

Day 50 - December 22nd

        I went straight from Jake's place to Family Christmas at Mum and Dad's. One of the guys must have driven me, or maybe Mum even picked me up from that zoo hahaha... Jesus.
        I'd pretty much been up all night, and was definitely still drunk. Years later my cousin Kate told me that she thought I was a dickhead for ages based on my performance at that family Christmas, but I honestly thought I was killing it. I was high on confidence after my Big Move, I guess everyone else just sat back and let me have my moment.
        After dinner I went out to the bar where Phil was working and from there went back to my good friend Lucy's place – we dated for a while in 2009, I'm not sure if that's important, or adds context? Anyway, we had sex, which was stupid, because I was still technically with Rach, who had returned to Melbourne a few days before I left for Adelaide. Lucy dropped me at Phil's in the morning on her way to work in the city.

Click here to read the next part - Day 51 - Day 23

Day 49 - December 21st

        When I first moved to Melbourne I kept going back – back home to Adelaide – I think I took that nine-hour Greyhound three times each way in the first six months after I left. What it probably was, was that I wanted all my friends to congratulate me on how well I was doing, it's like that kid who keeps coming back to his old primary school in the first few weeks of the new year after they've started high school. Super lame. Just move on, the library still looks the same, stop trying to act like you're nostalgic already.
        I went back for Christmas, as did most of the guys from Melbourne, but my first port of call was Sam and The Lost Boys. Sam and Jake's birthdays both fall in the days around Christmas, so we went to some club night and took a bunch of drugs together to celebrate, just like the old days. Some fuck called Jon Cenzato put gum in my hair while pretending to give me a friendly head massage and I was furious – in my fucking HAIR dude... One of the girls went at it for half an hour trying her best to fix it while I sat there stewing. Eventually she had to cut a chunk of my hair out.
        I made Cenzato buy me a bunch of drinks to make up for it, but I didn't forgive him in my heart, I just took the drinks out of spite. I didn't even know him that well, but most of all I felt like he was doing it as a way to intentionally disrespect me... I mean who knows really. It's a weird thing to think about, dumb power dynamics and whatever.
        The next day we went back to Jake's place to keep partying. That afternoon while Jon Cenzato sat in a deck chair in the sun talking to someone I came up behind him, pulled him down off the chair and laid a couple knees into his ribs, screaming, “THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR PUTTING GUM IN MY FUCKING HAIR!!”.
        It's wild to remember that. I'm laughing because he deserved it, but also because that's such a psycho thing to do – I waited for like twelve hours until he was convinced I'd forgiven him, and then dropped him on the floor out of nowhere. I really wanted to fuck him up. I didn't, because I don't fight and didn't know how, but man. I really wanted to see him cry, to properly hurt him.
        I'm pretty sure everyone laughed at the time, no one really liked him that much.

Click here to read the next part - Day 50 - December 22nd

Day 48 - December 1st

Another one of the nights where I felt like I'd spent a drinking day and had nothing exceptional to show for it. I was saving up a run of days for the trip back to Adelaide over Christmas, and knew that this was the last night I'd be able to drink until then.

Click here to read the next part - Day 49 - December 21st

Day 47 - November 23rd

When I first started working at Yah Yah's I was avoiding drinking at work because it seemed like a waste of a drinking day. I think this falsely endeared me to the management, as if me not drinking was an indication that I was approaching my position as a glassy with the seriousness that the station warranted. Little did they know I would have drank every drop of alcohol in that bar if I could have figured out a way to do so and not lose the dumb bet I'd made with myself almost a year earlier. I hated it by this point, but I was so close, and I couldn't figure out a loophole to escape through.
I don't remember what I did on this night, but it probably involved Pony, which was a club in the city owned by the same people as Yah Yah's that opened until... I want to say 7am? We would finish work at 5am, drink a few free pints there, and then head over to Pony for the last half an hour or so. Whenever one of us got any romantic ('romantic') interest from anyone over the bar during the night, we'd swap numbers with them, and then tell them to head over to Pony to meet us there after we finished. That bar has changed hands now, but it's still called Boney, in what I assume is a nod to the former late-night institution. Boney is a lot nicer, but it took years for the smell of piss to seep away from the rear wall of the dance floor that backs onto the toilet.

Click here to read the next part - Day 48- December 1st

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Day 46 - November 20th

James was like a softer, gentler version of Brodie, whose parents he shared. He lived with us for a while as he mulled over the idea of living in Melbourne and becoming a DJ like his big brother. Brodie was a horrid mess of lies, and from what I can tell is still wallowing around in the same kind of existence now that we had back then. I've not heard anything from James in years, but I'd guess that he's doing a little better – I liked having him around whenever he stayed with us. It actually took me a while to figure out what happened on this day when I read the card initially, probably because nothing noteworthy happened at all. We got some beers, and settled in to drinking them in the sun at our house in Richmond. It was sedentary and brilliant.

PS Brodie if you ever read this, fuck you you never paid me the $400 bond that you owed me. You told me to get it off of your little brother who only lived in my room for a couple of months before everyone moved out of the place. You owe me my bond you dirty little cunt, don't make me tell everyone about the time at Phil's place when you were strung out on ice, shit yourself, then walked your own shit on your bare feet through the house and crawled into bed with your girlfriend without taking a shower. I don't want to describe your pathetic life to people, but I will unless you send $400 in cash in an envelope addressed to Aidan 'Taco' Jones to 150 Capel St, North Melbourne, VIC 3051. It's my old address, so don't bother turning up yourself, just send the money. You can list the return address as 'A Worthless Piece of Shit'.
Cheers.

Click here to read the next part - Day 47 - November 23rd

Friday, July 27, 2018

Day 45 - November 8th

Working as a walking tour guide for Peek Tours in Melbourne was one of the best jobs I've ever had. I would rock up to Federation Square at around 9:45, collect however many tourists were waiting there for me, give them a 2.5hr tour around Melbourne in which I got to tell great stories from history, and then pick out the cool people and take them out for lunch. We always went to this Chinese place I'd picked because it was cheap and empty, and some days if there was still life in the crew, we'd go to a bar and get to drinking. One of these days ended up getting me fired from Yah Yah's in January 2013 after midday drinks lasted all the way through until my shift started at midnight. I showed up drunk, passed out on a couch in the pub, and woke up to my manager firing/kicking me with his foot.

The best tour I ever had was November 8th, 2012 – Cameron was a girl from New York (Westchester, even!), and after lunch we dropped her friends back at the hostel and went to explore the city together. As we walked through Federation Square the projectors showed Barack Obama delivering his victory speech upon winning re-election to the US Presidency and we beamed together with pride – I was really hoping we'd sleep together later. I'd met this English comedian Aaron the week before who worked at a bar in Prahran, so that seemed as good a destination as any. When we got there he asked how we knew each other, and we sheepishly locked eyes before explaining we'd met that day.
“We're... yeah we're getting along pretty well!” We nervously confirmed each other's suspicions. The next day we walked the streets holding hands and kissing on street corners, then she left to continue her travels. She told me she was considering coming back to Melbourne, and I told her I hoped she did, but she didn't. I sent her a few Facebook messages over the following months to replies of diminishing length and interest until she finally stopped altogether. The clean break after the fling has never been a strong suit of mine.

In December, when Rach came back from her trip overseas, she told me there was a point when our communication dropped off from almost daily emails, to sparse, limited chat. She said she felt like I'd started to become distant towards her. I couldn't admit it to her or myself at the time, but that day with Cameron was definitely the day that did it.

Click here to read the next part - Day 46 - November 20th

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Day 44 - October 30th

        A bit more detail on Leon:
        From what I could tell he spent most of his time alone in bars trying to meet people and sell them mushrooms. He'd roll joints and ask people nearby to borrow papers or tobacco off them as a way of striking up conversations, then he'd try and make sales to the guys, and have sex with the girls. I didn't necessarily like him, but he wasn't bad company and I was in a new city, so he was fine. He was one of those friends who you only ever see one-on-one because you know if you introduced them to other people they'd probably embarrass you. He was filler, like a summer fling, without the passion – or the fucking. I promise we didn't fuck.
        He met Rach once when she came to pick me up from his house, and the three of us went out to the park nearby to kick a football. When we got there I remember him making some derisive remark about girls not being able to play sport. Rach and I both hated it, but when she pulled him up on the comment he got indignant. He was only joking, of course; “Jeez Taco, you're a comedian, right? You know that was a joke!”
        I hadn't spent enough time thinking about – or being in, for that matter – these kinds of situations at that stage to know that I needed to stand up for my girlfriend, so I laughed half-heartedly and said we had to go.

        On the day on this card we went out to the beach at St Kilda to meet this girl I knew from back in Adelaide – she worked in the strip club above Red Square while I was working behind the bar there. She spent half of her time in Melbourne but had to keep going back home because she was on bail for I thiiiiiiink assaulting someone or something? (Exciting!) I may be getting that story all wrong, but she had to keep going back to Adelaide to report to the police back there for some reason, so she'd dance in Melbourne where she could make more money, then make the trip back home to report a few times a month. It sounded like an insane existence, but then again I love that shit.
        We took mushrooms on the jetty at St Kilda and sat there all day drinking – at one point a fight broke out on the beach and I recall the far-away image of a huge Lebanese guy swinging wildly into another guy's head on the sand beneath him. We were stuck out on the end of the jetty until the cops came and the crowd dispersed.
        Back at my Adelaide friend's flat near the beach we were settling in for an evening of drinking, and all seemed well, but quicker than my mushroom-brain could keep up with, something happened between Pocky and Leon that ended in them yelling at each other and calling each other stupid. I thought maybe they were about to fuck maybe? I had no idea what was happened, and didn't realise that anything seriously wrong had happened until we were out on the street holding beers with a door being slammed in our faces.

That was the kind of crap that came with hanging out with Leon, he thought he was so fucking smart with his hallucinogenics and podcasts and opinions, always justifying everything with a speech too long and tiring to come back at. I only saw him a few times after that, I'd started to make better friends in the city, and the mushrooms he'd picked in April were running out, so the friendship reached a natural conclusion. I've met so many more people like him in the years since. There's no arguing with these dirtbags, they're always right, and they'll rattle off all the reasons why and if you can't refute their dissertation point-by-point then you must, by rights, concede defeat and forfeit your opinion, because logic.
Just because you're technically right, doesn't mean people have to like you, or listen, or spend time with you, and it doesn't even really make any difference to anything. You can scream, “Ad Hominem!” all you want, but at the end of the day if your Correct Opinion doesn't have a likeable person to espouse it, then it's of no use to anyone. I hope one day all of those people can find an island to all go to be right together forever, and while they're busy being right, we can all stay here and be happy.

Click here to read the next part - Day 45 - November 8th

Day 43 - October 23

        Around this time I'd been doing a lot of drinking to the point of blackout, and I thought it would be funny to record myself talking into my phone while drunk and then transcribe the recording later. I thought maybe those blanks in my memory contained some hidden genius, as if my drunken brilliance had somehow forced the brain to malfunction, leaving behind missing patches like the momentary spots of dead vision that come from looking directly into the sun. Basically this was my last, desperate attempt to write stuff without having to do any work.
        I'd only taken a quarter bar of Xanax on this night, but it was still relaxing enough to make me drop an entire pint of cider on the floor of Bar Open where I was drinking – I remember having the glass in my hand, and the next second feeling it slip away and down onto the floor. I grabbed my bag and made for the exit as soon as the I felt the liquid splash onto my shoes. It was late, and my night was definitely finished.
        I started recording somewhere along Brunswick St – I don't have the recording, or transcription (which I did make eventually) – but for some reason I remember everything. I guess maybe the time spent transcribing the recording must have burned those meaningless events into my memory alongside Pythagoras' Theorem and the one phrase I know in Japanese. (“Boku wa ottokonoko ga daisuki desu yo.” – “I like little boys.”)
        At some point on my way home I started walking and chatting to a dishevelled stranger, who was, of course, out walking his dog at 2 in the morning. We talked about whatever, and he gave me an orange, which I put in my pocket.
        I'm almost certain I ate that orange in the morning. I don't have a memory of it, but if I look inside myself, it feels like something I would have done, a logical way to end the story. To throw it in the bin would have been callous and ungrateful. Also I found no trace of it in my room when I woke up, just half a Maxibon melting in a pint glass next to my laptop.

Click here to read the next part - Day 44 - October 30th

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Day 42 - October 18th

I'd met Camila at The Workers one night, she was Venezuelan and always very excited about something. She kept talking about getting a “bed base” in this giggly accent, I barely understood what she was talking about, but I let her pull me by the hand out of the pub and onto a tram We rode it down Smith Street for a while until we were near her house. She took us to some pallets on the street, and told me to help her carry them back to her room.
When we went out later that week she was a little less excited. We kissed a few times in between me refusing to do karaoke. When we got back to her room we were still kissing, and into her bed, still kissing, I was on top of her, still kissing... and then she locked up all of a sudden. She told me to stop, I rolled off her, and she went to sleep.

       I thought about that night for weeks, maybe months afterwards. It really fucked me up. What did I do? Where did I go wrong? I remember talking to Sean about it one morning and unloading about how shitty the rejection had made me feel. It made me feel like she didn't like me, like I was a shitty, boring person. Sean told me that was crazy, and that I should be thinking of it in the opposite terms, that I would probably never know why she had to stop, but whatever her reason was was probably very valid, and that it's a credit to just how cool she thought I was that she'd let it get that far. I appreciated the logic, and tried to agree with it, but I could help still feeling like garbage.
        I wanted to ask her, and I probably did, but she either wouldn't, or couldn't tell me. In hindsight, it's not impossible that she didn't even know why herself. In all probability she just realised she'd lost the feeling, and decided it was time to stop. I was young, my ego was tied up in these kind of things.
        Rach and I had agreed that we were allowed to see other people while she was away. I mean, I'd agreed to it at least, because I didn't want a repeat of what had happened with Mélanie, where I made a commitment that I couldn't keep when faced with choices in the moment. I knew Rach didn't want me to, but I wasn't so sure of myself, so I just did what felt natural. I remember wishing I could talk to her about how sad and confused I was over this thing that had happened with Camilla, but obviously I couldn't tell her, so I held onto it.

In the morning Camila didn't put socks on. Instead she dusted her feet with talcum powder before slipping them into her brown brogues. She told me her house back in Venezuela had a tennis court, so I trusted that she knew what she was doing with the no socks thing as well – she seemed to be of reputable breeding. We shared a muted breakfast somewhere, and she never replied to my texts.

Click here to read the next part - Day 43 - October 23

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Day 41 - October 10th

This card was the only bit of information in the deck that I've had to censor, but I can tell you that it was a name there, before all the 'hahaha's. The name belongs to a person who I kissed that night, who isn't really around comedy any more, but who I thought might not want to be reminded of some very poor decisions they made six years ago. I know I don't, and yet somehow here I am.

Station 59 was the first place in Melbourne where I felt at home. It was a shitty pub in Richmond that survived because the owner, a fireman at the station across the road, offered discounts to his fireman buddies, and filled the six rooms upstairs with illegal lodgers who paid him rent in cash. The pub had an open mic comedy night every Wednesday, and the 40 year old man who ran it used to hold court to groups of mesmerized open mic comics, usually 20 years his junior, in the beer garden after the show every week. I was immediately in love with his “band-of-rejects-against-the-world” rhetoric, especially after he gave me my first gig in Melbourne on my second day in the city.
Eventually us new comics started doing other open mics, which is what you need to do to get better, and we realised that our beloved leader wasn't the revolutionary figure we thought he was. It took me about a year to figure this out though, and in October 2012 I was still well and truly enamoured.

        The Aristocrats night that I'm talking about here was a night of comedy where every comic would come on stage and have three minutes (if I remember correctly) to tell their own, ideally improvised version of the classic 'Aristocrats' joke. The basic structure is a family walk into a talent agent's office with an act to show the agent, he tells them to go for it, and they proceed to do the most awful, heinous things imaginable to each other. When they finish, the agent says, “what do you call this act?!”, to which they reply, “The Aristocrats!”
        The point of the joke is for the comedian to improvise the bits in the middle, filling it with the most awful things they can think of, before hitting the ready-made punchline at the end.
        I'm absolutely sure that of the 30-or-so 'comics' who performed on that night, we wouldn't have had ten minutes of material between us. There was barely a scrap of actual comedy on that stage all night, just a bunch of whatever the opposite of performative woke-ness is – all racial slurs and sexist crap and naughty words that excite young morons. Offensiveness for the sake of being offensive, raging against the machine we imagined was trying to shut us down, but wasn't.
        But it wasn't about the offensiveness per se, that stuff was just a ritual, like a secret handshake, to prove your membership to the club. That night was about the community that we were a part of, and I remember it being one of the happiest nights of my life up until that point because I knew that night that I loved stand up and I had found a bunch of people who loved it too. People who I could share it with. I was sure we would be going on this journey together for years to come, and I finally felt like I belonged somewhere.

I've not seen most of those people in years. A couple of them are dead now, and most of the rest of them have quit comedy. The leader figure still runs his open mic room, giving hope and outrage – and to be fair, some meaningful outlet – to his entourage of losers, drug addicts and borderline homeless people who congregate around him. The venue is different now though, Station 59 the pub is long gone.
I did a split show in the 2013 Melbourne Comedy Festival at Station 59 with the inimitable Rob Caruana, we called it 'Two For The Price Of Free'. A friend of mine saw the poster for that show on Facebook in April 2018 after I posted it nostalgically as part of the promotion for my show in that year's festival. He took his group of friends to Station 59, having read the 5-year-old poster and thinking it was current. I was bummed that they didn't make it to my show that night, but because of his mistake, I can now confirm that Station 59 has been converted into a Mexican restaurant.

Click here to read the next part - Day 42 - October 18th

Monday, July 23, 2018

Day 40 - October 8th

One thing doing this challenge taught me was to appreciate drinking without getting absolutely trashed. I noticed around this point in the year, when the end was in sight and my drinking days were getting close to single figures, that by the nature of the challenge I'd set myself, I felt like I'd wasted a day if I drank, but didn't drink to oblivion. I'd told myself that the move to Melbourne would change me, but my mindset was still essentially the same. I'd found an analogous group of mates to get fucked up with, and a girl to spend time thinking about, the only difference was the names on the street signs.
Also I had nothing to aim for. When I was in Adelaide I could point myself towards the goal of leaving for greener pastures, but now I was in those pastures and didn't know what to do with myself. Comedy. Just do comedy.

        I had a drink that night because I'd just met Shayne Hunter, a comic from Brisbane who'd come to Melbourne to do gigs for the week. I was excited at the prospect of hanging out with him because he was a good comedian. I'd seen him kill it at a couple of open mics where I'd bombed my ass off, and I guess I thought if I hung around him some of that might rub off on me. I didn't realise that he didn't drink, or at least that he wasn't drinking that night, so I bought a beer, then stood next to him drinking it and feeling stupid.
        I drank blindly, committing to the hope of a wild adventure – I knew that even one beer counted as a day, and I wasn't about to cheat myself and ignore it, as badly as I wanted to. We caught a tram to somewhere vague with this girl Shayne was seeing, walked around a little searching for some party or something, then headed to The Workers when we couldn't find anything. After half an hour there we called it quits.
        It wasn't drinking that made this night a failure, it was the pressure that I put on it because I was drinking. For me now, a couple beers with a new friend after a gig sounds great, but in 2012 it wasn't enough. Because of the challenge, and the limits I'd put on myself, I was always desperately swinging for the fences.

Click here to read the next part - Day 41 - October 10th

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Day 39 - September 26th

        After we'd been seeing each other for a couple months, Rachel went away on a trip to Europe. We were at The Workers when she told me, it was the same night one of her friends brashly referred to me as “Rachel's New Boyfriend” while on the phone to someone, telling them where we were. We laughed and made eyes at each other, pretending to be mad but secretly loving the shit out of it.
        She insisted she'd told me before that she was going away, but I didn't remember ever hearing about it, and I was devastated. That night I held her tight on the dancefloor next to the bar in the band room. I thought about Mélanie, and what had happened to us when our growing romance had been interrupted by distance. I still didn't really understand that the actual reason it didn't work out was a little more complicated than time difference, I just saw a pattern that seemed to fit. I was scared. I felt like I could already see the inevitable end.
        One night – and maybe it was this one I'm not sure – we went back to her parents' place and sat in her bed screaming with laughter at everything either of us said while my phone sat next to us recording. I sent her the file and would listen to it every now and then while she was away, as well as the folder of music homework she gave me. This 19 year old girl from Melbourne was the first person to make me actually listen to The Rolling Stones – until then they were just a band I knew the name of.

Leon was this guy I used to hang out with because he sold me mushrooms – the one from the hostel I mentioned before – we got chatting over beers one night and he seemed confident. He was a couple years older than me and spent his time reading self-improvement books and listening to the Joe Rogan Podcast. As I threw myself further into comedy we started seeing a lot less of each other, but for a while there we were fairly close. I sometimes think of him as similar to the guys I used to hang out with in Adelaide, but he wasn't. The Lost Boys were all sad, but only temporarily, and we all had good hearts. Those boys and the ones I took drugs with when I moved to Melbourne were of a similar breed, but Leon was different. He was an arrogant, friendless douche, and when I ran into him in a bar in 2017 after not having seen him in four years, he hadn't changed a bit.

Click here to read the next part - Day 40 - October 8th

Saturday, July 21, 2018

Day 38 - September 16th

        For about six months in 2012-13, my ankle was swollen and tender because I'd decided to buy a skateboard. I also grew my hair out and tied it into a top-knot, and for about three weeks had a real, concerted crack at growing a beard until I caved and admitted that it was itchy and I hated it. Every now and then I'd go down the city skate park at the top of St Kilda Rd with Brodie, who was a very good skater. He taught me a few basic flips, but I was learning so I'd land wrong all the time, and it fucked my ankles up, especially my left one which would always land on the kick and roll when I didn't catch the board properly. Evidently you're supposed to learn all that shit when you're 13 and your bones are still made of ballistics jelly, so even after rolling your ankles all afternoon you can pretty much walk it off. You learn by failing, and you do it young so by the time you reach the ripe old age of 22 you're past the point of eating shit constantly. I was already over the hill, and even with the ankle brace I bought from Chemist Warehouse at the bemused advice of a doctor whose time I definitely wasted – “I fell off my skateboard a lot, what do you think's wrong with it?” // “Well son... it looks like you fell off your skateboard. A lot.” – I limped around the city for months.
        One morning around sunrise I was drinking with my workmates at Yah Yah's after a shift. I went upstairs to pee and on the way back I bounded down, taking them three at a time – like always – I guess out of impatience? I honestly don't know, but I've always liked to get that part of my life over as quick as possible, because, as small, Greek bartender once said to me, “You're never having a good time when you're on stairs.”
        My ankle gave way somewhere at the top of the first flight, and I lost control completely. My face came down to meet the floor with what to me seemed like an enormous crash. I limped back down the second flight, but was too drunk to realise just how badly I'd hurt myself. The fact that none of my workmates in the bar seemed to have noticed the sound I'd made when I fell suggested to me maybe it hadn't been that bad. I'd expected to come down and answer a volley of questions about the sound they'd all heard. Or maybe, I thought, they'd all have guessed what the sound was, and would instead greet my return with a joyous round of applause? But no, not so much as a raised eyebrow, so I brushed it off. By that night I could barely make it out of my bedroom.

I skated a lot less after that, and whenever I did again I was scared of hurting myself, which meant I never committed, so I fell more. I couldn't land anything, so I bought some bigger wheels made for rolling around the asphalt, and decided to just use the thing as a mode of transportation. One night on the way to a show in Collingwood I slung my deck over a fence before climbing over myself. As I hung it by the trucks on the top rail of the fence, one of the wheels fell off (somehow?) and bounced away into the darkness. I looked for a while, then gave up and went to the show. The deck sat in my room with three wheels, disused until 2014 when I sold it to the highest bidder in a comedy show to help fund my move to London.

Oh, and I guess, according to this card, this was the morning when I was shooed away from the building site near my house by security after jumping the fence in search of one more adventure before Sunday Morning Bedtime. I barely remember that – ha. What an explorer!

CLick here to read the next part - Day 39 - September 26th

Friday, July 20, 2018

Day 37 - September 13th

        This weekend Phil drove over to Melbourne with another mate of ours, Chris, and after drinking into the night at The Workers, we woke up in one of the rooms above the pub. Or maybe we slept at mine and went over later? I don't remember, but I do remember Richie having this array of vitamins pills and supplements that he handed out to us when we woke up. Richie is always on some new self-improvement tip, and he loves to tell you about it, wide-eyed like he's figured it all out. I don't take the specifics of it too seriously, but it's cool to see someone always trying to better themself – he's always full of hope and optimism.
        The last pill he gave us was big and long, and as he handed it to us out of another plastic pharmacy tub his eyes glimmered: “Boys, this last one, oh man... this is that LIMITLESS shit, like the movie. Get ready to unlock your SHIT on a whole 'nother level!”
        I couldn't take him seriously, but I did love that movie, and I took the pills regardless – it just felt nice to be included. I don't remember whether we laughed at Richie's 'Limitless' comment in the moment, but I've always remembered that as the highlight of the morning. We went and got sandwiches from some hole-in-the-wall cafe he was raving about, and I felt like I was being let into the Secret Melbourne Society step-by-step.

Actually I do remember now! We didn't sleep at Richie's, we slept at mine. Phil drove over with a bunch of stuff from my place in Adelaide and I'd just moved in with Brodie and Ben. Up until this point I was still sleeping on the floor with a powerboard to plug my phone, laptop and bedside lamp into, all of which lived on the floor. My clothes were in a pile in the corner of the room,which felt so liberating after having to pack them into my bag a the hostel every day for two months. Finally,now that I had my own room I could up-end my bag and leave the contents strewn over the floor like a grown-up. Phil brought my bed over, but I didn't set it up until after the weekend because we were busy taking drugs.

Click here to read the next part - Day 38 - September 16th

Thursday, July 19, 2018

Day 36 - September 4th

Sigh... okay.

        Moving to Melbourne was a huge adjustment for me. At 21 I still didn't really know how to live independently and look after myself, and I was also still stuck in a fairly selfish mindset, having grown up in the sheltered bubble of Adelaide. A few years later when I moved to London I remember walking around and being taken aback by the number of people of all different races speaking all different languages that I'd see just walking around the street. It made me realise the lie that is Australian Multiculturalism. We like to think of ourselves as this diverse and integrated culture, but while London is as close as I've experienced to actually diverse and integrated, Australian Multiculturalism basically amounts to, “Look! There, see?! We've got one! Look, how multicutural!”
        Growing up in Adelaide I was especially sheltered to the effects of racism/prejudice etc. I went to a fantastic private school in Adelaide, and in a year of 168 kids, there was one black kid. His nickname was Black Man. Insanity.
        When I was 19 I moved into a house with some friends for six months and on the first day we lived there we found a litter of kittens, one of which we kept. We couldn't think of a name for him for a long time, so I just started calling him a name I thought was funny, which ended up sticking and becoming his actual name until he was sadly run over by a car and unceremoniously 'buried' by our douchebag housemate, Josh, in a wheelie bin. That name was Faggot.... I mean, fuck.
        When I was 18, riding around in cars with loud, drunken mates, I would yell in excitement, to no one in particular, “NIGGAS IN THE CRIB!!” – in my mind, that's what we were. In my mind it was fine, because I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. I just didn't understand.

        So obviously the reason I'm writing all of this is because on the card for Day 36 I've blacked out the Queen's face with my pen, and next to her I've written the word, 'COON'. And that's not really cool, is it. It's not great, in fact it sucks, and I'm really very ashamed of it.
        Even at the time I would have known it wasn't great. I would have been scribbling on her face out of absent-minded boredom, and then seeing what I'd created, decided to label it as such, with a naughty word. It's like when someone says, “Don't push the Big Red Button.” I don't know what kind of person you are, but unless I'm given a very good reason to go along with it, all I want to do after you've said that is push the Big Red Button.
        And of course in this case there is a reason not to do it – loads, actually – but as far as my self-centred world view was concerned it didn't really matter. At 20 years old I barely knew anyone who wasn't white and straight, and the few people I did know who didn't fit into those two categories, I didn't know very well. As far as I could tell, my actions had no consequences – I couldn't see an obvious victim, so I imagined that there was none. I was just saying silly things that people told me not to say, because they told me not to say them. People had explained why they were bad (other straight, white people, because that's all there really were), but I couldn't see the consequences right in front of my eyes, so to me, those reasons were just theoretical.
        That's all this kind of juvenile racism was to me until I met people in my life who it had actually effected, and realised the real damage validating those kinds of attitudes does to us as a society. And the damage it does to actual, human people.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm sorry for the ignorant person I was at 21. I try to listen and be better, and there's always more I can do. I'm honestly terrified of writing this and putting it out into the world. I'm scared of what people might think of me, maybe they'll think I'm hiding something, or condemn me for my past mistakes. I wish I could just take this card out of the deck, but I can't, because you'd know, and then you'd ask why. I could replace it, find a deck and write myself a new card, without the scribbling, but then I'd know. The whole point of this thing is it's supposed to be honest, so I might as well own up to it. This is who I was, hopefully it's not who I am now.

Click here to read the next part - Day 37 - September 13th

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Day 35 - August 29th

        Rach still lived at home with her parents in an inner-Northern suburb of Melbourne, and at this point I was still living in the hostel, so we didn't have anywhere to go and fuck ('make love', whatever, what would you call it? Fucken loser). As it happened I was absolutely allowed to sleep at her parents' place, I was just too shy to ask and assumed the answer would be no, so we spent the first few weeks of our relationship going on lovely dates and furiously making out on street corners. One of the hardest times I've ever laughed was around the corner from Bimbo between kisses when Rach responded to something dumb I said with, “Is this real life?”
        I replied, “...or is this just fantasy?”
        “...caught in a landslide...” she eyed me off, daring me.
        “...let's not, and say we did?” I pleaded, not wanting to commit to a full rendition of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. Oh how we laughed. We laughed all the time.

        I told her everything about my past: Mélanie, Grace, Bolivia, everything. I told her I'd booked a trip to go to Sydney with Mélanie for a weekend, but that I'd committed to it before I even came to Melbourne. All of it was true.
        After I stopped talking to both Mélanie and Grace, but before I moved to Melbourne, I'd found that I still had things to say to Grace, but I couldn't say them to her because we weren't talking. I wanted to tell her that I hated her, but that I loved her as well. I wanted her to know how much she'd hurt me, and that it wasn't fair, and that she should have given us a chance instead of turning away from me, and that maybe, if she wanted, she still could. I wrote it all down in a journal, I wrote in the second person, as if I was talking directly to her, and then on her birthday on the 4th of July, just before I left for Melbourne, I went around her house and gave it all to her.
        When I got to Melbourne Mélanie contacted me again on Facebook and asked what my address was, she had some mail for me. I gave her the address of the hostel, and a week later an envelope thick with handwritten pages showed up. She'd left Adelaide, but found she still had things to say to me, but she couldn't say them to me because we weren't talking. She wrote all the stuff down in a journal, addressed to me in the second person, and sent it to me in Melbourne.

Have you ever heard that song, 'Everyone's Free To Wear Sunscreen'? It's based off a column in the Chicago Tribune written by Mary Schmich in 1997 titled, 'Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young', the concept of which being that she would love to give a commencement speech at her old college, but had never been invited. She decides to write the speech she would give should she ever be asked, and in it, attempts to give the best advice she can to the hypothetical group of young people sitting in front of her. The advice ranges from poignant, to beautiful, to frivolous, and the song takes the words to her imagined speech, and sets them to nice music. I've always loved it.
One of the lines is,

Keep your old love letters, throw away old bank statements.

I kept those pages that Mélanie sent me, along with the original envelope that she sent them in, and wrote those words on the side. I still have it, it reminds me of the amazing time we spent together in South America, when we really were in love. It could just as easily remind me of the bad times, like the weekend we spent in the Blue Mountains near Sydney after I told her that I was seeing a girl called Rachel back in Melbourne, and didn't want to sleep in the same bed as her. It could remind me of that, but it doesn't. That's nice, isn't it? That bad memories fade away eventually, while the good ones linger, and float up slowly to the surface.

        But Rachel.
        I've been thinking so much about the distant past while writing these entries – and after six years, the distant past is really all it is. I've read through some old emails, and even listened to old conversations and silliness that we recorded from around this time, and in doing so, and listening to the the people we were, it's easy to forget the people we are now. I listened to a voice message she sent me once, and I almost wanted to message that person and talk to her because it made me smile.
        But I can't, that person doesn't exist any more. It would be an insane person who would make that contact, trying desperately to dig up feelings from the past and resucitate them. They're gone now, and just spectres.

I do almost feel as if in writing this I'm somehow trapping myself in the past. It's not healthy to relive these things over and over. Every edit dredges up new, forgotten details. I need to get to the end of this, but when I get there, I need to break free.
Rachel was and is an amazing person. I met her so quickly after I moved to Melbourne, and at the time it seemed perfect, like she had appeared in my life on cue to offer me a fresh start. Looking back, as happy as we were, I don't think I was anywhere near ready.

Click here to read the next part - Day 36 - September 4th

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Day 34 - August 18th

        I think the best way to stop doing something isn't to try to stop, you have to replace the vice with something – a life, ideally. I drink for a bunch of different reasons, from boredom to excitement to anxiety – and of course because it's real fun – but in trying not to drink and setting myself this challenge at the start of the year, I think I missed the point a little. Like, why did I want to drink less? I said it was because of the hangovers, but I still drink to this day, and I still get hangovers. That's definitely not stopped me.
        The trick to stopping isn't to try and win some battle of willpower with yourself – I always lose those anyway – the trick is to find something that you care about more than drinking – or smoking or gambling or taking drugs or whatever – that will force you into a decision.
        For me right now, the decision is between drinking and stand up. If I stay out all night on Thursday, and Friday and Saturday, and maybe through Sunday, I'll be burning through time and energy that I could be using on stand up. I'll be hungover through the day when I should be writing, and I'll bail on gigs because someone's asked me to come down the pub and get started on the evening. Drinking is incredible, it's so much fun, and if I didn't have stand up to worry about I'd definitely be out every night I could find company, but luckily for me I stumbled upon something that I could care about more than drinking. Stand up: I love it.

I have no idea what happened on August the 18th, 2012, but I know that what was happening in a larger sense in my life around this time was that I was in the process of falling in love with stand up. The screaming into the microphone thing was one of the first bits of evidence that I'd started spending time in my day trying to solve the problems I encountered every time I got on stage. That's one thing that's great about stand up, there's always a new problem to solve and more ways to get better. Something else to think about. It never ends. It's like drinking: exciting every time, only with stand up there's no hangover.

Click here to read the next part - Day 35 - August 29th

Day 33 - August 9th

The first time I ever performed stand up was August 15, 2011, but I really didn't start gigging regularly until I moved to Melbourne a year later. This card might be from the first time I'd been to Monastery, but pretty soon I was there every Thursday because it was effectively a sign-up-on-the-night show if you got there early enough. I was ravenous for stage time, but like all new comics I was absolutely awful, so no one wanted to put me on. Micah – who ran the show at Monastery – putting me up almost every week was invaluable experience to me, and an act of kindness that I can only appreciate fully with the privilege of hindsight, knowing now how truly horrific my comedy must have been then.
It was also in Richmond, around the corner from Timmy, Brodie and Ben's house, which eventually became my house when Timmy moved out and I jumped at the opportunity to leave the hostel and take his room. That was sometime around September; I lived out of my backpack at the Melbourne Connection for two months, and left missing a few t-shirts, some socks, and my favourite pair of Nikes, but I made it.

        One night, during an early period of experimentation, Brodie came to watch me at Monastery – he'd never seen me to stand up before, but he would have known from talking to me that I'd already decided this was something I wanted to for the rest of my life. I remember committing to doing it ten years very early on – I was all in.
        One of the first things I noticed when I started stand up was people would avoid eye contact with me and generally zone out while I was on stage. I know now that the reason for this lack of attention was I wasn't saying anything funny, or really much of anything at all, and most people find it incredibly embarrassing and difficult to watch that. Being an audience member at open mic comedy is one of the most brutal things you can subject yourself to, and I stand in awe of those brave few who do so on a regular basis without the ulterior motive of getting on stage themselves. You people give more of your soul than any performer and ask nothing in return, and one day there will be statues of you faceless heroes lining the streets in place of the disposable stars we currently worship.
        Back then though I had no idea why people weren't paying attention, or if I did, I lacked the capacity to just Be Good At Standup and rectify it, so I was grasping for solutions. The week that Brodie came to see me, my solution was to stop, mid-set, and declare, “I've noticed sometimes at stand up shows people don't pay attention to the stage, and I've found a good way to get people back to focussing is to yell like this: AAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!!”
        That was the bit. The plan was I would yell directly into the microphone and then... and then I don't really know what I thought would happen after that. Everyone would laugh probably?
        Turns out they didn't laugh, but they did all jump and hold their ears, because yelling into a microphone makes a painfully loud noise, and it also really bums people out, whether they were paying attention before or not. Brodie asked me after the show how I thought I'd gone, and I sheepishly mused, “I don't think that yelling into the mic thing really worked...”
        He couldn't have agreed faster. It was vigorous.

That night I learned another truth about starting stand up, which is that your friends are generally excited to come and see you, until they do and realise that you suck because you've not learnt how to do stand up yet, so they rarely if ever come again. You see them less and less, because you're always out doing stand up, and if you're doing it right, you don't have any evenings free to give time to social commitments. A few close friends will always be there, but those who were always on the periphery will drift away, and be replaced by friends in the stand up world.
Thus begins your descent into a new life.

Click here to read the next part - Day 34 - August 18th

Monday, July 16, 2018

Day 32 - August 4h

Day 32 - August 4th
Today I was tempted to cheat myself and not count the shot of vodka I did to say farewell to Aaron as a drinking day.
But that's bullshit
It still counts

        This guy English Aaron (there were two Aarons staying at the hostel, English Aaron was English, and the other Aaron was homeless – or thereabouts – but you can't call someone Homeless Aaron. He didn't have another defining characteristic though, so he just stayed Aaron, and we called the English one English Aaron to differentiate... I mean yeah, you're not a moron, you get it)... so this guy English Aaron stayed in the same room as me at the hostel and was really the first guy I remember talking to when I got off the bus from Adelaide. He looked kind of like Karl Pilkington, if I remember correctly? Which I probably don't.
        He used to sit in the kitchen and drink while everyone else cooked and chatted, he was just a very friendly presence in the common area. One time he told me this story about how he jumped onto a slow-moving freight train as it passed a train platform – you know the way you always tell yourself you totally could, but never actually do, he did that. But he realised once he did it that now he was just stuck on this freight train with no way to get off, so he started climbing over the carriages towards the front, meanwhile people at intersections could see him on there as he went past, and someone eventually called the police. When he got up to the cabin the driver was furious, and told him they'd set him down when they got to the next stop. The police met him there, furious too and suspecting some sort of terrorism, so they took him into questioning and asked him why he was on the train. What was he doing? Was he a terrorist? Protester? Or just a vandal looking for trouble? “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!?”
        And all he could think of was “..I... I just love trains.”
        Hahahahahaha!
        He said, “As long as I can remember I've always wanted to ride up in the cabin with the train driver, so I jumped on to the train and now my dream has come true!” WHAT A GENIUS! Can't argue with that! The guys not dangerous, he's just a fucking moron.

        On this day, August the 4th, Aaron left the hostel. We all had a shot of vodka to celebrate his departure, and in my 21-year-old naivete I asked him, “So, are you ever gonna come back?”
        “NEVER!” He laughed at me. And he never did.
        At this point I was still coming to terms with the idea that as you move through the world, people drift in and out of your life at random. Some people you feel a strong connection to are only around for a short while, and you never really know when the last time you're going to see someone might be. Goodbyes are such a rarity.
        So when English Aaron left that day, he knew in all his wisdom that we were probably never going to see each other again, because the connection we'd had just was what it was – we had our time together, united as we were by the flea-ridden pit that was the Melbourne Connection Backpackers Hostel on King Street. I hadn't yet learned to accept these things, so I was anxious to know when I'd see him again, because I didn't know how to say goodbye. No one really wants that big goodbye though: “Take care! So long! Good luck with your Life and Everything!”
        It's exhausting, who has the energy? So English Aaron told me the truth, but laughed to make it sound like a joke. He softened the blow.
        When he left that day I really did think he might be back someday, and maybe he did come back to Melbourne, but I never saw him in the hostel again. I know now that even if he had come back there, it wouldn't have been the same.

Click here to read the next part - Day 33 - August 9th

Day 31 - July 29th

        I met Rachel at The Workers Pub in Fitzroy where Sean, Benny and a few more of the Adelaide guys worked. They got me a cushy job taking money on the door when bands were playing, and one night I was sitting at the desk doodling on a bit of paper when Rach walked up and started chatting to me about my doodles (teehee). The Workers had a great night on Mondays where you could get pints of shit beer for $3 and jugs for $6, so I told her to meet me back there the following week. I was too scared to ask for her number, even when her friend came to take her away; “Oh that's okay, he doesn't want my number”, she chided, “I'm sure he has really nice conversations with girls all the time.”
        She was wrong, I thought about her all weekend, furious with myself for trying pass my cowardice off as laid-back cool. I pretended I didn't care, but I did, I cared so much, and I spent the weekend telling my friends about her, secretly terrified that when I went back on Monday she wouldn't show up.
        But she did. I walked in around 8pm and scurried frantically around the venue, knowing she wouldn't be there, slowly letting the truth I'd already accepted sink in as I berated myself: “This is what you get you fucking idiot, you were too scared to ask her for her fucking number and now she's gone. Fuck you.”
        I wasn't even sure if I'd recognise her, maybe she was there, but she wasn't looking for me, maybe I was just another nice conversation that she'd had? Then, on my second lap, I saw her standing at the bar.
        “I'm such an idiot! I should have got your number last week! What is it I need it right now! PLEASE!!”
        “Yeah you are!” She laughed through rolled eyes at me as we both breathed a sigh of relief. We held hands later as we walked down Brunswick St to the kebab shop where they put glossy pictures of customers up on the wall. She pointed out the ones of her and her friends on previous nights out and we ate pizza and chips with sweet chilli sauce. I still look for those pictures whenever I go in to get a $2.50 slice of pizza, but I think they must be gone now.

We went on a date the following Sunday to this pub called Bimbo that had $4 pizzas. We talked about The Young Ones with Rick Mayal and Nigel Planned and Alexi Sayle and I told her I'd moved to Melbourne to be a comedian. She wanted to be an actor.
I waited with her at the stop until her tram came, then kissed her goodbye and when she got on I jumped on my phone and posted something like “FUCK YES!!” to Facebook. I was so excited. She liked it and messaged me straight away laughing. I went back to the hostel and told everyone about her again.

Click here to read the next part - Day 32 - August 4th

Friday, July 13, 2018

Day 30 - July 17

        I don't think I've ever been more driven or motivated than I was in the weeks when I first moved to Melbourne. I was so scared that I wouldn't be able to make it work, and I'd have to go back to Adelaide with my tail between my legs. It felt like I had no other option.
        There were all these other people in the hostel who'd moved over from various other parts of Australia as well, many of them around the same age as me. Jean-Henri from Perth had come over with $2000 to be a musician, he worked in fundraising jobs standing on street corners trying to get people to donate to charity. He was apparently pretty good at it, but kept getting fired for not showing up. He took himself out for $80 meals at the restaurant next door to the hostel for reasons that I still struggle to understand. There was another guy whose name I can't even remember, but he was from Perth as well, and was also trying to make it as a musician. One day he asked me to sell his old guitar and laptop for him down at the pawn shop – they won't take stuff off you if you don't have an ID, and I guess he figured you don't need an ID when you have a song in your heart and bugs in your hair. He offered me a cut of the money to do it for him, but when I got down there I realised I could get more for the laptop than the pawn shop were offering if I sold it myself on eBay. I got Phil to send me the money from Adelaide to pay the Perth guy, gave it to him, then posted the unsold Macbook on eBay.
        Incredibly Sam almost instantly offered to buy it off me at the price I was asking. Once again, like when he paid me to clean his place, I don't think he particularly needed it, he just loved Apple products and had money to spare. He also loved helping out his friends, and I think he really believed in me – incredible, when I think about it.
        I paid Phil back, kept the difference, and probably bought bread with it.

The guy used the money he got for his guitar and laptop to buy food, and some mushrooms, which I was also selling through this wack motherfucker called Leon I'd also met at the hostel one night (more on him later).
The Perth guitar guy, his hippy girlfriend, and good old Jean-Henri all ended up retreating back to Perth in the weeks following after their money slowly ran out. Now that I think about it, the experience of meeting this group of all-talk failures might have soured me on the whole city of Perth for years, because even though I heard the Fringe there was one of the best in Australia, I didn't even consider going over until 2018. I saw what those guys let happen to themselves, and I was adamant that I wouldn't let it happen to me.

Click here to read the next part - Day 31 - July 29th

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Day 29 - July 15th

I didn't know anyone in Melbourne well enough to ask them to stay with them, so I booked myself a room at the Melbourne Connection Backpackers' Hostel because at $20 a night it was the cheapest I could find. It was on King St, which is a mile-long stretch of garbage clubs and strip joints that somehow sits between Southern Cross Station and the banking district. It sucked then and continues to suck now, but the scumminess reminded me of Hindley Street and my beloved Red Square in Adelaide.
My first night in the hostel one of the guys asked if I wanted to come to the movies with everyone, but I declined. I knew I had to get up and look for a job in the morning, but it was so hard to say no. I remember being really proud of myself.

        A few of the guys I knew from back in Adelaide were bartending at The Workers Club in Fitzroy, so they all used to congregate around there, and I probably could have got a job if I'd asked, but I didn't want to. I was too shy, and didn't want to seem like I'd come to Melbourne to leech off of people who I honestly didn't even know that well, so I went around for a few days handing out resumes and eventually landed a job at a bar called Yah Yah's. Once that was settled, I made contact with The Boys, who were:
        Brodie – Charismatic, loveable DJ/drug dealer from Adelaide who was six months younger than me, and the youngest of the group. Would readily name any of a group of 5-10 people as his 'Best Friend', and seemed to always be at the centre of everything. Never really liked him. Apparently got caught smuggling drugs into the country a few years ago? Not 100% on that, but from what I hear his life is still a nightmare.
        Timmy – Oldest of the group at around 27, and was often fighting an internal battle between his desire to party and hang out with the crew, and the obligation to his upper-middle class family to get a good job, find a nice girl, and settle down. Very intent on being serious, until he wasn't.
        Sean – Maybe the funniest person I've ever met in my life. The real centre of everything, the reluctant leader and North Pole by which we all set ourselves. Every one of these guys was a DJ to some extent, but everyone knew Sean threw himself into it the hardest. Ended up opening a record store for a while some years later, and always had hundreds of music blog tabs open on his internet browser.
        Benny – People would always say that Benny was one of the kindest souls they'd ever met, and I agreed with them. Everyone loved his understated calm, and he could usually be spotted darting around the house with a camera taking analogue photos while everyone else was deep into The Sesh. I passed him a few months ago on my bike, he works for Australia Post now and was crossing the road with a package, he called, “IT'S TACO!”, to me, in a way that sounded warm and familiar. It was as if seeing me for the first time in four years didn't surprise him at all – I on the other hand was beside myself. By the time I recognized his knowing grin I was well past him and couldn't turn around, but fuck, what a joy that man continues to be.
        Steve – The dark horse of the group, super smart, and if I remember correctly, the only one of any of us who finished uni and got a degree. Also the first, and so far only one to get married. Managed to cultivate a life away from partying, but still dip in regularly. Fantastic.
        Rich – A darker horse, if there is such a thing. Rich lived in a room above The Workers, and made money bartending there and DJing around the place with the other guys. He always seemed to be on the periphery though, in the midst of some sort of falling-out with the main crew. I've got boundless time for the guy, he lives in Queensland now, and is the only one I've caught up at all with in the last five years.

For my first shift at Yah Yah's I let myself use one of my drinking days, and after the shift I went back to the house in Richmond that Benny, Brodie and Timmy were living at. After the clock ticked over past midday I didn't drink any more – in accordance with the rules. I did cheat a little and have some mushrooms, but EVERYONE WAS DOING ITTTT!
When I got back to the hostel this French cocktail bartender named Remi was practising bartender-flairing with white plastic bottles in the tiny area of floor between the three bunk beds in our dorm. I sat on my bed and watched the bottles make arcing lines in the light, listening to the soft, deliberate sound of his hands grasping at the white plastic. He grunted quietly under his breath as he tried to maintain his own rhythm while we listened to some French lounge mixtape called Hôtel Costes. We went outside and smoked a spliff (he called it a 'stick') and when we came in this Dutch girl, Myrthe, jumped out from behind a door brandishing this foot-long, black dildo like a sword ready to strike at us. It's name was Rodger Double, and the Facebook page they made for it had more friends than my grandma.

Click here to read the next part - Day 30 - July 17

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Day 28 - July 3rd

When I quit that sales job I decided to take all the money I'd earned – something like $300 – pack all of my shit into two bags, and catch a bus to Melbourne. I wasn't sure how it was going to work, but I knew that whatever happened it would be better than Adelaide.
Sam had to move out of his place after he got sick from all the NOS, and he moved back in with his dad, back into the room he slept in when he was growing up. The day I quit the sales job I went round there to tell him I was moving to Melbourne. We had a few drinks and took some mushrooms in his room, then he pulled out a bunch of spray cans and paint pens, and started spraying something on the wall of his room. He told me to think of some words to write over the top of his design, then wrapped a shirt around his face and got to work.

One of my favourite albums ever (EVER!) is 'A Grand Don't Come For Free' by The Streets. The first track is called 'It Was Supposed to be So Easy', and in it, the protagonist Mike sings about losing £1000. It went missing in his living room with all his mates standing around, and over the course of the album he starts to suspect them all because, as the logic goes, it can't have just disappeared by itself. As his paranoia deepens he starts seeing his relationships with friends fall apart, and after singing about how much he loves her in a few songs towards the beginning, his girlfriend leaves him right when he is at his lowest ebb in 'Dry Your Eyes'.
The last song, 'Empty Cans' depicts an angry, isolated man who continues to push people away out of distrust rather than accept his their well-intentioned help:

        Everyone wanted this to all go wrong from me from the start
        It's fucked up that a man's life can just be attacked
        Watching 'This Morning' with a beer is much better than relying on
        Unknown cunts for mates I was given that don't have my back

He rejects his friend Scott's offer to come round and fix his TV, and instead, he calls a repair man over, but not before telling his mate to, “fuck right off, chap”. The guy comes round to fix his TV, and they get in a fight when Mike suspects him of being dishonest with the fee. He finally proclaims, “Everyone's a cunt in this life, no one's there for me.”

But then! Then the track rewinds, the harsh synth disappears and over the same drums, a rising piano creeps in. He starts the story again, and when his mate offers to fix the TV he says, “I felt like just telling him to 'fuck right off, chap' ”
Only this time he doesn't. He considers that his friend really is trying to help him, and accepts the offer. His mate comes round, and they end up finding his £1000 down the back of the TV. It had been down there the whole time, no one took it, the paranoia all for nothing. The chorus rings:

        It's the end of something I did not want to end
        Beginning of hard times to come
        But something that was not meant to be is done
        And this is the start of what was

I played the song and explained it to Sam, and then, while he finished painting the dark-green background underneath me, I wrote out the words to the last verse in white, over the top of the purple heart he'd painted on the wall, from ceiling to floor, in the front bedroom of his dad's old house in Richmond:

        About two this afternoon the last of the people left my house
        'Cos they never stop chatting 'til all the racket's gone
        I really feel like things clicked into place at some point,
        Or maybe it's the fact that me and Alison really got on
        Or maybe it's that I realised that it is true,
        No one's really there fighting for you in the last garrison
        No one except yourself that is, no one except you
        You are the one who's got your back 'til the last deed's done
        Scott can't have my back 'til the absolute end
        'Cos he's gotta look out for what's over his horizon
        He's gotta make sure he's not lonely, not broke
        It's enough to worry about keeping his own head above
        I shut the door behind me, huddled up in my coat
        Condensation floating off my best, squinted out the sun
        My jeans felt a bit tight, I think I washed them too high
        I was gonna be late, so I picked up my pace to run

FUCK YEAH DUDE!! That was the end of Part One.
Click here to read the beginning of Part Two - Day 29 - July 15th