52 Days: June 2018

Saturday, June 30, 2018

Day 17 - April 7th

I was two halves of one person on that day at the Claire Races, one half of me was drinking with my friends and my girlfriend, laughing, enjoying myself. The other half was somewhere else, fixating, sneaking off to the toilets to message Grace, losing control.

That night we built a campfire in the dirt in front of the house and burnt wood we found at the bottom of the paddock next to the river. We were loud and drunk and singing. Mélanie and I slept together in a single bed in the smallest bedroom, the weekend was a hit.

Click here to read the next part - Day 18 - April 11th

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Day 16 - April 6th

The weekend following the party Mélanie and I went up to the Claire Valley, a wine region a few hours North of Adelaide, with a big crew of my mates. These weren't drug people, they were Phil's friends – friends of ours who we knew through his girlfriend at the time. They were all great people, and there were around fifteen of us. We stayed in a country house owned by one of the guys' parents with the plan to go to the Claire Races on the Saturday – races as in the horse ones. It should have been really, really lovely.

A few weeks before Mélanie arrived, but a few weeks after she told me she'd decided to come to Australia... I want to place it maybe around the last weekend of February?... I'd taken acid at Sam's house with a few people, one of them being Grace. Four of us went back to Grace's house and spent the night there tripping. I'd told Grace I had a girlfriend and that upset her, she was angry in a joking kind of way, but we both knew she wanted to be the only girl I cared about. She was so selfish in her brokenness.
At some point during that night when my trip was at it's peak, Grace and I had a dumb fight for some reason, and she kicked me out of her house in Port Adelaide, leaving me to wander the night trying to figure out which way I had to walk to get home. I was happy to walk the two hours if I had to, but I kept getting confused and doubling back on myself. Eventually after (I'm guessing) about two hours, I wound up back at the only landmark I could remember – Grace's front door. She let me back in and everyone laughed, the fight forgotten.

Sometime in the middle of the following week Grace and I were messaging and she invited me round, and I went. I'd turned down advances from a couple of old flings since I'd been back in Adelaide, citing my newfound love, but this was different. This was Grace. The One That Got Away. That crazy, mad eyed unicorn-girl with the awful life who didn't care about anyone, except when she did, and right now she cared about me, and she wanted to be with me, and we could get a place together because she was different now and she knew she loved me and if only I hadn't “gone to stupid fucking Bolivia and met that French Bitch then we could be together Taco! Boo!!”
She used to call me “Boo”, short for “Clever Boots”.

She invited me round and I went, and we kissed and she tasted like cigarettes, she spread her legs wide and her skin was so soft and inviting. I saw the scars where she cut herself, and she held me tight, finally letting me in.
I'm Yours, You're Mine.

Afterwards I called Phil and told him what I'd done. He didn't have much time for it, he knew that I was an idiot. I was already grappling with the repercussions as I slinked off down Old Port Road where I'd gotten lost when I was on acid. I remember it being cold, which it may have been. It was an afternoon in April.

Click here to read the next part - Day 17 - April 7th

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Day 15 - March 31st

        This party was one of the most incredible set-ups I've ever seen. The parties up at Crafers were legendary in our drug circles, they were hosted by some older couple in their mid-40s – old school ravers that our mate Liam knew somehow. I'd never made it to one, but I'd been hearing about them for years. This one was set the last hurrah before they sold their house in the Adelaide Hills and moved away for good, so they went All Out.
        Mélanie had just arrived in Australia that week, so while I half-heartedly asked her to come to the party, she said was too tired from the travel. She told me to go by myself and see my friends while she stayed home and rested. She insisted, saying that she knew she wouldn't fit in with that circle of my friends anyway – she was right. I went without her.
        I woke up in the morning with no shirt and no phone – I found them both under a couch inside the house, next to a TV playing clips of some vaguely remembered cartoon on a loop – just to be clear, the TV was UNDER THE COUCH.
        I emerged, stumbling through the remains of a spectacular Alice In Wonderland themed backyard complete with flowers, a huge chess board, and fairy lights dimming in the morning sun. A group of my mates were huddled on chairs amidst the wreckage, they'd all smoked way more meth than me – I'd limited myself to a little bit at the start of the night... WHAT THE FUCK AM I TALKING ABOUT THIS IS INSANE HOW THE FUCK DID I USED TO LIVE LIKE THIS WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE!?!!...

        We all sat around and I brought up the topic of Mélanie, this girl who had come from France to Australia to continue our overseas romance, this girl who I was in supposedly love with, this girl who had cared for me and been patient enough to hold on while my heart healed from the pain of Grace the year before. This girl who I achingly admitted to everyone I wished had never come.
        She was waiting at home for me, and I had to get back, but I didn't want to face her. I didn't want to be with my friends, I didn't want to be with my girlfriend, I just wanted to be left to be alone. An older lady who I'd never met before sat with us and patiently listened to my story:
        “You've got to break up with her. If this is how you really feel then you have to do it, you owe it to this girl.”
        “I know.”, I said, and sipped a can of Jack and Coke with my eyes pinned heavy to the floor.

Click here to read the next part - Day 16 - April 6th

Day 14 - March 12th

        This was a Sunday, and I think the Monday must have been a public holiday because we went to Future Music Festival, which was a house and electro festival that has since gone bankrupt and fittingly been consigned to The Past. Ho ho ho.
        Askham and I spent the day together, took some pills, and went to a few stages. We saw Aphex Twin on that day, and he did some weird shit sampling the voices of the audience with a microphone held out in front of the stage. The screaming voices of girls shouting, “YEAAAAH FUTURESSS!!” were shifted way down in pitch and made slower, so their joyous screams rang haunting and ominous over the music. I was not in a good way, and this didn't help. I tried to find it funny, but I could still identify the original sound of the screams beneath all the distortion, which made it seem like they were ghosts trapped inside the speakers.
        We sat on the grass at the back of the giant marquis and I wished I was doing something else, somewhere else, with someone else, but I had no idea what, where, or who I wanted those things to be. I was glad of Askham's company, but I spent the whole day next to him feeling lost and lonely.

Click here to read the next part - Day 15 - March 31st

Monday, June 25, 2018

Day 13 - March 11th

        Oh! This day was actually fantastic. Phil, Askham and I were drinking in Glandore the suburb where we all grew up. We went for a walk to the bottle shop, and on the way there – and it was the middle of the day mind you – we found a sidewalk full of hard rubbish outside someone's house. There were Tech Decks (remember those little finger-sized skateboards?) and ramps to go with them, and there was a working plastic train that chugged with determination at around the pace of a scuttling ant.
        The train was maybe as big as a shoe, and had some decent torque in its little engine, so we tied fishing line to the back of it, attached a bunch of plastic bottles, and like proud parents we set it off across a main road, aimed at the bottle shop on the other side. Every now and then a car would come past, slow down, and carefully drive around the tangle of plastic, and every time it did I was disappointed. I wanted to see the carnage as a truck or bus ran straight through the little guy, but it just kept going across the road in the hot, midday sun.
        We took a video of it that was inevitably very boring – just us cackling and wheezing as the engine chugged across the road. When we got bored of it we took our beers and Tech Decks back to my place and played with them until we got drunk and went to sleep.

Click here to read the next part - Day 14 - March 12th

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Day 12 - March 10th

        Here's something fun and silly I wrote in a previous draft of this chapter. It doesn't really fit the tone any more, but I didn't want to take it out:
        Upon first reading, the phrase, “I believe, The Cranka?”, may seem to refer to our hero's belief that he and his friend Phil went to a pub called The Cranka. However, as we inspect the peculiar construction of this phrase another meaning suggests itself: perhaps our hero is attempting to find something other than that which he already knows to believe in – in this case a pub outside of the regular cannon of nightclubs he normally frequents. He attempts to proclaim this new belief in the desperate hope that he himself will believe it, but as we can see with the use of a flimsy comma, rather than the mighty exclamation mark, his belief wavers even at its genesis. He asks us, and himself, “The Cranka?”, effectively wondering, hoping, pleading that this is the answer he seeks.
        We know, sadly, that it is not, and his search is yet doomed to continue.

Bit of fun, eh? Hahaha.

A couple of weeks after I got back, Mélanie told me that she'd been thinking about deferring her degree at uni in France, jumping on a plane, and coming to Australia to be with me. I knew that on paper this was maybe the greatest thing that had ever happened to me, so I said yes. I told her to do it.
She started planning. I kept living my life as if nothing had happened.

Click here to read the next part - Day 13 - March 11th

Day 11 - March 9th

I started writing on the cards retrospectively a few days after I came out of the drunken haze. Not sure what I actually did on this day, but I think it's pretty clear that I was in a very positive and stable place mentally.

Click here to read the next part - Day 12 - March 10th

Friday, June 22, 2018

Day 10 - February 25th

        I'm always very sceptical of claims of drink spiking that don't involve anything but someone being more drunk or fucked up than they can accept they could have possibly been. If there's an element of assault in there, or if someone was passing out and vomiting then yeah, sure, that's a different thing altogether, but if someone just comes out with some shit like, “I felt so out of it last night and I only had x amount of drinks! I must have been spiked!!” Bullshit.
        Reading these cards has made me confront who I was in 2012 and I've found a lot of it pretty distasteful. When I read this card, I see myself as a 21 year old trying to explain away weird feelings with the only thing I knew anything about at that point: drugs. But who the fuck spikes drinks with acid at a nightclub? That doesn't even make sense.
        It's wild to me now that a young me would ever let himself believe something like this, because if someone told me now that the reason they were such a mess last night is because their drink was spiked with acid, I'd laugh right in their face. Pathetic. Assuming that weird feelings the previous night were down to some outside factor like acid is the epitome of childish blame-shifting. I couldn't deal with the fact that those weird feelings came from me, and I didn't want to examine what they were (guilt, probably, and I'll get to that later), so even when I wrote my private record of events on this card, I needed to blame it on something else.

Click here to read the next part - Day 11 - March 9th

Day 9 - February 24th

        Part of Sam's drug dealing operation was that along with renting his house in the inner suburbs of Adelaide, he'd get a hotel room at the Oakes just near Light Sq in the city every weekend. This was so he had a central base of operations to go back to throughout the night, rather than stashing everything in a car which he then had to find parking for. He could also then take a suitcase with changes of clothes, and we all had somewhere other than the club to drink and take drugs at. It saved us money on exorbitant drink prices in the clubs, and to be honest the dancefloor was always loud and sweaty anyway... it was almost as if we were becoming less interested in people and more interested in getting fucked up. Withdrawing into our warm, cosy shell.
        Most of the guys had started smoking ice, and I joined in a little too, although never as much as everyone else. I was hesitant to throw myself back into that life after having experienced something else in Bolivia. I didn't know what the other thing was that I wanted to do yet, maybe keep writing and be a journalist? Although I didn't really know how that would work on a practical level - “Okay, I want to be a journalist, now what? What building to I go to, where do I sign up?”
        I'd also done comedy a few times before I left for Bolivia, and that was something that I was thinking I'd maybe keep going with. Plus I was still at uni, studying politics. I wasn't sure, but I just had a feeling that I didn't want to smoke ice.

One of these nights at the hotel – I can't remember whether it was this one or one further down the line – Sam proclaimed that he was, for the first time in over two years, going in to town without any drugs on his person. He donned a cape, crown, faux-gold-tipped wooden walking-stick, and finally a t-shirt with the word 'DEALER' scrawled across a poker chip on the front. Only children could ever be so cocky, imagining that in conquering our insignificant little world that we'd outsmarted everyone. We all thought it was absolutely hilarious.

Click here to read the next part - Day 10 - February 25th

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Day 8 - February 23rd

Phil is my best friend, we've known each other since we were kids, and our parents' houses were only a few hundred metres from each other. At this point in time he was probably my only friend outside of the group of drug people I spent most of my time with. He loved to drink and party too, but he balanced that out with his real passion for design, he studied at uni, had a great girlfriend, and wanted more from life than anyone else I've ever known.
On this day he got home from a trip around Asia with his girlfriend. We sat out on the back verandah at my parents' house drinking West End tins, and whacked the empty ones across the backyard with my dad's new $300 golf club. Later when Dad asked me I tried to deny it, which is hilarious because I think I still have videos of us doing it somewhere. Good, honest fun.

Click here to read the next part - Day 9 - February 24th

Monday, June 18, 2018

Day 7 - February 18th

The acid rocked me pretty badly on the 17th, which was a Friday night. I did make it out to the club, but I remember being very fragile. When I got into town all my friends were hanging out in the alley down the side of Red Square where everyone used to sit and smoke cigs. Sam made a joke out of guarding me like an NFL player guarding the quarterback, his arms out while he shuffled around me yelling, “No one touch! VERY FRAGILE!!” – that made me feel a little better.
I'm guessing we all took a shitload of pills on the Saturday morning and drank all day, because that's what we always did. I slipped back into my old pattern so easily, it was as if Bolivia had never happened.

        The other reason I'd gone to Bolivia was... well okay, so on Easter Sunday 2011 I took acid, and the trip lasted for 36 hours. It was exhausting and hellish, and made me realise that my life for the previous few years had been a complete wreck. In the months leading up to that acid trip I'd been fired from a job after I'd showed up for work at the end of a three-day bender, not realising that the time was 7am, rather than 7pm like I'd thought – I was so fried I didn't realise until I got to the pub, which was closed, looked up at the sky and saw the sun, “That's only there in the morning... whu? OOOOOH!”.
        For real.
        I went home to sleep until my shift actually started, only to wake up at midnight, now five hours late. My phone was full of messages telling me not to bother coming back.
        Also some friends and I found an abandoned car in a park near my parents' house and set it on fire, and then finally, worse than anything else, I'd been arrested for breaking into the back of a ute on the street one night, and only escaped a criminal conviction through the one-in-a-million chance of the ute being owned by a friend of a friend who felt like he owed someone a favour. That was and still is the most incredibly lucky thing that has ever happened to me. I often think about how different my life would have been had I copped that criminal conviction, about the trouble I'd have had getting jobs, going overseas – everything. Instead I just had to pay the friend of a friend $60 to repair the damage I caused. I paid the money, and like magic they dropped the charges.
        Maybe some people would thank god here, or say that a vague, “someone, somewhere,” took pity on them, but I can be more specific than that. It wasn't god, I know exactly who it was, it was that guy – the friend of a friend – who called me and told me that I'd fucked up, but that he was willing to make it right for me. That guy gave me a second chance, and I'll be thankful to him forever.

        Going to Bolivia, as much as it was about getting away from Grace, was also about ditching the self-destructive lifestyle I'd fallen into since waking up on my 18th birthday with more freedom than I knew what to do with.
        We were all so stuck in our ways: I remember having conversations with friends in various smoked-out sheds and garages where we wondered at HOW it was even POSSIBLE to do anything other than drink and take drugs: “What do people DO all day if they don't do this?! Fuck man, it's crazy!”
        It's not that we really wanted to waste our lives away like this, it's just that we didn't know anything else. It's easy to say no to drugs when you have something to do in the morning, but when you don't have anything to do, ever, suddenly getting fucked up the only thing that makes sense. Why wouldn't you? It's fun.
        I came back from Bolivia into a world unchanged. Nothing was different, and my friends were all as lost as I'd left them.

Click here to read the next part - Day 8 - February 23rd

Sunday, June 17, 2018

Day 6 - February 17th

I remember this day really well, I was so happy to be back home with all my friends who I'd spent the last four months missing. I went to my mate Sam's place, he was a pretty successful drug dealer at the time... Hahahaha! Fuck, even just writing the phrase “successful drug dealer” now as a 27-year old is making me laugh. Ridiculous.
Sam's place was the meeting point for our group of mates, these were the guys I'd been hanging out with every weekend from when I started going to clubs and taking drugs at a semi-professional level, they were:

        Sam – e used to refer to him as 'Peter Pan' because he was a child at heart, and 'Dad' because he was the only one with any money. Sam and I had gone to primary school together, but lost touch through high school and only reconnected when I started working bar at Red Square ('Reds' for short), which was the nightclub we all went to every weekend. Sam had a flat close to town that he rented with drug money. We called it Neverland – like Peter Pan, “never grow up” – and the bins were always full of pizza boxes and gatorade bottles.
        Plummy – Sam's right hand man, was around the most by virtue of not having even the slightest trace of employment, and having been kicked out of his parents' house too many times to count. Stood by Sam when he slipped into a deep, horrific depression, and was there with him every day pulling him through.
        Jase – Tall and hairy, Jase was a DJ around town, he played at Reds sometimes, but often did sets at other venues and then came afterwards to party. Known to get upset while drunk and start sulkily stomping around the dancefloor until someone gave him a cigarette. Very, very funny.
        Sketch – Sketch doesn't feature in any of the stories I'm about to tell to be honest, but I think it's still super notable and illustrative to note that I had a friend at the time called Sketch. He was an idiot. We called him 'The Miracle Boy' because of his strange ability to come out of insanely adverse situations unscathed, with no concept of the fact that he was ever in danger.
        Someone: “Sketch where were you last night?”
        Sketch: “Oooooh fuck man these guys tried to rob me ay! Cornered me in the carpark, but I told 'em I didn't have anythin' on me, then one of 'em knew my Mum and shit and they gave me a lift to Maccas!”
        Everyone: “Of course they did.”
        Johnny – Perennial fuckup, a drug dealer as well, but somehow never made any money from it. Once I remember he was counting out a stack of cash on a Sunday, flashing it around all proud of himself, and a few separate people he owed money to saw and wryly started deducting their share from what he'd proclaimed he was holding. Ten minutes later we'd figured out that after he paid everyone back, Johnny's profit for the weekend sat at an impressive $25.

        There were plenty more in the cast, and over the months and years people came and went, but these guys were the core, and we were at Sam's place the most. We called ourselves The Lost Boys to fit with the Neverland theme, and every weekend we'd meet on Friday and do pre-drinks there, go to the club, and then head back to Neverland in the morning to kick on all day. I showed up in the afternoon on the 17th of February. Sam was asleep, but Plummy was awake and ready to party with me, so we took acid and sat in the living room drinking, waiting for the night to come.
        To pass the time we started writing lists of all the girls we'd ever slept with – normally I wouldn't even remember such an innocuous detail, let alone share it without prompting. It's kind of gross really, sitting there with your mate making a list of girls you've slept with to prove to each other how great you are. If it were up to me I'd have kept quiet about it forever, but as it happens the universe has conspired to reveal it by making it a part of something incredible.
        Months after this, Neverland was raided by police and Sam was arrested and tried for drug dealing. Because it was his first recorded offence, he didn't go to jail (although he did go down on the second offence a few years later), and was released on bail. After the trial, the police returned everything they'd taken from his house as evidence to use in the trial against him, including a piece of paper which he took a photo of and sent to me. On the paper was a list of names with the title “Taco's Fuck List”. The cops took the list I wrote with Plummy on the day I got back from Bolivia, they must have thought it was a coded list of drug dealers, which means that if they did their due diligence, every girl I slept with from 2007-2012 was investigated by the South Australian Police.
        What a reward for their charity.

        That first night back in Adelaide I also had the news broken to me that Grace, my ex, and part of the reason I'd gone to Bolivia in the first place, had started dating Johnny. When the news was broken to me, I mean Jonnny and Grace showed up at the house together like nothing was going on, and when I saw her everyone kind of looked at each other and went, “oooooooh....”
        Fuck that was brutal.
        I'd met Grace on Australia Day 2011 – I'd heard about her from a few people before then, she had a reputation as Wild Girl, a hurricane, wasn't worried if she slept with people's boyfriends and broke hearts. I thought she sounded fantastic.
        The day we met the party was at her house and she was wearing a straw fedora when we kissed for the first time in the doorway to that led from her kitchen to the backyard. She stared up at me when our faces touched, reached down and grabbed my entire crotch through my shorts while piercing my eyes and laughing, “I'M REALLY DRUNK!”
        I was in love.

        But she was broken, tough life is an understatement. Raped by her grandfather 98 times – she counted – from ages 12-13, and an ice addict by the time she left high school. Her and her drug dealing boyfriend bought a house together with drug money when she was 19, but she lost the house to him when he ran off with her best friend while she was doing a stint in rehab. I mean that is insanity, right?
        She told me all of these things in the first few months after we met that day in January 2011, but I was young, and had no idea how to respond to them. I thought that by telling me she was giving me the job of fixing these problems in her life, and so I set to work with an arsenal of moody song recommendations and very average poetry.
        We spoke every day, said “I love you” and all that, but whenever I tried to organize a meeting she'd tell me that she couldn't because it made her too anxious to see me. It drove me crazy for months, I couldn't understand how this girl who told me she loved me could, in the same breath, refuse to see me. The one time we tried to have sex I was so terrified of messing everything up that I couldn't get hard, and she never let me forget it. I'd ask her to meet up again because I wanted to see her and she'd say things like, “You gonna get it up this time, champion?”
        Around the time she broke off contact with me and started dating a girl called Sav who worked at the same bar as me, I decided to volunteer in Bolivia to get as far away from her as possible. Then I met Mélanie and rediscovered myself.

When I left Bolivia, when Mélanie and I stood crying our eyes out in Cochabamba Airport on Valentine's Day 2012, she made me promise that I'd never speak to Grace again because of what she'd done to me. I never meant to see her again, but when I got back there she was, dating my friend, and hanging out in my place, with all of my people, acting like nothing had happened. I tried to look in her eyes and see the same thing that I'd seen on Australia Day the year before, but she was guarded, and she wouldn't look back.

Click here to read the next part - Day 7 - February 18th.

Friday, June 15, 2018

Day 5 - February 11th

        I can honestly say, looking back, that the time I spent with Mélanie in South America during that first month or so of 2012 was a happy time, even though as I read these cards now it's clear that I was ready to go home. Mélanie and I had so many amazing times together travelling. We spent days sitting on buses or in awful hotel rooms. There was one bus ride from Chile to Argentina just before our 21st birthdays (hers was Feb 2nd and mine Feb 5th) when the waiter (attendant? I dunno, they only had them in Argentina, kind of like a flight attendant, real lovely guy), mistook her for a pregnant woman. She was waiting for the toilet and he offered her his seat, saying, “You shouldn't be standing up in your condition.”
        She came back to our seat, mortified. I laughed until I was red in the face. One afternoon on the bus we wrote messages to each other in pen on our backs to pass the time. They were like love leters... but... like on backs, you know? Like beautiful, fleshy love letters.
        I wrote mine on her back in English and then took a photo of it so she could read it later. She wrote on my back in Spanish, with these French 'M's that looped downwards and looked more like 'n's. She had me read it out loud and corrected my mistakes when I translated it into English. We took some happy photos, and shared turns playing Fruit Ninja on my phone, then when she fell asleep I turned the brightness down and read books that I'd downloaded when we had WiFi: 'The Brothers Karamazov', 'Edwin 'God' Little', and 'On The Road'.

My flight out of Bolivia was set to leave the morning of Valentine's Day 2012, Mélanie was flying back to France a day or two later. If you've never cried in an airport before, you've missed out. It's sad, but not in that bitter way like when someone dies, it's more uplifting. Maybe I'm just remembering it like that because it was so long ago – it definitely did hurt at the time – but if you've never cried in an airport, you're fucking up, man. Go get your heart broke, what are ya, a coward?

Click here to read the next part - Day 6 - February 17th

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Day 4 - February 9th

Jan from The Netherlands is one of those people who I still think about, even though we knew each other for a total of about two months, six years ago, and I'm fairly certain we'll never see each other again. Even online our chat is fleeting, but fuck he was fantastic.
That same weekend when I latched onto Mélanie's hand in the back of the minibus, our whole volunteer crew went rafting in a 10-man inflatable boat thingo (raft) on some Bolivian river somewhere (Bolivia). The water was fairly calm but we all sucked at rafting so enough people fell overboard to make it fun. The entire time, as the nine of us plus our Bolivian tour guide paddled against the currents, Jan and I sang the barbershop classic 'Mr Sandman' at the top of our lungs:

        Bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum!
        Oh Mr Sandmaaannnn...... Bring me a dream (bum-bum-bum-bum!)
        Make him the sweetest that I've ever seen (bum-bum-bum-bum!)
        Give him two lips, like roses and clover
        And tell him that his lonesome NIGHTS ARE OVER
        Mr Sandman...... I'm so alone (bum-bum-bum-bum!)
        I have nobodyyyyy to call my own
        So please turn on your magic beeeeaaaaaammm
        OH MR SANDMAN BRING ME A DREAM!

Everyone else hated it so much hahahaha. We loved it, and how could you not? It's a classic. ALL TIME!!

Jan and I spent a lot of time together when I first got to Cochabamba, we used to go down to a particular bar whose name I can't remember, drink beer, eat nachos, and play Chess. One time our cocaine dealer Andres asked for a game, and once we were done sniggering to each other he romped the both of us twice each in record time, before retiring because he said chess made his head hurt. That was the scariest part, it was like his brain wasn't part of him, like it was a motor that switched on in the presence of a chess board. The guy was fucking Rain Man.
We'd been buying coke off him for a month, rolling our eyes when he told us that he made a living as a “tennis instructor”, but when I think about I now, he had positioned himself as the go-to drug dealer for every new volunteer that arrived in Cochabamba through the agency we were with. He'd identified a constant stream of 20-year-old, first-world uni students looking to party, and cornered the market. In a country gripped with poverty the guy was a straight up genius and I sincerely hope he charged us double.

On Feb 9th Jan and I were sitting at the bar, drinking just after lunch time with no plan, when Jan piped up excitedly declaring, “Taco, we are going to go to the hairdresser and ask for The Local Cut!”
A picture appeared in my head of myself with a cartoonish purple streak through my dark brown hair and I thought it looked pretty sweet, so we went in to the hairdresser and I tried to explain it to them in Spanish. I had this idea in my head that they would have to bleach it first and then dye the bleached part purple afterwards, and I tried to explain that to them, but the combination of my limited Spanish and non-existent knowledge of hairdressing only led to confusion. I decided to leave it after the bleach was done because it was taking a long time, and the image in my head had started to fade anyway.

Mélanie was furious with my bright orange fringe, and I loved the attention. That night we went with a big crew to La Pimienta, which was our favourite nightclub in the city. I needed to go to the toilet real bad at one point, so I climbed over the door to a toilet stall which for some reason was locked with no one inside. The bouncers came in and banged on the door, and I drunkenly told them to fuck off. They kicked me out, but Mélanie rescued me by pleading our case with them in her superior Spanish, saying that this was our last night out in the city with everyone and we just wanted to enjoy it. I kept my mouth shut like a good idiot and we went back inside.

Click here to read the next part - Day 5 - February 11th

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Day 3 - January 26

        I woke up homesick on the morning of the Australia Day and desperately called the Australian consulate in Chile to see if they knew where I might find a congregation of my flock, but they had no answer for me. The lady on the phone hung up with a cheery, “Happy Australia Day!”
        “...Happy... Australia Day...”, I replied, my voice nearly breaking.
        I'd had the idea to call them stashed away for days as a backup plan in case no other options materialised, the day stretched out before me bare and lonely. Mélanie found a free walking tour we could go on, we were in Santiago by this point. The city reminded me of the Melbourne I'd spent a week in at the start of 2011, all leafy campuses and clean public transport.

        Sjoerd had told his parents back in The Netherlands about drinking challenge, and his dad had told him to tell me that if I made it to the end of January 'on par' (having used as many or fewer days as there had been weeks) he'd send money from The Netherlands for Sjoerd to buy me a beer.
        When I had decided to set the challenge for myself, I'd announced it publicly on my blog (hahaha 'publicly' – a press release to my 800 Facebook friends). I laid down the rules and gave a few thoughts on how I thought the whole thing might go.
        I did this partly to keep myself accountable, and partly because I had – and still do have to some extent – a very inflated sense of self-importance. I played it up like a boxing promoter hyping a fight, and challenged people to bet against me fancying that waves of scoffing disbelief would ripple through the halls of power when news of my great challenge broke out. Embarrassingly though, no one gave a fuck. Sjoerd's Dad taking an interest in my self-important affairs meant the world to me, and since this was the last day we'd be travelling together, and it was looking like I was going to make my monthly target, he bought me the beer then.

We drank with Mélanie and the two English guys from the hostel in Arica.
“Quiet Drinks?!?” reads to me like a desperate sigh of disbelief. Of “Who ARE these people?!?” Of wanting to be anywhere else.

Click here to read the next part - Day 4 - February 9th

Day 2 - January 21

I don't remember anything about the card trick here, but I do remember the rest of that night. Mélanie and I were travelling through Chile with Sjoerd and when we got to Arica we stayed in what is still one of the best hostels I've ever been to. The owner was some fiftyish-year-old guy who charged travellers with the day-to-day running of his hostel in exchange for free board. These two English guys who'd been there for five weeks made all the food, did the cleaning, and ran errands for El Jefe, while he slept in until midday, woke up, ate, slept again until 8pm, then woke up and started drinking. To me, now, that life seems like it would be profoundly sad and lonely, but when I saw that at 20 I honestly thought this guy was a fucking God.
This night was the English guys' last in the hostel, they'd been there over Christmas and New Years and were full of stories about the guy who ran the place, and he was making a big show of taking them and anyone else who wanted out for one last night on the town. I remember in the cab El Jefe drunkenly explaining that in Chile the people don't pronounce the 's' in words: “'Dohh-mil'! Decimos 'dohh-mil'”, he repeated over and over. That's instead of 'dos-mil' – two-thousand.

We went out to some night club and I spent a bunch of money on drinking. Mélanie wasn't into it, but she told me to go if I wanted, so I told her I loved her and left her in the hostel sleeping. I felt bad for leaving her there, but I wanted excitement and new people, and she seemed fine with it.

Click here to read the next part - Day 3 - January 26th

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Day 1 - January 19th

        I started 2012 in Bolivia. Since October 2011 I'd been living in the city of Cochabamba, right in the centre of the poorest country in South America. I was ostensibly there participating in a voluntary journalism internship, but when I arrived I found that said internship involved much fewer instances of people telling me how brilliant a writer I was than expected, so I transferred my focus to the taking of cocaine.
        By New Year's Eve 2011/12 my drug buddies from the beginning of the trip had shipped back to their home countries in North America and Europe, leaving me with a French girl called Mélanie, who I promptly fell in love with.
        I remember the first time we held hands in the back of this mini-bus on the way to some valley in the middle of the Bolivian jungle. Our fingers crept towards each other on the back seat, and she told me later that when our hands finally met, “you grab onto me! Like really take it hard, like a baby!” Her English was very limited when we met, and her French accent was adorable, I used to mimic it while we lay together in bed, “Hey you SHUTUP Ai-Dan you don't laff about me! Stupid Australian Boy!!”.
        I really loved that girl.

        The volunteer organisation that I went to Bolivia with was called Projects Abroad, they have offices all over the world funnelling young students from developed countries into places in Asia, Africa, and South America to work in various volunteer projects. Jan from The Netherlands was teaching kids how to swim, Mélanie and a few of the others were working at a kindergarten, and I was writing for an monthly magazine called the 'Cochabanner' that was distributed to local universities for students to practice reading in English.
        Projects Abroad set us up with host families, and provided social events during week nights so all the volunteers could get to know each other, it was a fantastic atmosphere. We were all young, and we all loved drinking.
        January 19th would have been one of those 3-4 nights a week when all of the volunteers (between ten and thirty, the numbers fluctuated month-to-month) got together at a bar to drink and figure out if we wanted to fuck each other, and if so, how. Mélanie and I were boyfriend-and-girlfriend by this point, so for me these events were just about the drinking – it's always good to narrow your focus. I remember I'd just gotten back from Peru with Mikkel (Danish) and Sjoerd (Dutch), so this night was probably a bit of a homecoming celebration.

The bar we were drinking at was called Lapsus, we loved it because they had shisha, and it was pretty much some lady's second house that she had kitted out with tables and chairs for people to drink and smoke in. She loved us because we spent our foreign money there, but I cringe to remember just how much fuss she made over us, and how drunken and awful we were in that place. It's crazy to think she had any other customers, and in fact now that I think about it, she barely ever did. The bar was upstairs in some kind of dishevelled apartment

“Threw up on Bolivian lady's washing.”
“Used a shirt I found as toilet paper.”

These are perfect examples of why I needed to stop drinking. I'm sure I told people the next day about how I went down into the courtyard with Josh from England and how we both threw up next to the communal clothes line, and I would have played it for comedic effect. To be fair, I still do find it a very funny image, some 20-year-old kid vomiting on someone's washing line, but I also understand that it's really not ideal behaviour. Whoever's washing that was would have been so, so bummed in the morning. I'd love to make a bigger deal about how sorry I am right here, but I'm also acutely aware of the fact that there's a whole year still to come.
But am am very sorry.

Click here to read the next part - Day 2 - January 21st

Introduction - The Pitch

        For my New Year's Resolution at the start of 2012 I decided to give up drinking.
        I quickly revised the goal to a more realistic, “I'll try not to drink as much,” finally arriving on the target of one drinking day a week for the year. I set rules for myself: If I had one drink, that would count as a day. If I had a million drinks, that would also count as a day. I defined a 'day' as the hours from midday to midday on consecutive days – I did it like this, rather than making it midnight to midnight, so that I could stay out all night drinking and not have to use up two days when “realistically,” I rationalised, “if I drink from 7pm until 5am, that's only 10 hours, so it shouldn't have to count as two days.”
        Genius.
        I also loosened the rules on when I could use the days. There are 52 weeks in a year, so rather than just straight up give myself one a week, I decided that I could 'save up' days by taking weeks-long spells of complete sobriety, and then 'cashing in' those accumulated days in one glorious bender. It was all very civilised.

The most important part though, and probably the only reason I ended up going through with the whole thing until the end, was that an American girl named Caitlin gave me a deck of 52 playing cards upon hearing of my wager with myself. She told me that I should pick a card out every time I used a drinking day, and write what I did that day on the card as a way of keeping track of how many days I'd used up. This deck of cards became my diary of that year, lived as it was through alcohol, because as we all well know of the addict – whether through shameful indulgence, or white-knuckled abstinence – their life revolves around their vice.

        I did actually finish the challenge (spoiler, soz), and I still have the deck of cards, complete with all the stories that I wrote on them. As it happened, 2012 was a pretty big year for me: I started in Bolivia, moved back with my parents in Adelaide, and then left on my own on a bus to Melbourne to be a comedian. I fell in love and fucked it up several times, and did more stupid shit than I care to remember.
        When I had the idea to read over these cards and write a little something for each of them, I fancied it might be a fun little exercise in nostalgia. A lot of the major events of that year are things that I still think about from time to time, stories that I tell in bars, or at parties. They feel very close at hand, and because of that I felt like I wouldn't be writing about anything I hadn't already come to terms with. The thing about forgetting stuff though, is that you don't realise you've forgotten it – there's no empty space in the brain staring back at you, telling you something ought to be there.
        What I'm trying to say is that when I started this, I wasn't aware of just how many awful things I'd done in 2012 that I was committing to writing about. Turns out there are a lot.

        So think of this introduction here as a sort of disclaimer. This is me, trying to take the only chance I have to try and explain away a lot of the shit you are about to read as youthful... let's call it 'silliness'. That sounds fun, right? It's just silliness.
        I really am sorry if anything you read here bums you out at all. I promise I didn't kill anyone, or do anything properly awful that I haven't already paid for (emotionally I mean, financially I have paid for nothing. You can't get blood from a stone.), but it was very difficult to write some of these chapters. For the sake of honesty I've kept everything in. I wanted to confront who I was head-on, because what's the use in trying to hide from the past? To pretend these things didn't happen – that's never going to help anyone. So here it is.
        Here we go.
        I'm starting right... nooooow.. NOW!

Now.
Peace, Taco.

Click here to read the next part - Day 1 - January 19th