Soft reset my personality!
I eat, I pray, therefore I'm Glove.
If you and I have one thing in common, I hope it’s growing up in a town with a sketchy train station. I revisited mine in the recently gentrified Frankston last month in the skirts of Melbourne. In hindsight, I do miss the grit: lazy graffiti, socially inept youths, bad tempers erupting from gravelly homophobic mouths: all things I became a karate black belt in, you poofter.
Every day you exit via the sketchy train station’s “shopping centre side” because it’s more populated, well-lit and you get to walk past that 7-11 that gives our free slushies when the slushie machine breaks, which is all the slushin’ time. It’s safe and it’s predictable. Without noticing, every day you’ve chosen the predictable path.
Habits: they’re not just for Whoopi Goldberg anymore.
Only in case of emergency do you exit via “the other side”, under a bridge, through a tunnel, wading through a bitumen-rimmed cocktail of litter and foliage. Everyone you see has a cigarette in one hand and an it-expires-today Oak Choccy Milk in the other. People are standing still on “the other side”, mid-way through their daily crises of varying intensities, screaming down the phone about who in their universe dogged ‘em so hard it created the life they have now. Gamblers, single parents, white men constantly strapped to an untouched acoustic guitar like it’s a baby bjorn.
Every day, I’d choose whether I make my journey home via the safe, predictable and reliable shopping centre side, or explore my other options via the other side, where TAFE carparks, drug enthusiasts and reckless abandon are abound.
I’ve made great strides in my life to leave the train station behind me entirely. Design my life so that I only have one choice, and it’s “the good one”. Though I do admit I am jealous of the “other side”; regardless of where the other side’s lives are at, it means at some point those people at least tried a new path.
Eat!
Consumables that don’t perish.
I’m this close to starting a Big Brother review series on TikTok or something. DON’T CLOSE THIS WINDOW YET – I know I’m probably the only person in your life saying the new season is good, but believe me. I’m astonished at how perfect they captured the 2001 vibe in the new 2025 series – back to Dreamworld with a 24/7 stream, live nominations and evictions, even Big Brother’s voice kinda sounds the same if not a bit gayer. Gone are the weird reboot days of physical challenges in the house a la Survivor, and back to the Big Brother that’s all about the unpredictable dwelling, or as I like to call it: The House That Fucks With You.
Who else laughed out loud at the final scene of Squid Game? I finally finished the last season this week, a feat I began back in June and swiftly gave up when they decided to stop crafting any story beats. Why did they bring in so many side characters for B-plots which either never resolved, converged, paid off, or had their purpose explained until it was too late? It’s a shame; even the fun Netflix outliers get dragged back into “keep making us more money” territory. Netflix has no real goals and should discuss it in therapy.
I’m 20 years too late to this realisation, but is Jim Carrey actually a fantastic dramatic actor? I already banged on about how impressive The Truman Show is on rewatch, but I also recently watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a trippy and riveting rom-com that kept impressing me over and over. Plus, anything with a surprise Kirsten Dunst gets an A+ from me. I want her to show up at my 40th. Putting that in writing now so that someone, somewhere, somehow makes it happen.
Pray!
Wishful thinking with no follow-through. It’s called manifesting!
Fine, I’m deep on self-improvement TikTok. Are you happy? Happy you got that outta me? I have a collection built from the rubble of videos with messages like “walk in there as if God Himself sent you”, “the life you want is going to cost you embarrassment” and “the lesson you refuse to learn will repeat itself until you do”. The collection is genuinely titled “pay attention john” and if you ignore the Taylor Swift songs underscoring half these pep talks, they’re pretty poignant.
Part of the reason I quit the job I’ve been at for the last [I’m not telling you the exact number] years is because I felt myself enter the building with a sheepishness I didn’t like. Head down, shoulders forward, brain on alert, ready for flight. Each morning’s building entry came with a healthy serve of “good god, what’ll happen next”. I don’t want to enter rooms that way. I want people to think that themselves after I’ve entered a room.
I don’t have enough ADHD for this. Some of my most unemployed friends have ADHD! And they’re doing great.
My dad, undiagnosed as he is in something, could never ignore the creativity poured out of him. Growing up, his unofficial “den” contained a piano, woodworking equipment, mechanical robot parts, fake robot figurines, puppets, a light-up ‘APPLAUSE’ sign for a studio audience, model rocket ships, a green screen, and whatever else he could get his mitts on before 3D printing was invented (another machine he now owns).
He was compelled to constantly create. To fix up something outside himself. I’m compelled to consume what other people create. View their art or swallow up their advice. To fix up what’s inside myself first. An impossible task; for every “everything in your life is a mirror” TikTok I save, I eat a $3 KitKat from the servo. I’m a month delayed in writing this thing because I can’t type on my computer with a damn phone in my hand. Ignoring the voice saying “but nooooo don’t focus on yourself that sounds so hard” is as close to equilibrium as I can get; that encouraging voice most of y’all have is simply MIA.
I timed my last day to be on 11/9 because it makes me laugh, which also happened to be RUOK Day which, unlike most observers of 9/11, I certainly was. My motivations in life are to follow the shiny thing first, fix my brain second.
Resigning from my job may be an extreme course-correction but it felt like a vital move. I went from working 40 hours a week to working 8 at a part-time job. I’ll scrape by with my money in exchange for time to myself, soft reset my personality, and hopefully, the newfound ability to enter rooms as if God Himself sent me.
Glove!
A personal reality from a real person.
If you do it right, the health benefits to going off-the-grid are surely immeasurable. My housemate recently told me she “deletes Instagram for a week every now and then”, a sentence that shot me in the face.
As I write this, reader, we are on our ninth day without home internet. What began as a simple radio-button-switch in an online form that would move our FTTB plan from one tier to the next has erupted in failed service, futile technology, and fuckface technicians. Bob iiNet, your days are numbered.
Nine days without internet in 2025 is unspeakable. I feel insane when I tell people, appropriately responding aghast, like somehow I’m the crazy one. It would be more believable to say I broke my leg this morning but it’s fine now.
“Your modem isn’t compatible with our new plan” isn’t a sentence you should be allowed to hear anymore. Punishable by law. That’s a swear sentence. I paid $80 a month to hear it. iiNet should put a lobster in the swear jar (my bank account).
That sneaky role reversal disguised in a passive voice puts the onus on the form-filler-outerer, not the form-generator; don’t let me pick an incompatible plan that you, the supplier, aren’t able to supply. A bad batsman blames his bat, even though he’s the one who chose it.
The benefits of a home without ‘net are laid out: I can’t stay up ‘til 1am playing Overwatch, can’t window shop for houses I’ll never afford on Real Estate Dot Com Dot Au, can’t edit and upload all those sketch videos I haven’t filmed or written ‘cos I’m too mad about the lack of internet to let myself create something.
Isn’t having no internet meant to reset your mainframe? Let you get out of your own way a bit? Wake up early, seize the day, do your tax return, let death come for your ego? Instead I get emails with subject lines like “we’re cancelling your ABN unless you call us” and I say fuck the ATO, fuck MyGov, fuck iiNet, fuck the MBA brains who devise confusing systems that lead to ABN cancellations then dangle the solution out-of-reach above an open tank full of crocodiles.
Oh, you did the Mark Ritson mini-MBA? Did he tell you you were always right about everything? Did he let you French kiss him after? Did he mention anything about creating a service people can use? I say cure MyGov at home first, THEN put an oxygen mask over your other UX designs.
Before you go…
I’m performing in this week’s Comedy Festival hosted at Improv Theatre Sydney, doing a show where the audience decides whether they want to see our characters fuck or fight. That’s all there is to it, baby – and it’s delightfully stupid.
Found myself on a couple of podcasts lately:
Glue Factory with Olga Koch, Milo Edwards and Huge Davies which we recorded in London. Mostly chat about furries in Zootopia.
Comedy Writers Group with Marcel Blanch-de Wilt which we recorded in Melbourne. Mostly chat about the Japanese ikigai and the 12 month plan.
Smell ya later, fudgepackers! (I’m reclaiming it)
