ROADKILL
As I sat in an air-conditioned 4WD hire car zooming down a paved highway at a hundred and something km per hour with Prince’s greatest hits blaring at top volume and drinking a can of XXXX beer, I thought about how maybe the source of widespread malaise permeating the modern world was man’s disconnection from nature. And as we all know, nature is best viewed fleetingly, from a position of isolation i.e. a fast moving vehicle. You gotta be separate from it, that way you can tell that it’s nature and not the animal planet channel that you’ve fallen asleep in front of again. This insight originally came to me somewhere between Coober Pedy and Yulara as I released a steady stream of beer piss into the red dirt, looking out at the endless horizon in front of me and feeling for the first time since shitting my nappies and feeling no shame, a peace of mind. A great relaxation. A conspicuous absence of anxiety. It was nature. Or maybe it was just the relief that came with the knowledge that my bladder was no longer in danger of exploding like a bug hitting a windshield at a hundred and something per hour.
So we’re driving through the night at a hundred and something km per hour and the windshield is covered in a dense fog of splattered bugs that hit the screen at such a velocity that when they explode, all that’s left of them is a mixture of clear and orange liquid that hardens in the wind. I have no idea where the exoskeleton goes. I think it just vaporizes, or possibly enters some kind of time warp and somewhere out there is a dimension full of sentient geographical land formations with googly eyes that periodically experiences a hail of dead bug shells that fall inexplicably from a gap in the sky. They probably construct some kind of weird mythology over the whole thing. It’s a bug splotch cemetery on that glass and I toy with the idea of being a high–paid conceptual artist that drives around at high speed through countryside, letting the dead bugs accummalate on his windscreen before detaching it and selling it for millions to hidden monkeys posing as art buyers. I mourn for the bugs and the art dealers in equal amounts. I wonder how many we have killed. I keep a rough tally. I have to, it’s the only way we can tell that time is moving forward, marked by the sporadic ‘spatck!’ noise everytime one hits glass. 489 236 and counting. Bugs that is, not art dealers.
One of the main ways to see the wildlife here in Australia is to kill them with your vehicle as you drive impossible distances along roads marked with the other dead carcasses. Roos, rabbits, wombats, dingoes, foxes, possums, echidnas, tourists, anything and everything, some not even in the slightest recognizable, just mounds and lumps of mangled pulpy flesh and guts and bone…. Others frozen in their final death pose, eyes glassy and forelimbs stretched out as if in prayer… You see them for only a few milliseconds seconds as you flash by it at a high speed, and the image catches in your mind like a bright snap shot speck of dust in your eye and you linger on the animals dead horrified face for a bit too long, wondering what in gods name a wild animal must perceive or conceive or process a huge motor vehicle to be as it strikes the life out of it and god you feel morbid, knowing your good times come at a price: The death of native wildlife. Still there is no free lunch, unless you stop to pick up the animal you just killed. So far we have only killed a rabbit. We felt it go under the wheel of our hire car. We didn’t go back to check on it. I didn’t want to entertain the horror of having to finish it off myself. I can’t stand harming or killing animals but goddamn I love eating meat. Oh the hypocrisy. But it’s too easy to be a hypocrite in a world where the meat at the supermarket is all cut and carved up and devoid of all recognizable traces of it’s source. If only they put something on the meat to remind you that it was once a living thing maybe then would vegetarianism be a bit more widespread. Like staple gun the skinned face of the baby lamb so it dangled off your packet of chops. Or tie the blood splattered severed head of a chook to your roasting chicken wrapped in cling film. You get the idea. What can I say, I’m an ideas man. To the bitter end, where I will be shouting and waving placards in the street that say ‘ALL CONSPIRACIES ARE JUST A CONSPIRACY,’ and ‘THERE ARE CODED MESSAGES IN YOUR BOWL OF RICE BUBBLES IF YOU CARE TO LISTEN CLOSELY ENOUGH…’ We say a little prayer for the rabbit. Even though it’s an introduced species, you can’t hate the bunny personally. That’d be hypocrisy. I mean come on, we were the introduced species that introduced all the other introduced species. We were so rude, we introduced ourselves without any invitation and fucked everything up. We were like that uninvited guest that no one like who turns up to the party anyway and pisses in the punch and shits in the dip and wonders why everyone hates us. If you need to cull any species, go to the root of the problem and cull the homo sapiens. It could be like the salem witch burnings all over again. But instead of accusing people of being witches, you could accuse people of being massive cunts that the world could do without. Cases and evidence would be supplied, evidence presented and a final verdict delivered. At King’s Canyon, I saw a guy throw rocks at a dingo. Cull that guy. He is not needed. Then we could go through his supplies and eat all his food. That’s life. Waste nothing.

OUTBACK
We are in the middle of nowhere. We are in the outback, the never-never, down under. Why all condensations for the Australian bush revolve around a vague set of directions is understandable. The space here is so limitless there is hardly any specific reference points to the untrained eye, so the descriptive terminology is as vague as the weird fugue state you enter after driving along an unchanging red dirt road for 16+ hours. Everything begins to look like everywhere you’ve already just driven through. You realize the scale of the land against you. You are nothing more than a microbe on the ass of an elephant. After days, this sensory disorientation turns into a kind of mysticism. Awe. The landscape is alive. Time becomes a circle. There are no advertisements or billboards. No sense of history, no sense of time, no Justin Beiber, nothing. Just wide open land that stretches virtually flat towards the horizon. Nothing but the rich red dirt that absorbs the sun like a sponge in water and the odd angular tree standing stark against the sky. You can understand why serial killing is so popular here. I mean there are virtually infinite places to dump a body. The whole country is basically one massive potential shallow grave. The more I drive through it, the more I find myself entertaining these notions. It’s not me, it’s the environment making me think this. I get a hard on just thinking about all the dickheads I could cull and leave in the dirt to be eaten by the wedge tailed eagles. And no one would ever find out. Their lonely bones would bleach in the sun and I would go to the grave with my secrets. The epitaph on my tombstone would read, ‘Murder is easier than you think.’. You are driving and driving and driving and looking around and thinking about how easily someone could disappear out here leaving absolutely no trace. You can’t help it. Besides what else are you going to do out here? You gotta have a hobby. A past time. And it just so happens, one of Australia’s most popular past times is serial murder. Or maybe it’s just being in nature part of the equation, but the serial murder and the dumping of the body is what gives you the impetus to get out there in the first place. So what of it? What else are you going to do in the middle of bumfuck nowhere? How else are you going to pass the time and feel alive? Backgammon and tiddly winks? Fuck that. Basket weaving just won’t cut it. You need a hobby out here and a good one at that otherwise you will go crazy. And if that means sacraficing the life of a stranger as a safeguard against your own encroaching insanity so be it. I finger the dull blade of my hunting knife. Needs sharpening.

HEAT
It’s hot. Duh. But I mean like really fucking hot. The ground and the rocks and the earth soak up the heat so it’s like being stuck in a convexion oven. And there is nothing you can do about it. So I sit there in the intense heat, feeling it burn away everything that was unnecessary to me in that moment. Movement had shrunk to the barest minimum. Slow rhythmic breathing, that was all that was worth doing. Every single minute gesture had to be reviewed and considered multiple times before execution. Key question: Was this particular movement necessary? Any superfluous movements would cause unnecessary hassle. Unnecessary sweating. Plus it would disturb the dense blanket of flies that had accumulated all over me. I wondered what it was about my taste that they liked so much. Was it my bean based camping diet? Traces of residual curry powder in my sweat? I felt simultaneously flattered and cursed. Every time I would say, raise a finger to scratch my nose, they’d explode into the air around me, buzzing angrily into my face in retaliation before assuming new positions upon my body. So after a while I just stopped reacting and sat there in a cloud of bugs, being at one with them. Even though they had probably spent the whole day tasting animal shit with the same feet that were now tracing the edges of my lips. Even though they had probably spent the whole day laying eggs in rotting roadkill carcasses, eggs that would burst into a riot of white bloated maggots in a matter of hours to consume putrefying flesh and turn into the very same flies that were on me right now. But nothing mattered. I was no better than them, they were no better then me. We had our different methods but at the end of the day, we were just two equally successful species in a race towards extinction.
I was no longer neurotic. I was a stoic. ‘Fuck it’ became my default mantra. It was just too hot. My neuroses was shown to me as nothing more than a luxury item afforded by modern living. A product of living in an urban environment inundated with way too much informational stimuli for my brain to process. A product of too much free time and not enough adverse living conditions. I had been pampered. And with pampering came excess energy and all excess energy went somewhere eventually, and that somewhere was the nuthouse. The nuthouse inside your brain that was full of screaming immortal suicide addicts. They were really just an expression of your under used life force. In that sweltering heat that made my eyes sweat and the world melt underwater, I realized ambition too was neuroses. All my dreams and aspirations wilted in the face of the intense heat and the sense of endless space that stretched infinitely into every direction. I hadn’t thought about facebook for 11 days now. I hadn’t sent an email or used my phone to message someone about what so and so said about so and so behind their back or slept regularly or thought about what Kim Kardashian and Kanye West were doing at that exact moment and it felt fucking fantastic. The outside world was dead to me. All this striving towards an end goal, towards a mythical place that was better than where you were at that present moment, towards recognition, towards fame, towards money was nothing more than the actions of a retarded monkey trying to scratch his name in the bark of a dying tree that would one day be kindling in a fire that burned everything including itself forever. Woah that was so deep, i think i have to go murder someone now. Murder them under the milky way splattered across the night sky like a child’s brush stroke, feeling the warm breeze caress my balls as I stood there stark naked in the Valley of the Winds at the Olgas, off my face and trashed out of my skull on 100% pure life.
We slept on a salt lake that night staring at the shooting stars until they were all inside of us. I made a wish for everyone in the world to be happy. There was no doubt about it, I had gone the full hippy and I wasn’t sure if I was ever coming back.

Death was a weird sensation. It was nothing like DMT. Whoever said that DMT was as close to a near death experience that you could get was tripping.
The pain of bullets ripping through his flesh and into his brain was instantaneously short circuited by bullets ripping through his flesh and into his brain. Duh. And then…
A clear light. Perception without the organs of perception. Shadowy figures. Smoky lights. Flanging sounds. A strong faecal odor in the air. Then a click and a whrrr and bang- he was watching his life flash before his eyes.
The camera work was shaky. The dialogue sucked. There was like zero character growth and the narrative arcs floundered in cul de sacs of loose ends that never got tied up. Heavy editing was needed. More funding would of helped too. Plus it was all out of chronological order. He should of guessed it would have been, being the pretentious wannabe arthouse wanker that he was. Or maybe it just came out that way because he had shot several high velocity pieces of lead through his brains. That’s where the film was kept he was guessing.
He tried to focus on what he was watching but to be honest it was just plain tedious. It wasn’t his fault. It was a badly made piece of cinema. End of story. He kept drifting off, thinking about unrelated shit. Why people who didn’t play baseball still insisted on wearing baseball hats. What Richard Gere was doing at that exact moment. Whether those rumours about him putting gerbils up his asshole were true or not. How such rumours started in the first place. He shook himself and brought his attention back to the film once more. Man it was a long film. Truthfully, all he really wanted to do was watch the sex scenes again but when they came on, he was in them so that kind of ruined it. So that’s what I look like when I fuck he thought grimacing in disgust. He tried to masturbate anyway, but it just didn’t feel right. His dick melted like wax in his hand the minute he saw himself orgasm. Back arching, face crumpled like a cruel impression of a intellectually challenged boy lost in a shopping mall. No one ever needs to see their own come face he duly noted.
After that came like the entire second and third season of Seinfeld. He didn’t mind that. He sat back and laughed as he watched himself in his old sitting room watch Jerry and the gang get up to their hijinx. Those were some good times. A random assortment of South Park episodes followed. Then Futurama. The Simpsons. Sabrina the Teenage Witch. All the television he had ever watched being watched by him watching him watch it. Next came every movie he had laid his eyes on, one after the other. Ad breaks and previews included. Then youtube. Days after days of him just watching himself watch youtube. That Japanese cat that jumped out of boxes. That guy who falls off the trampoline and gets his face fucked by his dog. That chimpanzee who fucks the frog in the mouth. That one really weird hentai porn clip that he kept going back to where some guy turns into a multi-dicked demon with like 9 cocks and fucks all those female ninjas… He seemed to watch a lot of things that got fucked by other things. I need a fast forward button or something for this he thought. Or at least ice cream and some popcorn.
He should have been out there living a life and going on adventures instead of watching all this TV, movies, youtube etc… Creating more action so the film of his life wouldn’t so fucking boring to watch. People who approach life intellectually have the most tedious times dying.
He turned back to the film. He watched himself play Grand Theft Auto for several days.
Then came childhood. Cool. But in between all the blissful innocence and good times was all this stuff he had forgotten about. Or conveniently blocked, because it violated the idea of who he thought he was. And that was to say, a good guy. Like that time in gradeschool where he had kicked that girl in the shins for no reason. And that other time when he victimized the other loser kid in his class after he himself had just been teased. Stealing money from his parents. Not visiting a friend in hospital who had been in a serious car accident. Lying, stealing, betraying, selfishness, greed. And finally the bomb shell:
He had never actually been molested. He had been waiting sick with suspense for that traumatic memory to flash by but it just never came. Because to his horror, he realized that it never had happened in the first place. It was just a lie he had started telling people to get attention. Sympathy. To feel special. A lie he told himself to justify to himself why he was so dysfunctional. So he wouldn’t have to do anything. So he could remain a damaged victim for the rest of his life and not try. And gradually over time that lie had become as real to him as reality itself, and a false memory had grown around it like scaffolding to support a diseased tree. It had seemed so real to him all these years. The sleazy gaze peering out from under all the garish make up, streaking in the summer heat. The novelty oversized shoes bracketing his own tiny ones as he was pushed backwards into the closet. The stink of whisky breath as he was promised a balloon animal if he just touched it. Any balloon animal he ever wanted if he didn’t tell anyone. He told everyone. But it was a lie. It had all been made up. The defective product of his black soul had put away an innocent children’s entertainer for life.  His white-washed self image fell to pieces in the face of irrefutable fact. There was no doubt about it, he was a piece of fucking shit.

Then came the wasted months spent on facebook. Looking at himself look at pictures of his friend’s pretty girlfriends for hours on end. Adding wry responses to other wry responses  about shit that no one gave a fuck about. Commenting on various irrelevent aspects of nothing. Endless weeks of scrolling through status updates in some kind of fugue state, not even aware of what was happening. ‘Life is wasted on the living.’ Some whining zombie once said and he had to agree.
After what seemed like a lifetime he finally got to the bit where he wigged out and shot everyone in the comedy club. That was really the only entertaining bit of the entire film he thought glumly.
The credits rolled. It was mostly his name. Followed by a supporting cast of several hundred other names. Finally the last credit disappeared into blackness. It was for the keygrip. He was the keygrip. What the fuck was keygrip? How could he of been one when he didn’t know what one was?
Lights came back on. Bright jarring lights. He shielded his eyes. He was lying on a cold floor made of some unidentifiable material somewhere between glass and metal. He was naked. He was covered in shit. A blast of cold water shocked him awake. A bar of soap was handed to him.
‘Wash yourself.’ A voice commanded. He tried to look at where the voice was coming from but his vision was all blurred. All he could make out was two smoky figures.
‘… What?’
‘Wash yourself.’
‘… What?’ He said once more, disoriented. He lay there not moving. Useless. Confused.
He heard one of the smoky figures sigh.
‘I don’t know why we keep asking them to wash themselves. They never do it. They’re just too deep in shock.’
‘Well look, it’s worth asking.’ Said the other.
He felt hands that seemed to be both solid and gas at the same time vigorously soap him down. Then the hose was turned on him once more.
‘I don’t know why everyone has to always shit themselves when they they die.’ One of the figures said.
‘It’s like your final act on earth is to fuck up someone else’s day.’ It continued.
‘Well he’s not dead is he? He just thought he died.’ The first voice said.
‘Well it was real enough to him. Now someone has to clean that up. And that’s us.’
They hosed him down some more and he watched the dirty water slide down the sinkhole at the centre of the room.
‘What is with shit anyway? I mean it’s only shit after it leaves your body. What is it when it’s still inside of you waiting to come out?’ The second voice continued.
‘Shut up. Let’s get this over and done with so we can go to lunch already.’
A towel was thrown over his body.
‘Dry yourself.’ One of the figures commanded. He sat there catatonic.
‘Fine. Fine.’ Two pairs of smoky hands bruskly dried him with a towel.
‘We may as well not bother asking him about this bit.’ Said one of the figures, as he began wiping his buttocks and perineum down with a wet wipe while the other applied talcum powder to the area. Something clicked in him and he began to struggle.
‘STOP IT!’ he yelled, trying to shake himself out of the figure’s grip.
‘No you stop it! You’re just making things difficult!’ One of the smoky figures replied, pulling and pushing his kicking legs through what seemed to be an adult sized baby’s nappy.
‘I’M NOT A BABY!’ he yelled flailing and punching at the air around him.
‘Ooh, do you hear this Frank?’ Said one to the other.
‘Baby’s all grown up.’
‘baby’s all grown up.’ Said the other giggling.
It was useless to struggle. They were just too strong and he so eventually he gave in and let them dress him. The clothes they patiently guided onto his body were unmistakably children’s clothing but in an adult size. Denim kiddy-cut overalls complete with a poop chute. A Shirt with little bears on them. Orange bib. Sandals. Nappy. All adult sized.
Once they had finished, they stood back to admire their work.
‘There. Much better.’ One of them said.
He turned towards his two… whatever they were. He had no idea. His vision was clearing a little. But he realised the two smoky figures were just that: Two smoky figures. Their faces were indistinct. They looked solidy human, but somewhat immaterial. He leant in, trying to get a good look at one of them. The closer he tried to focus in on specific features, the fuzzier they became.
‘Woah keep your distance buddy.’ The one he was leaning towards said.
‘Can I have a mirror please?’ He asked.
‘What? No I’m afraid not. Those things aren’t allowed where we are.’
‘I’m hungry. I want something to eat.’ He said.
‘No food here either I’m afraid. You can have these though.’ A small bunch of bright blue flowers was handed to him.
‘What am I supposed to do with these?’
‘Just smell them. They’ll perk you right up.’
He lowered his face cautiously into the flowers and sniffed. They smelt like nothing but a really intense nothing. Like nothing had been loaded with MSG. But they were right. No doubt about it, they were perking him up. The more he smelled, the more solid he felt and the brighter and more sharply in focus everything became. Everything except the two smoky figures. They remained indistinct and wraith-like.
‘What are these things?’
‘You sure ask a lot of questions… Come on, it’s time to go.’
He was taken gently by his arm and led out of the door, clutching his bunch of bright blue flowers.

(To be continued…)

March the 7th, 2013. The Horsehead Nebula continued to disperse it’s swirling cloud of cosmic gas and dust across the constellation Orion. Shi’ite fighters rallied to defend a Damascus shrine. 64 yr old John Troyola campaigned to keep trolleys out of his beloved St Ives shopping centre car park. A mongrel street dog in downtown Pondicherry licked its leg on a traffic island. Somewhere in Denver a Dustmite coughed inside a couch cushion. Inside a proton within an oxygen atom, a quark masturbated.
What was this? He thought as the computer screen filled up with meaningless text. He didn’t know what to write or where to go or what to do. He was trying to climb out of a hole filled with quicksand with a rope ladder made of words. Like that had ever worked.
What was an out of work comedian anyway? He couldn’t claim to be one when he didn’t have any gigs in his diary. So what was he? A parasite. A wastrel. A lost soul hoping to god that there was a god about to intervene and give him some kind of direction. But for now he was nothing. No one.
What to do next? He had started a blog. He had done that already. It had been going okay but now he was a bit lost. He had run out of juice. He didn’t have anything to write about at the moment. Everything he wrote turned to shit and he’d hit ‘delete’ after the first page petered out. It was getting repetitive. Same shit every week. Drugs. Weird sexual exploits. Bleak view on life. Pissing his pants again. Wank jokes. Boring. Plus he felt that fictionalising his exploits had created an alter ego that he didn’t even like or agree with. Some kind of drug addicted, filthy mouthed, physically repellent, self obsessed slacker. He wasn’t all that. He was so much more. Everyone was. Besides, the only people reading it had been mostly other loser comedians and that was an audience he didn’t really want because a) there weren’t many pretty girl loser comedians that would fuck him and b) they had no money they could give him.
Maybe he should get on twitter. Start a youtube channel. Get on the social media side of things. Use facebook more effectively as a self publicity tool. Recently it had served no other purpose then to indicate to him how depressed he was. The more time he spent scrolling through the status updates charting the gradual mental deterioration of his friends, the more it meant that in some way he had failed. He needed to hustle. He couldn’t rely on the establishment to help anymore. DIY all the way. But he was lazy. He didn’t want DIY, he wanted to GSETDIFY – Get Someone Else To Do It For You.
Maybe he could write a novel. A best selling novel. Yeah that’s what he should do. He would write a book that would sell fuckloads and then he’d never have to work again. Or become a reporter for VICE. Sure that would be cool. Right? That was the dream wasn’t it? What?
Podcast. Yeah that’s what he would do. Podcast. Everyone had one these days. He bet he could do a good one. What he really needed to do was to stop talking about what to do and just do something. He looked at the to-do list tacked up on his bedroom wall. At the top of the list was ‘Write a to do list’. That was all that was on the list. But there wasn’t much of a space between ‘to’ and ‘do’ so it looked like ‘Write a todo list.’ Like he was going to list all the dogs that had ever played Todo from ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ He could only think of one and he didn’t even know what its name was. It was the one from the film ‘The Wizard of Oz’.
He lay on his bed. On his soft coffin of memory foam staring at the ceiling wishing he could forget everything. Choose your own adventure endings to his life crowded his mind. Most of them were bad endings. He thought about his friend T. 31 year old actor. Hung himself last year. Heard about it on facebook. Was there life after facebook? Now he could see where T was coming from. Why not? It seemed like options were blinking out. No exit. Rope. Stool. Boom. All this shit over and done with. No more being trapped. But for now he was trapped. Shunted towards a fate where he would work minimum wage in some shit kicker job for the rest of his life cause he hadn’t planned ahead. No way. He had something to give the world. He was sure of it. He just wished he knew what it was and how he could exploit it for cash.
He had spent the earlier part of the day scanning the job listing sites. The only thing he was qualified for was… Nothing. He had no qualifications. Every job requested previous experience. How were you supposed to get previous experience when every job requested previous experience? How was he supposed to explain a 10 year gap in his CV? ‘I watched too many fictional movies where everything worked out in the end and decided to base my life on them.’ They wouldn’t buy that. He had put all his eggs in one basket and now… Now he didn’t have any eggs left. He had eaten them all. In the toilet with the lights off as soon as he’d been given them because he had self control issues. Maybe he should help out at a charity or something. Become a care worker. Think about someone who wasn’t himself for once. Quit being so self obsessed. Quit complaining. There were people out there missing half their faces. Torn off by cluster bombs. Or wild animals. People with diseases that made their eyes fall out whenever it rained and yellow pus spurt out of their armpits. Who would want to be friends with something like that? What did he have to complain about? Nothing. Life had always been too easy and that’s what made everything so hard.
He thought about what skills he had. Drug dealer. He could be a drug dealer. Yeah just small time. Nothing major. He’d just deal pot to his friends, small amounts, nothing more than half q bags. Just to cover rent. He’d dumpster dive for food and during his down time he could work on his writing. Do the odd paid gig. Maybe save some money to do some festival shows again. Maybe he could grow weed. Just a few plants. 4 or 5 of them, but big ones. Six footers. Sell it to all the comedians during festival time. That was a great idea. He could make shitloads off them. Use the money to pay for his festival shows. Then he would get spotted and… He could do that.
He got off his bed and looked at his face in the mirror.
‘I LOVE YOU, I BELIEVE IN YOU, YOU CAN DO IT.’ He said.
‘I LOVE YOU, I BELIEVE IN YOU, YOU CAN DO IT.’ He repeated.
‘I LOVE YOU, I BELIEVE IN YOU, YOU CAN DO IT.’ He repeated silently in his head.
‘F-F-F-FFFFFFUCK YOU! FUCK YOU ASSHOLE!!’ He yelled, smashing the reflection of his face with his fist. Bits and pieces of mirror fell on the floor and blood poured from the lacerations on his hands.
‘OWW FUCK!’ he yelped, pain bringing him back to his senses. What a cliché he thought to himself. Every fucking male protagonist in every book and film smashes a mirror.
‘Is everything alright Ricky?’ he heard his mom say downstairs.
‘Everything is alright and that’s what’s wrong.’ He muttered under his breath.
‘YEAH IM JUST WATCHING A VIDEO MAH’ he yelled.
He could stand it no longer. It was time. Time to do something. Anything. Strike out in no particular direction, with great force. That was his motto. At least get more material to write a stupid blog about. He opened up his cupboard and standing on a chair, dug into the back of the top shelf. He pulled out a heavy rectangular box by its handle, went downstairs, put on his shoes and walked out of the house.
‘When will you be home?’ His mum called out after him.
‘I don’t know mah. Love you.’ He said, walking towards the future.

He walked to the station to catch the train. He’d been away from home for three years and now that he was back there were so many fucking Asians. Everywhere. Like vermin. He could say that right? For the least part, physiologically he was Asian. But not one of these Asians. These Asians just fucking looked at him like he was weird or something. All the time. Must be his weird hair. Or the clothes. Or his size. They knew he wasn’t one of them. Maybe he was being paranoid. Maybe he smoked too much pot. Or not enough. That was a lie about all Asians looking the same. If all Asians looked like him, he would of noticed by now. But these Asians, they kind of all looked the same. Not him though. He was different. He was special right? He wasn’t really Asian. He was just a fat western pig in ethnic drag. He knew this because he could understand why some people didn’t like Asians. They were so fucking inscrutable. They hardly ever smiled. They were kind of conservative. Kind of boring. They didn’t mix with other groups. Well most groups didn’t mix with other groups. Groups needed to mix. Then the groups would break down and it would just be one big, confused group. And in that confusion, he would rise to power. But what the fuck did he know? He was racist. He had assimilated.

He hopped a train into the city. Walked to the venue where the gig was on. It was an open mic. He walked in. There were about 10 people in the crowd scattered around the room. They all had that expression on their faces like their trust had been broken one too many times. Some cunt with a ukulele was onstage singing a comedy song that wasn’t funny about having a ukulele. 20 comedians milled about up the back in the shadows like hungry ghosts. He wasn’t even sure they were comedians. Most of them were just damaged rejects with a website and a business card that said they were comedians. There was a fine line between ambition and delusions of grandeur and sometimes it could go either way.
‘Can I get a spot?’ He asked the woman with the clipboard sitting by the door. She was garishly made up. She was an awful human being.
‘I don’t know… We are pretty full tonight.’
‘Just a five minute spot. I just really need to get on tonight.’
‘Well I don’t know if there’s space…’ Of course there was space. There was always space. Plenty of it. In all the empty seats in that godforsaken black hole of a room. She just enjoyed the power she had here that she lacked in her everyday life. The worst abuses of power were always at the pettiest level. She was Hitler of the compost heap, and he was a rotting banana skin begging her for worms to come eat and shit him out.
‘Listen I really need to get on. I’m doing a short spot on a cable talk show tomorrow so its important to me that I get my shit down. 3 minutes just give me three minutes.’ He lied.
‘Oh TV? Okay well then okay. I will squeeze you on at the end. 3 minutes.’

He sat up the back to await his turn. A fog of tedium-induced apoplectic rage grew around him as he watched the new acts one-by-one do their routines like retarded kids at show and tell time at the special school. Sure open mics were fun for the first 9 years but after a while they started wearing him down. Going to one now was like being trapped in the ninth circle of hell and being forced to watch a parade of broken toys that could not be fixed that no child would ever want plead their case as to why they shouldn’t be incinerated. They should all be incinerated. All those new guys with their blind youthful arrogance. Full of beans. Hungry. He used to be a new guy. What happened to that new guy? Somewhere along the way he had gone AWOL after watching too many of the shit guys get ahead. Why did so many shit guys get ahead? They sucked. They weren’t funny. But the bookers loved them. And worst of all, the crowds loved them. This was why democracy never worked.
His name was called and he took to the stage with his box. He leaned towards the microphone.
‘Good evening… I’ve been doing this for too long now, and I just can’t see a way out…’ He said.
There were some nervous titters.
‘…I’m trapped and I’m lost and all I see is storms up ahead…’
More nervous titters.
‘…This is a sick game where everyone loses…’
Someone coughed.
‘… But tonight for once, I’m going to be the winner.’
He clicked open his box and pulled out a loaded PP-19 Bizon 9mm submachine gun and began to open fire.
‘YOU NEVER LAUGHED AT MY SHIT HUH?? WELL THAT’S TOO BAD!!LAUGH AT THIS YOU FUCKING BITCHES!!!’ Bullets sprayed across the room in a wide semi circular arc. The bodies in the audience exploded in a riot of blood. His line of fire caught the booker across the throat, shearing off her head in a stream of lead. It fell bouncing to the ground with a look of terrified surprise on its face. He watched as the frantic shadowy figures up the back fell down one by one.
‘HAHAHAHA IS THIS FUNNY??? WHERE’S THE LAUGH TRACK NOW????’ Shells fell in a pile around his feet and the smell of cordite hung in the air. He stopped firing. The low, tortured moans of the mortally wounded filled the air.
He looked around at the mess of dead bodies before him, breathing heavily.
‘You’ve been a great crowd… But I think we should see other people.’
He put the gun beneath his chin and pulled the trigger. Bullets burst through the top of his skull coating the ceiling above him with brains. His body collapsed to the floor.

TO BE CONTINUED…

People holding signs with our names on them meet us at the airport and we are driven to our hotel rooms in an envoy of sleek black vans. We gather in the lobby for briefing. There are around 100 other comedians from Australia and the UK milling about uselessly, not talking to each another. Autistic kids at a school camp dance. The level of insecurity, bitchiness and negativity in the room would of driven even the most optimistic motivational speaker to suicide within minutes.
‘We were supposed to film you all coming in today, but we figured it was just easier if we did it tomorrow morning instead.’ The executive producer lady tells us.
‘So tomorrow around 6am, we will drive you back to the airport to film you arriving. Bring your suitcases with you, they can be empty, but you must bring them.’
The briefing ends. I go to my hotel room. Its fucking amazing. It’s so amazing i take my clothes off as soon as i close the door and walk around. I sleep naked on a king size bed with satin sheets. I will buy this hotel when i make it I think.
The next morning they drive us back to the airport with our empty suitcases to film us pretending to arrive. This means they have to film all 25 of us coming down the same escalator close to 30 times. The host is some blonde airhead TV presenter slut with a nice smile and zero personality in a safari suit, inexplicably holding a toy whip. Evidently that was the closest ‘Australian’ garb they could find to approximate our perceived national dress code or whatever. Each time we come down the escalator the director yells at us ‘BE MORE AUSTRALIAN.’ So we would go down the escalator the next time saying ‘MATE BLOODY HELL MATE STREUTH BLOODY MATE’ and all the other stuff that real Australians never say and when we would get to the bottom she would be like ‘YOU WEREN’T AUSTRALIAN ENOUGH, YOU NEED TO BE MORE AUSTRALIAN.’ And we would ride back up the escalator thinking of more ways to be more Australian, which in my opinion consisted of me telling her to fuck off and get fucked ya cunt but i knew that wasn’t appropriate so i just hid up the back, trying to obscure my precious face from direct view of the camera as we went down the escalator once again trying to be more Australian. My dreams were radically downsizing with each descending cycle. By the 20th time down the escalator everyone was red in the face from screaming at the top of their lungs ‘THATS NOT A KNIFETHROW ANOTHERSHRIMPONTHE BARBIEMATE DINGO ATE MY BABY MATE JIZZWALLERWALLERBINGBANG BONGOWINGOWOZZAWOZZAWANGOCORROBOREEBAZZAWAZZACARPENTERIA’ and all manner of weird gibberish that approximated the American conception of the stereotypical Australian.
We could of done this for the rest of time with our suitcases full of rocks like a more futile version of the myth of Sissyface but after the 26th take, due to time constraints they had to stop and we were whisked to the local Miami comedy chain club for the 2nd round auditions. There, we were all divided up according to some arcane system into groups and sub groups and sub sub groups that stretched around the block in multiple directions. Livestock outside an abbatoir. The host looked like a black ventriloquist doll. He had that weird polished doll look that so many TV people often have. Up close you could see he had had his eyebrows plucked and shaped too many times and his skin looked like it had been buffed by a belt sander. Talking to him was like listening to a bank of pre- recorded messages punctuated by a fake laugh and a smile that he thought was charming but in reality came across as creepy and robotic. Good luck to him though, he was just trying to get ahead like the rest of us. I line up behind the 100 other comedians from the UK and Australia. We all sit down for five minutes, then get up and shuffle forward a couple of feet and then sit down again. Shit prizes in a broken skill tester machine. After an hour of this my turn comes up. I have two minutes to give them a good enough reason to get me on the show. That’s how long all of our sets had to be. Two minutes, no more no less. Two minutes? What the fuck kind of set is that? That’s like 4 short jokes. At the time i didn’t have 4 short jokes. I didn’t even have one joke, short or long. At that point in my creative development I just had long self-involved rants that invariably ended with some reference to fucking something, usually an animal or an inanimate object. Not much has changed. I don’t know why i thought that passed as comedy at the time but hey I was going through a transitional phase and now was not the time to go through a transitional phase. I am still waiting for this transitional phase to end. I decide to do my old shit that I no longer cared about and didn’t want to do in the hope of getting ahead. Play the game. Give them what they want. I wish I had known then like i know now, that what I thought they wanted was never what they actually wanted. And what they wanted wasn’t what I had. Or that sometimes they just had no fucking clue what they actually wanted and was as confused as I was.
I go in. Black ventriloquist doll man with the eyes blank as buttons sticks a microphone in my face as I walk down the corridor to the venue.
‘What do you want to say to all the viewers out there watching this?’ he yaps.
‘Why are you watching this trash? Every waking moment on this planet is a gift. Death could strike you down at any time anywhere.’ I wanted to say.
‘Hi.’ I said.

I go in. The club is the kind of place where wealthy germ freaks go to find a life partner to suffocate themselves in hermetically sealed polyurethane bags with. I thought there was going to be a studio crowd but there wasn’t. Just two judges about 100 feet away from the stage sitting in the darkness up the back of an empty room with a seating capacity of around 200. Directly in front of me circling the stage edge is a tracking camera chugging along a semi circular track.
‘Hi.’ One of the judges says.
‘Hi.’ I say into the blackness, shielding my eyes from the blinding spotlight. I’m a bug under a magnifying glass and all I can see are the illuminated dust particles that swirl in the tunnel of spotlight before me. At the end of the vortex I see my dead relatives asking me in a language I don’t understand why I have to masturbate so much. I ask them why they have to keep watching me. They shrug and pretend to not understand what i’m saying.
‘Which one are you?’ The other judge says. I shield my eyes to try and get a look at them. I can’t see their faces. Maybe they don’t have faces.
‘Uhh.. Nick. Nick Sun.’ I hear shuffling papers.
‘Ahhh okay. Well… Do your stuff for us. At two minutes we will cut you off.’
‘What like start right now? Just to you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh and don’t look at the tracking camera please, just look straight ahead.’ the other one adds.
I’m by no means an expert, but I think Stand up comedy involves at least two things: a) a comedian and b) an audience. But there was no audience here, just two shadowy authority figures up the back of an empty room.
This is it Nick. Just do it.
‘Good evening.’ I begin and immediately think how odd it is that I’m addressing a) two people amidst 200 empty chairs, b) two people i have already addressed, and c) It’s not the evening it’s the afternoon.
‘You guys are a great crowd and it’s good to be here.’ I lie.
‘How are you guys doing?’ I ask no one.
I start my routine but my timing is off because I’m trying to pause in the right places and the right places is where the audience is laughing and there is no audience, just a silent black void that absorbs my rapidly diminishing words. The camera moves back and forth along its track filming me die in front of no one.
I think of the old zen koan, ‘If a joke is told and no one is around- save for two industry people and a tracking camera – is it funny?’
No. No, it isn’t.
‘That’s enough.’ They say.
‘So…uhhh… Nick, we just want to ask you some questions… Firstly, why do you want to be on ‘Last Comic Standing.’?’
‘So I can rise to a position of power high enough where I can track down anyone who has ever wronged me in life and destroy them.’ I wanted to say.
‘My mother is really sick, and I need to win this to pay for an operation to save her.’ I said.
‘Oh my god! What’s wrong with her?’ One of them asks.
‘I think he’s joking.’ says the other one bored.
‘Oh… That’s not very funny. You shouldn’t joke about that. You can go now.’
I leave. All my delusions of grandeur have fallen down and I’m left sitting in the rubble. I get the feeling that maybe I wasn’t Australian enough for them. Or maybe I just suck and I’m a bad loser. Ventriloquist puppet man jumps up in front of me and sticks a microphone in my face. A cameraman trains his camera to get an ultra-close up shot of my shattered dreams, the money shot in this failure porn for the disgruntled masses.
‘How did it go?’ he asks. Camera man zooms.
‘Terrible.’ I say.
‘Oh that’s shame. How long you been going for?’
‘Almost five years now.’
‘Oh hey man, it takes a long time to get to the top. You will get another shot don’t worry about it!’ he bleats.
I wasn’t so sure. I could tell by the way the foundation on his face was cracking to reveal wrinkles deep as crevasses that he had been waiting a long time to get to the top and now this was about as close to the top as he could manage and it was only a matter of time before his limited reservoir of optimism ran out and his soul was eaten by despair. But good luck to him. He’s just another midnight cowboy looking for love like the rest of us.
I retire to the courtyard to commiserate with all the other losers. Fuckit everyone says. Fuckit. A bunch stay to watch the 3rd round auditions but me and few others decide to get totalled on the daquiris from the nearby bar instead. They are like pint sized 7/11 slushies but have loads of tequila in them and come with an extra test tube shot of tequila sticking out of them. After about four of them I’m wasted drunk with a killer ice cream headache. Someone passes around a cuban cigar. All I taste is sugar and ash. I don’t remember much after that only that at some point I ended up at Hooters staring drunkenly at the breasts of a waitress I couldn’t tip. I would prefer shit service for cheaper prices I tell her. I just want a beer, I don’t need you to pretend to be my friend. But in this country, money is more vital than air. ‘In God We Trust’ it says on their bills. What they never specified was that the God they were referring to was the money that statement was printed on. Judging from her blank look this insight that I share is worthless to her but I got no money left, because it turns out that it wasn’t all expenses paid, it was more like, keep all your dockets, make sure you don’t spend more than forty bucks a day and we will try and re-imburse you for the stuff we feel is worth covering 5 months down the line. Fuck you NBC and your false promises, that 9/11 footage was fake and you know it. The twin towers never fell. They just got put in storage beneath the Pentagon I yell at her. We are asked to leave.

I wake up with one of the worst hangovers in my life since high school and that other time in Sweden when i mixed undercooked shellfish with schnapps and red wine. Oh god I feel sick. I have to find out if my friend M____ is okay because he isn’t answering his door and we have to leave for the airport like right now. We are literally bashing the door in. No response. I have visions of him lying dead on the floor choked to death by his own tongue and vomit. Cool. We eventually have to get the security to break in but just before they break in, we hear a disoriented voice screaming ‘WHAT??? WHAT? FUCK OFF!’ he is still smashed up drunk and we have to physically drag him out of bed. He resists, violently flailing his limbs at us with the intent to harm. He has his shirt on but no pants or underwear. This what dreams become: A semi-comatose drunk with red eyes that point in different directions and breath that could wilt cactus, wearing nothing but a puke stained collared shirt with the buttons done up out of sequence with his dick flopping out, trying to attack the people attempting to help him.
We get into the taxi to the airport. My drunk friend winds down the window and starts yelling at anyone and everyone on the streets ‘SHOW US YA FUCKIN TITS!’. He should of saved this for when they were filming us going down the escalator at the airport all those times. ‘Can you be less Australian?’ I ask him. We get to the airport and I immediately run to the toilet and puke my guts up. It’s a deep puke. I don’t sound human. I get onto the plane and pass out immediately. I come to as we land in San Francisco where we are catching our connecting flight home. As I stand up to get my hand luggage, I catch a big waft of piss stink. There’s a baby in front of me. Stupid baby pissing itself I think. Then to my horror, i realise my crotch is damp. The baby is innocent. I am not. Makes sense. I thought it was a bit odd that the baby’s piss smelt like daquiris.
‘I can smell urine’ The African American woman in front of me says. But she pronounces urine ‘Yooo-riiine.’
‘I can smell Yoooo-riiine’ she says again.
‘Can anyone else smell this Yoooo-riiine?’ She says.
‘I can smell Yoooo-riiine’ she says once more looking around.
I rush out of the plane as fast as i can. I don’t know what to do. My clothes are in my checked in luggage. I had not factored pissing myself into my itinerary so I’m ill prepared. I have no choice but to let the piss dry on me. I use the hand dryer in the bathroom to dry my pants. I’m on my tippy toes in a sustained pelvic thrust position to get a good blast on my groin area. My balls tingle. It’s not unpleasant. A man walks in and looks at me. I look at him. He looks away.
I get on the connecting flight destined for Sydney. By chance they have a couple of Last Comic Standing finale episodes from previous seasons on the in-flight entertainment. Most of the comics on the show aren’t funny. And the few that are don’t get far. In one finale, this Vietnamese guy wins because he sucks and he is being bullied by the other comedians and the American voting public feel sorry for him and sympathy vote for him to win. In the other, a guy with cerebral palsy wins. His jokes are okay, but not as good as his disability so I call foul play. Life is often unfair I conclude. But at least I don’t have cerebral palsy so no complaints. I turn off the insipid TV world. I’m sick of that plastic flower. I just want to be in a forest. I fall asleep into dream.

In my dream I’m in my childhood bedroom staring at the stars through the skylight above me. The door opens and the incredibly attractive lady in the skimpy black dress walks in again. ‘I want to fuck you’ she says. I take the silver Uzi from under my pillow and fill her full of holes. The wave of bullets shreds her to pieces. Where the blood hits the carpet, flowers grow. Real ones. I spit on her mangled corpse. As I’m picking the flowers, the Siamese twins burst in waving their gun at me. The angry one with the permanently dissatisfied face gets it first. I shoot him in the mouth, the stomach and the crotch. He crumples to the ground gurgling and screeching, dragging his brother down with him. I kick the gun out of his hand and with my foot flip the dead angry one over to reveal the one with the sad blackhole eyes kicking his legs uselessly in the air like a beetle.
‘Spare me!’ he begs pathetically.
‘Your whore is dead and so is your brother. You can’t live without them.’ I say.
‘The question is how long are you going to have to drag that corpse attached to you till you die as well.’ His eyeless eyes widen in horror.
‘Kill me then! I beg you to end it now!’
‘You have already killed me so many times I think it’s only fair that I watch you die in the slowest possible way.’
I sit in lotus position on the dead woman’s body, spread the plucked flowers in a circle all around me and I begin to meditate, rudraksha rosary in one hand, gun trained on the remaining twin in the other. It takes hours for him to die. Moaning in strangulated woe as rigor mortis slowly spreads from across his brother and into him. As his meat freezes into it’s final shape and the light in his eyes dims, I wank myself off. I feel my kundalini rise from the base of my spine. When it hits 3rd eye chakra, everything bursts into flames.
I wake up laughing with a hard on. The plane shake and rolls. It’s the heaviest turbulence I have ever encountered. 10-15 minutes go by and it just gets heavier. All the babies in the plane are crying. My fingers are dug into the arm rest till they’re white. Several baggage compartments clatter open and bags fall. This is it, I’m going to die. I’m going to die in pants i pissed myself in. On the way back from failing to audition for a show I hate. And theres nothing I can do about it. I make my peace with death. I can’t learn to fly a plane better than the pilot between now and the time we crash. I’m not going to discover innate, fully-developed aeronautical engineering skills before we plough into the dirt and explode into smithereens. We are all dead meat and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. Nothing matters. All will be forgotten. I look out of the bouncing window frame. We are inside a cloud the size of a mountain. All around me is pure white. I smile.
I am in a cloud.
I am in a cloud.
In my piss.
I am in a cloud.
I am free.

Back in February 2008 I participated in the NBC syndicated television series ‘Last Comic Standing.’ The show concept was pretty much pop idol but with standup comedians instead of wannabe singers. It was season what the fuck and they had run out of ideas for the American show so this season they decided to go global and stretch the feelers out to England and Australia.
One bright Saturday I found myself lining up outside the Sydney Comedy Store for auditions with another 100 or so other comics from all over Australia. Three hours pass but the line doesn’t move an inch. By the second hour I was feeling antsy. Everyone was antsy. And severely dehydrated. But we all had stars in their eyes and a thirst for something greater then water. This could be it. The legendary big break from nowhere. One minute you were just an open mic schlub doing his crappy schtick in some Newtown Lesbian bar, the next, you were on national AMERICAN TV. So we put up with it. Nothing like dangling a golden carrot in front of our faces that let them treat us like shit. I looked around at all of us comics standing there. Us stupid, gullible comics, retarded from standing in direct sunlight for over two hours straight. We were nothing more than just another bunch of slaves to hope. We had all mistaken sunstroked delerium for dreams. Brought up to believe that one day we would all be stars. But if everyone was a celebrity who would watch us? Mirrors?
We were nothing but patsys in the American entertainment machine. More meat for the grinder. This became clear when finally i saw a comic friend W___ emerge from the comedy store building.
‘What the fuck is taking so long man??’ I asked him.
‘They brought in a fucking wild kangaroo and a dingo and lost control of it in the comedy room and it’s taken them 3 hours to get them under control!’ he said in disgust.
I laughed because i thought he was joking but five minutes later two wildlife handlers exited the building with two large cages with blankets over the top. What I assumed were dingo feet stuck out the bottom of one and kangaroo paws and tail out the other.
Oh god i thought. What have we gotten ourselves into?
I decided I couldn’t be fucked. This was a big warning sign. And i had shit to do. Okay i had nothing to do, but i was sick of standing in line like a pawn in some game i didn’t even want to play. I went upstairs to check things out first hand. The comedy store was abuzz with AMERICAN TV crews. Everyone was carrying on like they were involved in some kind of important history defining moment. The air was so humid with self-importance that it congealed on my skin like celebrity cum. I tried to get some answers but the crew were dismissive. My place in the invisible ladder was made known to me. A sad irony is that the actual peformers were often on the lowest rung of the entertainment machine. They were used, abused and taken advantage of. Because if you refused to be treated in such a way, there would always be another hundred scum sucking bottomfeeders waiting behind you to take your spot for even less. And that was what made us comics deserve to be treated like the miserable oppurtunistic pathetic subhumans that we were. We were all expendable until our commercial value rose to a high enough figure where we could buy our own freedom back off the system that had enslaved us. Make us pay for something we already had. And then hopefully… Power. A higher status. A higher rung. A supermodel wife made of cocaine. A yacht filled with beluga caviar. A private zoo of exotic orphans. Expensive depression. And finally sweet suicide death in the form of a golden bullet from a golden gun ripping through the mid brain and chipping the Italian marble behind your slumped headless body.
But for now I was at the bottom being ignored by everyone down to the keygrips and the catering staff. I wanted to slit the throats of their children in front of them just to get their attention. Finally i found the casting director and bulldozed my way into her personal space during some trivial task she was treating with great importance. How much longer i asked her. Maybe another two hours she said not looking at me, irritated. Okay fuck this, i thought. Fuck my shot at fame. I’m going to my friends place to smoke bongs and watch violent films. I stole some biscuits from the catering table and left. They were okay. I gave half a biscuit to a duck. I went to my friends place to smoke bongs and watch violent films and that’s just what we did. After the third cone i was gripped by a paranoid fear. Had i just fucked things up? Had i just missed out? should I of just stood there in the searing heat while my brain cells melted into my scalp in order to appear on Television? That all-unseeing blinding eye that binded people to furniture? That eater of time and human potential? Did I want to be just another agent of samsaric unawareness?… Maybe. My mobile phone rings. It was my agent at the time. He was like a step dad who was never around, and when he was, he’d rape me for 15 percent.
Agents. Managers. Comedy industry people. Yech… What the fuck kind of existence did these parasites lead? What did they do all day I always wondered? Phone calls. Wheeling and dealing. Sycophancy. Networking and backslapping and bitching and playing power games like the two faced pieces of manipulative shit little bitches that they were. Leaning in a high backed leather swivel chair smoking a cigar and laughing and jerking off behind a mahagony desk the size of a Polynesian island. Probably.
The weird thing about people involved in the comedy industry is how humourless most of them were. I could never talk to most of them. Most of the time it wasn’t like talking to a person, it was like talking to some kind of fucking cipher with gold coins for eyes, spewing shards of other conversations and rumours they had heard from somewhere else. Fakes and phonies. I wanted to drink their blood and throw it back up in their faces as they died. But hey, networking was never my forte. I found it difficult to pretend to like people i hated in order to get something I didn’t even want from them. Call it integrity, call it a self destructive low tolerance threshold for cunts.
‘Heeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyy…’ He said.
‘Hi.’ I replied.
Why am I with this guy? i wondered. We had nothing in common. We didnt see eye to eye. He didnt get me and i didnt get him and what he thought was best for me violated my basic belief system. I was being groomed to be some kind of token asian guy they put on panel shows so the network could say they weren’t racist. They were racist.
‘How was the audition maaate?’ he said, snake oil dripping through my mobile phone reciever and all over my cheek.
‘Ah I pulled out. I had to wait for too long…’
‘Why’d you do that? You had a good chance there!’
‘They brought in wild animals into the Comedy Store. Wild animals. Into a comedy club. I just got the feeling I wasn’t what they were after.’
‘You wasted a chance. It would of looked great on your CV but it’s your career mate.’ he hung up.
Career. Yes. What the fuck was this thing called a career? I got into stand up because I didn’t want a career, I didn’t want a boss, I didn’t want to have to write up a CV or a resume and now it had all backfired horribly on me. I was suspicious of this whole career business. I was sure it was some kind of conspiracy designed to keep us occupied between just after school and just before death so we wouldn’t try and over throw the government or some shit. Cavemen never needed to get a career. It was either hunter or gatherer and that was it. No IT specialist or HR assistant manager. We were all being sorted into boxes we didn’t fully fit into for easy storage. The time to rebel was surely soon. All we needed was a leader but i never looked good in camouflage gear so it wasn’t going to be me.
Half an hour my manager called me back.
‘Hey, listen, you got another chance. We just had a last minute dropout from the one of the guys picked to go. Do you want his spot? You get an all expenses paid flight to Miami for the second round auditions.’
Did i ever. Fuck yeah.
I was going to Miami. To become a superstar.

Two weeks later i found myself on a plane to Miami via Sanfranciso. It was a 28 hour, two part long haul flight. Each way. I was going to be in transit for a total of 56 hours for a total of 40 hours actually spent in Miami. We were spending 18 hours more in transit then at the actual destination. But hey it’s all about the journey and whoever made that horse shit saying up was obviously going somewhere shitty and he knew it.
The previous night, I was with the girl i was seeing at the time, A___. We were hanging out in an abandoned railway yard making out against a chain fence. It was then that i spotted it. A white rabbit. A pure white rabbit, eating the tufts of grass growing between the rotting railway sleepers. I became convinced that this was a good omen. Alice in wonderland. Jefferson Airplane. It all made sense. This meant that i was going to get through the audition. I was going to become a superstar. I was going to jettison this mundane everyday existence that hindered me and my fellow common man. That dragged us down in the anonymous swamp of mediocrity. I was going to rise into the sky and burn bright, joining the rest of those pretty empty nobodies on that flashing box of unrealistic expectations. We would stand on top of the drowning bodies of the plebeian masses and crush their faces underfoot with our expensive shoes. They’d worship us as we murdered them and promised them a better land. A better land we had bought with their blood. But there was no better land. For them or for me. Just different angles on the same shit heap with intermittent reprieves.
But like everyone else in this world I was convinced I was special.
I was an idiot. I had been duped.
For the 28 hours on the way there, fantasies ballooned out of proportion in my mind. I was going to win the competition. Then onwards and upwards to fame and fortune I’d go. Easy. In a few months time i would ditch all my old friends to party with Beck and the ghost of River Phoenix. I would be a scientologist eating blue green algae fruit smoothies and shooting homeless people with a silver Uzi on my private beach in Malibu. I watched the in-flight movies in a half asleep daze and their narratives merged with mine. No longer would be I just another social security number in a machine too big for me to see. I would be a SOMEONE. I’d shit limousines and bathe in the blood of jaywalkers. I fell asleep and into dream. In my dream, I was in my childhood bedroom, in bed looking at the stars out of the skylight above me when suddenly this incredibly attractive woman walked in. She was dressed in a tight figure hugging skimpy black dress. She looked like a whore at a funeral. Her flawlessness was breathtaking. I needed to fuck her. ‘I want to fuck you.’ She said. ‘Yes please.’ I replied. ‘Okay, in a minute but first, let’s just let you look at me a bit more.’ She posed this way and that on my bed, just out of reach, pouting like a fetish model. ‘Can I fuck you now?’ I asked again urgently. ‘Okay. In a minute, but first, let’s just let you look at at me a bit more.’  Again, she posed this way and that just out of reach. I could take it no longer. ‘I need to have you right now.’ I said. ‘Okay in a minute, but first let’s just let you look at me for a bit more.’ And again she slunk and skimped and minxed her way around me and into my senses. I lost all self-control and tried to grab her. ‘THIS SICK FUCKER TRIED TO TOUCH ME!!’ She screamed. Straight away the door opened and a pair of Siamese twins joined at the back ambled in. One of them pushed me up against the wall. ‘YOU LEAVE HER ALONE! YOU CAN’T TOUCH HER YOU FUCK SHE BELONGS TO US! YOU FUCK WITH HER, YOU FUCK WITH US!’ He screamed at me. His face was twisted in permanent anger and dissatisfaction. He spun around and I faced the other one. ‘Look but you can’t touch. You’ll get used to not having what you want.’ He said smiling sadly. Instead of eyes, I found myself staring into hollow sockets deep as a black hole. I looked down. He was caressing a gun in his hands in a semi-sexual manner.
‘So just don’t do anything stupid to our property.’ He finished. He pistol whipped me brutally in the face and I woke up screaming with a hard on as we touched down in Miami.

TO BE CONTINUED

The next morning I wake up in A’s arms. Hasty exit. I have arranged to go on a magic mushroom hunt with my friend F, a giant redhead viking bear of a man, four hours drive north of Sydney. One last fuck you to the encroachment of adulthood. It was as much of a symbolic act as it was a desire for psychedelic fungi. We drive for hours. Hopes are high. We check fields in the rain. Nothing. Slide under barbed wire fences in the mud. Nothing. I dirty my shirt and tear my shorts. Nothing. We check more fields. Nothing. We check more fields. Nothing. We check more fields. Nothing. I think about my future prospects. Nothing.
The car suddenly conks out. Shit. We rest it for a while and then start it up again. Nothing. We try to start it again. The engine jumps into gear. Phew.
‘We should head back.’ I say.
‘Aww, we come all this way, we may as well check this one last bunch of fields.’ F says.
‘Let’s flip a coin. Heads we check it out, tails we head back.’
We flip. Heads.
We drive up this deserted stretch of road with our heads out the windows searching for mushrooms. Nothing. Sometimes you strike out on hunts, that was part of the deal. There was never any guaruantee garuntee gauruntee gauraunty. you know what i mean i cant be fucked spllechckeining this.
It was annoying. I wanted to trip. I needed perspective.
Four km down the road the car dies. It rolls to a stop by the side of the road. We try to start it up. I silently pray to god, ‘Dear god,’ I say, ‘Please be real and help us.’ God spits on my lack of conviction. It’s absolutely fucked. An unholy silence descends upon us as the gravity of the situation sets in.
‘What do we do?’ We both ask each other simultaneously. In the distance birds cry.
We pop the hood. I stare at the engine dumbly. It means nothing to me. Just metal parts arranged in a way that points to skill set I don’t possess. It’s a foreign language I don’t speak that roughly translated says I’m useless. Says i cant keep getting away with doing 20 yr old shit as a 30 year old man.
‘I think it’s the oil.’ F says.
‘Yeah it’s probably the oil.’ I agree.
F has no mobile phone reception. I do but only one bar of battery left and $1.45 of credit.
‘FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!’ F shouts to no one. It begins to rain as dusk falls. It’s day 2 as a 30 year old and im suspect I’m failing. I think about all the people dying in wartorn 3^rd world countries. It could be worse i guess. I cheer up a bit.
All around us, scenic misty hills and lush green pastures. Cicadas shimmer like tambourines. But nature can only be appreciated when you know you can leave nature. When you know you can get back to your modern home anytime you want in your atmosphere polluting car. Back to comfortable clean bedding. Couch. Heating. Air conditioning. Xbox 360. Pop tarts. That’s why we camp. It’s to appreciate the modern conveniences we got waiting for us back at home. Camping wouldn’t be fun if we had to do it all the time. Then we’d just be primitive savages living in the woods. In leiu of our situation, nature had ceased to become a source of tranquility, but more representative of the hostile unknown. I expect some wolves to howl but all we here is nothing, which is even more unsettling.
After an hour and a half of sitting helpless in the car, a tractor with three dogs trailing behind it approaches us. We breathe a sigh of relief. Finally someone who can take care of us.
The farmer is a big portly man in his 70’s. His name is Gerald. Hard working salt of the earth type. His skin is a melanoma farm, mottled red raw pink and white from years spent toiling under the harsh Australian Sun. He is about as opposite to us city pansies as you could get.
We buy some oil off him. Saved. We put it in and crank the engine. Still doesnt work. Not saved.
‘Maybe it’s the fuel tank pump’ Gerald says. ‘Yeah it’s probably the fuel tank pump.’ I agree. I’m just doing my best to not appear totally useless. It’s not working. My friend gets under the car and taps it gently while Gerald cranks the ignition. I stand nearby folded arms. I have zero practical use in this world besides occasional comic relief and the odd sardonic quip. When I’m in the mood. When they pay me. I pat the dogs. I smell my fingers after I pat them. They stink. When do you ever smell your fingers and they don’t stink?
Car still doesn’t work. My friend taps it harder and harder and harder. Soon he is bashing the hell out of it, each blow more and more desperate.
Gerald scratches his head. ‘You with NRMA?’
F doesn’t know. It’s his sister’s car. He tries to call her on my phone. It cuts out and the battery dies. Gerald offers to get his and he gets on his tractor and drives off.
We are alone again.
‘This isn’t that bad. There are far worse off people out there you do realise that don’t you?’ I say. F frowns.
‘ I mean in the scale of things, this is nothing.’ I continue.
F frowns.
‘At least we don’t have AIDS.’
I suddenly remember a gig I had on that night that I had forgotten about. It paid fifty bucks. Shit. I really needed that 50 bucks. I’m trying to write a text message to the club booker but 200 characters is too little to condense a lifetime of failure into. I settle for ‘Car fukt middle of nowhere. Stranded in paddock. Can’t make it sorry (Frowny face)’
Gerald returns with the phone. We call F’s sister. She isn’t with Nrma. We will have to join. 200 bucks. F doesn’t have the money. Calls his sister and gets her to join for us. Reception keeps cutting out. I send a volley of the same sms. ‘Is help def on the way? thanks!’ Half an hour later, one word reply, ‘Yes’
Gerald says his good byes and departs. We solemnly shake hands. My hand disappears into his oversized work hardened flesh mitts. The hands of a real man who has lived and worked his whole life. My hands, smooth and delicate as a beauty queens. What a nice guy. We watch him leave the way we watched our parents leave us on our first day at kindergarten. Tears of separation anxiety slide down our faces.
It’s going to be a 40 minute wait. “May as well be productive’ I say and go across to one of the paddocks to look for shrooms. Why not? that’s why we came here in the first place. I jump the barbed wire fence and grab hold of the second fence. Second fence? A massive shock stuns my body. The second fence is electric. My eyelids twitch uncontrollably. My wrists clench and unclench involuntarily. It’s a buzz but an unpleasant one. Fuck the shrooms.

Eventually the NRMA guy comes. He tries to fix it but gives up quickly.
‘Well?’ We ask.
‘It’s fucked. I’ll get the tow truck.’ He is a man of few words. We wait another forty minutes. Flies, rain and mosquitoes cling to me. The tow truck arrives and I realise I get to ride in a tow truck for the first time. A small victory in the swamp of defeat. I’m 30 years old and excited to be riding in a tow truck.
He dumps us off in a the garage in Gloucester. A small country town in the middle of the middle of nowhere.
‘Garage opens 8am. Stay in the pub. 50 bucks.’ He says.
‘We don’t have any money. We spent it on NRMA rego.’ F says.
He shrugs. He couldn’t give a fuck. He couldn’t give a fuck if there were holes in our faces spitting pus, blood and gunk.
‘Don’t tell him you slept in his garage. He wont like that.’ He says leaving.
It’s night time in a strange country town. The surrounding majestic hills are coated in ethereal mist. We sit in the car cabin. We talk politics and conspiracy theories, people we know of, things we miss about home. After a couple of hours though, we run out of things to say and we both just stare in silence out of the windshield at the car yard we are in. F has his hands on the wheel. We are driving without moving for hours through the scenery that doesn’t change. Twilight. I can’t sleep. maybe its cause my bed tonight is the front seat of an 87 volvo or maybe its cause all I can think about is how i’m 30 years old and have nothing to show for it. My mind becomes a choose your own adventure book showcasing a plethora of negative endings. Demons pull me apart at the seams. I make a promise to myself to change. This is why we invented the myriad of distractions we call modern life. To prevent this sort of introspection. In the vacuum of inactivity the mind tries to eat itself alive. I think of the people I love. Family, friends, girlfriends. I miss them. I want to see them. I want to hear their voices. But instead all I hear is F snoring and farting. The night is a reflection of my soul. Butt outside the moon is bright. Hehe I just said ‘Butt’.
I sleep fitfully. I have a dream where F and I are driving along a cliff side road in pitch darkness and he refuses to turn the car lights on. We fight, we shout, we lurch off the road, crash and fall to our deaths. I wake up. I look around in the darkness. Its 1:30am. I get out and piss by a fence and look up at a brilliant full moon that bathes me in soft lunar light. The moon never had to worry bout this shit. Fuck the moon the cunt.
I jolt awake at 7:15am. The only bus out of gloucester to some form of civilisation is at 7:30am. I can’t miss it. This nightmare needs to end. Me and F jog to the bus stop. The sun rays are diffuse through the mist and cloud cover but it’s bright enough to illuminate the terrible mistake we made. We are stranded 400 km from home. It’s a sobering moment. The bus pulls up. We shake hands solemnly ‘See ya back in Sydney’ I say.
‘I hope so.’ He says. I watch him walk away. Maybe this is the last time i will ever see him.
I don’t have enough money for the bus fare. I tell him my sob story and beg for compassion. He let’s me on for a concession.
I get on. We whizz past fields of black and white spotted cows grazing on lush green grass. Rolling hills and jagged escarpment. Luxuriant white fog banks. Snaking rivers and idyllic farmhouses etc…
Eventually I get home around midday. My dad opens the door and looks into my eyes to see if I’m on drugs. I wish. We couldn’t find any I want to tell him.

TRUTHFUL VERSION
MUM AND DAD: How was the radio interview?
ME: There was no radio interview. I went looking for psychedlic fungi in cow fields but the car broke down and we got stranded in the middle of nowhere. I got electrocuted, I didn’t sleep. I sat in the cab of a broken down car in a garage thinking about my life direction and I got the fear.
MUM AND DAD: What did we do wrong? How did we fail?
ME: You did everything wrong. Maybe I was made from defective sperm. Maybe i was dropped on my head too many times when my skull was soft. Maybe suicide is an honourable act.
REAL LIFE VERSION
MUM AND DAD: How was the radio interview?
ME: Oh it was good.
MUM AND DAD: When can we hear it? What station is it?
ME: Oh it’s more of a private podcast than radio thing.
M N D: Do you get paid?
ME: No it’s just a favour but its good exposure.
M N D: Why are you so dirty?
ME: I played soccer and fell over repeatedly.
M N D: Why are your pants ripped?
ME: I tried to do the splits.

I am 30 years and 3 days old.
At least I don’t have AIDS.

(TO BE CONTINUED MAYBE)

I turned 30 high up in the branches of a Moreton Bay Fig tree overlooking Sydney harbour smoking a joint the size of a birthday candle. I was staring at the face of the town clock tower. The fingers on it’s hands were pointing at me accusingly. As it struck midnight the bells went, ‘DOOOMED! … DOOOMED! … DOOOMED! …’. I gripped a tree branch tight to brace myself as fear swept through me. Vultures circled above.
Age is just a number I kept telling myself. 30. Just a number. Yes. A number signifying youth murdered by time.
I prayed to a god that i wasn’t sure existed for the world to end this year like the Mayans had predicted. Long term planning was never my forte. The apocalypse was a sweet solution to the neverending problem of neverending problems that existence created. It would just make it easier for everyone. And by everyone, I meant just me. I’m not afraid of dying. I’m just afraid everyone else will continue living after I’m gone.
If I go, we all go.
Everything had changed. Nothing would be the same again. Blah blah blah. My mind was sick with dread and skunk. I lowered myself out of the tree and got a cab ride all the way home as a birthday present to myself. I asked the cab driver if he had any advice for someone who had just turned 30. He said just have fun and be careful with the women.

Fun. Women. Just a day ago i had still been in my 20′s. Just a day ago i had been young and wild and free. Just a day ago I had been in some suburban children’s playground in the early hours attempting to have sex on a slippery dip like a condemned man with A___ – my casual modern relationship co-participant at the time. I liked the idea more than the actual practice. I just wanted to be young and wild and free. I knew time was running out. But I couldn’t get any leverage and my knees kept bashing into the metal edge of the slippery slide and all i kept thinking was ‘What if some 5 year old slides down into my puddle of cum in the morning?’. That thought ran around in my head like a loop until it had gathered up enough guilt to turn me flaccid and make me stop.
‘I can’t do this.’ I said and rolled off. I stared at the stars through the tree leaves and thought that perhaps i was finally maturing into some form of adult. I felt like a stupid loser. The cocoon was hatching, but the butterfly didnt want to leave. He was more than happy to rot inside that silken womb rather than get a job sucking flowers till his death.
‘Let’s finish fucking at my parents house.’ I said romantically. I was staying there at the time while visiting from the UK where i was trying to make it as a comedian. It was going okay. Here and there. Up and down. Every setback I’d just visualise as another chapter romanticising the struggle to the top in my soon-to-be best seller autobiography. Once i had made it. Once i was standing on that pyramid of skulls shaking my gold and emerald inlaid bone staff at my legions of minions prostrating before me in total fear and submission.
But for now I was back here in my parent’s empty three story house.
Let me backtrack. Me and A____ were coming to the end of a night out. We were going to go back to her place but I was allergic to her cat. And if theres anything less erotic then performing the sexual act amidst the aroma of cat urine and faeces, it’s the sexual act performed amidst a severe feline allergic reaction. Sneezing and coughing and spluttering and dripping mucus and tears all over her… Oooh hot.
‘Just come back to my place, I will sneak you in like we are in high school.’ I said.
Like we are in highschool. I actually said that.
She isn’t comfortable with that, being a legal adult and all and tells me I need to tell my folks. Fine. I phone up my mum.
The conversation goes like this:
ME: Hi Mum. Listen, do you mind if I bring a girl home tonight?
MUM: (Panicked) Huh? What? You mean like a friend?
ME: Uhhh more like a… uhh… a lover?
(LONG AWKWARD PAUSE)
MUM: Uhh… Is she is a hippie?
ME: What? Kind of… I guess… I mean I’m a hippie too in some ways.
(Note: What my mum meant by ‘hippie’ was ‘drifter’, ‘homeless person’, ‘baglady’. In her paranoiac world view, she thought I’d picked up some runaway at a bus shelter or something and had offered her a bed for the night in exchange for sexual favours.THIS IS NOT A JOKE.)
MUM: But where will she stay?
ME: Uhh… In my Room??
MUM: But there’s lots of valuables in your room and in Dorjee’s(my brother’s) too.
ME: What? She’s not a thief mum!
MUM: Ummm…
ME: The Line’s brrzzt cutting out brrgt mum bzzzt bzzt brrgg gotta brrgg brrzt go (I hang up)

We get in around 1am. Parents are usually in bed by 9pm. Not today. The lights are on and the keys are not out. I’m stink of weed, booze and paranoia. I’m freaking out a bit. I’m on the verge of turning 30 and im worried about this shit?
‘What do we do?’ says A___.
I get my water out and try and wash the joint smoke off my breath and wash my hands… I run my hands through my hair.
I knock. Frantic steps pitter patter to the door. it opens. Mum is wide eyed and freaked out.
‘HI!’ she yelps.
‘Hi Mum, this is A___’ I introduce her.
‘Oh! Hi!’ she yelps again. Then she leans in and sniffs me while staring into my eyes to see if I’m on drugs. Which I guess I am, but even if I wasn’t, this kind of treatment is enough to make anyone feel like they are in some kind of authority-figure persecution bad trip.
Awkward silence.
‘Happy Chinese New Year!’ A___ yelps, trying to break the glacier. Her voice breaks half way and she does a little jump and a fist pump in the air.
‘I made a bed for you downstairs!’ Mum blurts at her pointing down the staircase.
We go downstairs. We decide to wait till she sleeps. But mum doesn’t sleep, she just keeps pretending to watch television. Occasionally looking over her shoulder. Creepy. Where was the trust? Oh that’s right. It was never there.

There was a specific moment when I realized how wrong it was for an almost 30 yr old man to live with his parents- even if it was just for a few weeks- and this came to me as I came inside of A____ in my childhood bedroom the next morning.
It was weird to begin with when I noticed mid way through the act, canine style, that I could hear my father mulching the front yard. The dull percussive scrapes of my father’s shovel and the rhythmic splashes of mulch hitting earth formed a disturbing counter point to my strokes. I found myself exploring the horrific ramifications of the situation. I mean my Dad was immediately outside the window. I don’t know if they heard me, but we were making a bit of noise and frankly it’s not something you want to inquire about over the dinner table, ‘Excuse me mum and dad, did you hear your much loved son and that caucasoid drifter girl he picked up at the bus stop fucking this morning??? Pass the salad please.’
I can only imagine the weird dissonance in my fathers soul as he realized that only metres away from him, behind a wall, his son was engaged in the very same act that he himself had engaged in all those years ago to produce me. Oh the circle of life. Akuna matata.
What can I say? It’s a true herculean feat of concentration to achieve orgasm with full knowledge of your parents being in your audible vicinity. But once I came, I felt a taboo was broken, a line was crossed and I had freed myself from something. What that something was is still beyond me. Good taste. Parental respect.

It’s the morning of my 30th birthday. I wake up trying to smother myself to death with a pillow from a dream where i can’t wake up. My nerves are shot. I head downstairs to the breakfast table.
‘Happy birthday!’ Mum and Dad say pensively. Me staying with my parents does not help lift my feelings of failure. Unhappy birthday. When you are young, birthday’s are fantastic affairs filled with cake and presents and partying. Then after a certain point they are less a celebration then more a reminder of the unstoppable passage of time and the inevitability of death. We decide to go get Mexican food.
Family time. There is nothing more unenjoyable than forced family time. Especially when no one has much to talk about. Needless to say, it’s a tense meal. They complain about things. I say nothing. I can’t. There is a world inside of me ending. A world of infinite potential, choice and beauty. All falling down. I look at my Dad. His face is a grimacing mask of tightly constricted pain obscured by big black sunglasses and a frown that cuts his head in half. I am one year closer to becoming him.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask him.
‘Pass me the nachos.’ He says.
The rest of the conversation consists of listing the various threats to their lives as informed to them by the media: Thieves, murderers, drug rings, delinquent crimes and their favourite topic: diseases (usually some form of cancer) – the things to be avoided that cause them and how someone they knew died of it recently.
I don’t say much. There’s nothing to say. Any level of truthful honesty between us would be met with tears and condemnation. There is a gap between our worlds with a narrow bridge of omission. They have few friends or contact with a social world outside of their immediate family who share a similar situation. Their picture of the world is formed entirely from fear mongering tv news programs and talk back radio. Something is always out to kill them. If I was to let them into even a fraction of my world the contrasting pictures would be far too great for them to handle without major crisis and possible cardiac failure. They love me. I love them. Hence why Im forced to lie to them. To protect them.
These people grew up in a rural 3rd world village in the Himalayan foothills in the 1950′s. They never taught me the language of my ancestors. We are both cut off from each other. They are in the old world, and I am in the new world and we shuttle back and forth in a boat made of lies and love. These hardworking, selfless immigrants who prize family above personal happiness gave birth to a pathologically individualist western pig in ethnic drag and they wonder why we never see eye to eye. This is the cross second generation immigrants and their first generation immigrant parents must bear.
They tell me ‘Be honest with us.’ It’s a lie. They don’t even realise it’s a lie. They mean well but it’s a trap they don’t realise they set.
For example:

TRUTHFUL VERSION
MUM: What did you do on the weekend?’
ME: Oh I went to a warehouse party and got gakked up on pills and K and danced to music that sounded like a computer crashing till my brains felt like they were leaking out of my eye socket.
MUM: (crying) What did we do wrong? How did we fail?
REAL LIFE VERSION
MUM: What did you do on the weekend?
ME: EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT Drank lots of water.

TRUTHFUL VERSION
MUM: How are you doing for money?
ME: Well I’m sleeping on a different couch every night, I’m stealing my food from the supermarket self service checkouts, I’m dumpster diving and scamming my way onto buses using an old ticket while keeping a lookout for ticket inspectors like an escaped POW hiding from Gestapo.
MUM: (crying) What did we do wrong? How did we fail?
REAL LIFE VERSION
MUM: How are you doing for money?
ME: EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT Can I have some money?

TRUTHFUL VERSION
MUM: Are you seeing anyone in England at the moment?
ME: Yes I’m dating a chainsmoking damaged goth musician with eyes like black holes and self mutilation scars running down her arms like train tracks to hell. She has PTSD so everytime she hears a loud noise she ends up shaking on the ground but I can’t touch her cause two years ago she was sexually assaulted and that kind of messed her up. Did I mention she is into being tied up, held down and sexually degraded? And that now im finding that i’m starting to enjoy doing this to her? Our safe word is ‘safeword’.
MUM: (crying) What did we do wrong? How did we fail?
REAL LIFE VERSION
MUM: Are you seeing anyone in England?
ME: EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT Yeah.

I look around the Mexican restaurant for an exit. Im not in any condition to share the burden of their post retirement depression. They worked their whole life for this moment. And now they don’t know what to do.  They arrived here with nothing but dreams and determination and managed to rise from a 3rd world working class ghetto to first world middle class where they could now enjoy the suffocating malaise and ambient dissatisfaction of the middle class experience. They are an immigrant success story. They’d worked hard to win this race. This stupid, stupid race. They’d worked so hard to support their ungrateful overgrown babies. This stupid, stupid baby. I’m just glad that hardworking immigrant work ethic skipped a generation when it got to me. My great grandads: One was a life long opium addict who sold my grandmother into the circus at age 8 and the other one died in an asylum after he made violence and defecating on people’s lawns too much of a compulsive habit. i like to think i take after those guys.

People complain about how they hate work. But very few will readily admit how much they hate not working. Sometimes free time isn’t free. Sometimes it’s a fight to the death that costs you your sanity. Sometimes it’s less of an oppurtunity to explore your own interests then more an exercise in compulsive psychic self-mutilation. Demons long held back by repetitive task based labour suddenly turned loose. These people, my parents and the first generation immigrants of their generation, know only how to work and to save and to toil for their children. Their selfish, self-obsessed egomaniac, corrupt western parasitic pig worm children. Me. In the process of self sacrifice and martyrdom they never learn how to have fun and after their working lives are over, they await grand children and/or death. Where’s a laugh track when you need one?
I pass my dad the nachos.
It’s the least that I can do.

The mexican food is eaten and i make my excuses and leave. I go and hang out with A___ at her sharehouse. It doesn’t feel right and it’s nothing to do with my allergies to her cat. We have only been seeing each other for a few weeks and she doesn’t know me well enough to know how to deal with my depression. This isn’t her responsibility. I mean this is a casual thing. Pulling me out of a hole is outside her duties. We resort to substance abuse and get drunk. She lets me fuck her.

(TO BE CONTINUED)