Time for your delicious helping of brain matter for the month. Like the Grand Canyon, I’m wide open to the public, despite the past horrors.
I’ve been performing lots of stand-up comedy and its arch nemesis, improv comedy, this Q2. I’m tired. Something in me is craving unwinding with a cigarette. Did you know when you’re hot they let you smoke anywhere?
You can take fake cigarettes into comedy venues and they can’t legally stop you.
If you came to see Microsoft Orifice at Sydney Comedy Festival, thank you greatly. I owe you a little kiss, or a big kiss depending where you land on the Fuck-scale™️, as per the ticketing T&Cs. After my last show, I fainted in the courtyard at the Factory Theatre. None of the staff noticed. If a comedian falls in the woods and no one’s around, does it riff a sound?
I’ve been telling everyone I was exhausted and underfed after my show run, which is true, but 80% of the reason I fainted was due to emotional shock from hearing a graphic story about a catheter being removed. Please never ask if I wanna watch SAW.
As we wind down ahead of EOFY, a very stressful time for comedians who are too stubborn to figure out Xero, let’s relax with some reflections.
Eat!
Consumables that don’t perish.
· Last week I started and finished an adorable open-world adventure game called A Short Hike. You play as an anthropomorphic bird named Claire who’s on vacation on an island and needs to get to the top of the hill to get reception to make a phone call. That’s the whole plot. It’s the warmest and sweetest video game I’ve ever played. It made me feel so happy the whole way through that I genuinely reconsidered if perhaps I’ve never felt happiness before. I’m not one for hyperbole, but I didn’t know joy until I played A Short Hike.
· RuPaul’s Drag Race: Beyond Thunderdome season 78 just landed. I’m writing this before I’ve gotten to watch the double premiere, so I’ll write some generic commentary to cover my bases: wow, divatown population 69! Those mamas slayyyed. I sure did like it when they said “Miss Vanjie!” on repeat! Wow, RuPaul looked phenomenal but also looked shit. Boots the haus down! That first lip sync was great and they’ve gone downhill since. I hope the hot one wins!
· I woke up at 4:30am the other Sunday to watch Eurovision live with some friends (not a straightie among ‘em). I loved it all but honestly couldn’t tell you what the winning song is even called. I’d check, but like most facts about Europe, it’s all history to me. If I’m honest, I’m not entirely positive what country U.S.S.R. turned into.
You can’t write video game dialogue this human anymore.
Pray!
Wishful thinking with no follow-through. It’s called manifesting!
One of the biggest lies I tell myself is that I can go to bed without my screens any time I want. I simply choose not to, every single day, but through the power of incorrectly redefining words, I’ve decided that’s not a pattern.
My old personal trainer told me that looking at screens within an hour of bedtime is damaging to your REM cycle and affects quality of sleep. He’s probably right, but after NSW made it mandatory to be vaccinated to enter gyms, I never saw him again so ignored it.
I have friends who download apps that freeze their other apps. That’s like hiring a second therapist to analyze your first therapist: it gives the illusion of progress.
Just a sleepy little bear on his phone in bed.
It’s not that I’m addicted, I just need my phone to survive. That’s where all my friends live. Intellectual people say that when you’re faced with a dilemma, to figure out what’s truly wrong at the core you should ask yourself “what need of mine isn’t getting met right now?” Do I have a need to be liked that’s manifesting in always being socially available, even when I should be sleeping? Do I have a need to cure my loneliness with any distraction available to me? Do I have a need to feel less intrinsically connected to my job, instead seizing control of my identity, hence I ignorantly stay up late to consume and recapture as much of my personal time as possible, delineating the capitalist-cog-John that I am from the carefree follow-the-fun-John that I aspire to be, every single night, until one day I won’t need to feel that way anymore and just love what I have instead of wanting what I don’t?
Nah, maybe I just like going on Twitter, and that’s all that has to be. Life is short. Don’t spend too much of it without your phone.
Glove!
A personal reality from a real person.
There’s a Samantha in me. She can’t be insulted, offended or brought down because she’s her own source of self-esteem. You can call her a faggot from a moving car and she’ll continue mincing. You can insult her bedroom décor and rather than take offence, she’ll think less of you for voicing it.
However, there’s one adversity that tests my Samantha the most: forcing me to wait in a line.
There’s simply nothing on God’s green Earth I want bad enough that I’m willing to queue for it. How good can Lune croissants be? No thanks, I’ll go to the vending machine. Why would I line up at the airport gate the second you announce boarding? No thanks, I’ll walk to Melbourne.
It's not that I’m impatient. I bleed patience. I get patience clots. I’ve got type A+ patience. I donate patience every 3 months. I’ve been waiting for my landlord to fix a bathroom roof leak for close to a year now, and I’m fine with it, due to my calming patience. Plus I use a separate ensuite.
Instead, I take offence at the systemic expectation that I, an adult, would be willing to wait for something because you, another adult or perhaps a system of adults, have decided I should. I’ve never felt more degraded than when I’ve waited in line for anything, and I was once called a faggot from two moving cars 15 minutes apart on the same Christmas.
My office has a mandatory “at least 1 day a week” policy which is so infrequent it should be rounded down to zero. To trick us back in there’s occasionally a catered lunch, plopped in our calendars for 12:30pm, at which time every yobbo descends upon the staff kitchen in one fell swoop, naturally forming the most insulting of shapes: a line. Prisoners awaiting slop.
Like cattle.
The haven of the cavernous, relaxing staff kitchen has become a sterile inmate cafeteria. We lose all sense of self, all confidence and inner worth, in exchange for a grubby little feed and compulsory small talk repeated in every crevice, rabbiting the parlance “this saved me $14 today”, becoming less interesting with each passing echo.
While our lunch is upgraded to a lovingly-cooked high-temperature feast, we are downgraded to a horde of shuffling neanderthals with room-temperature IQs. If you feed them, they will come.
I don’t want this to be my journey. If I’m not reasonably in the front of that line when it forms then I won’t be back until it’s changed to a dot.
Before you go…
I guested on an episode of Basecamp podcast which has just come out. Hosted by comedian Nicola Lombardi and Sophie Notsurewhatherlastnameis (none of my business), we all bring our controversial hills to die on and rip them apart, deciding whether they deserve to stay at basecamp or go to the top of the hill.
No joke, it’s the funniest podcast I think I’ve ever done and I was laughing so hard while we recorded it. Check it out if you don’t hate women or gays.
If you’re a comic in Sydney, you can register your interest for the next community open mic I co-run at Improv Theatre Sydney on May 26.
Queen out! That’s both a sign-off and a request.
I climbed the John Glover hill on this one.
I enjoyed this