Day 30 - July 17

Day 30 - July 17th
I'm behind the ball here
Need to learn to catch myself b4I fall
Should stop telling people about this
self-improvement
I'm doing it for myself, not the pat on the back

        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