bedlam updates

So the way my life rolls now I only have to eat my own shit, which is a position of great privilege, but last night I ate so much crap I almost choked on stage. About halfway through a storytelling spot I wanted to apologize to the audience and walk out the door and walk home and stop eating my own shit. But that's never an option so I simply ate faster. The theme of the night was Life and Death and I planned to talk about my time with Occupy and my support of Wikileaks and the price I pay for being involved and the rewards for taking risks, what with being arrested multiple times and my new scary relationship with the authorities. So far so good, I know what I do and why and I have plenty of stories. But let's eat shit. Doing stand up this year I've worked out my routine: talk to a voice recorder during the day and work in a notebook when I get to the comedy room. If the notes I make just before I get up don't relate to what I worked on during the day that's no...

Several years ago I flipped open my new phone and stared into the eye of its camera, little knowing I was gazing into a darkness that would send me on a death march of youtube comments. Curses! I cottoned on to the fact I could make ridiculous ranting videos with this device and began to do so with some success and all the interwebs negativity that comes with it. I'm already an angry bastard, but I really got amongst it for it for a while there. What was supposed to be cathartic became a horrible unpaid job and lost in a forest of bitterness and bitchiness I wandered O very much like a Shit Addict. Of course I also picked up all sorts of skills along the way, made some cool music videos and a few comedy shorts that are quite brilliant but this isn't about me being awesome- let's face it, I really am- this is about my walk on the internet micro-celebrity shame trail. The thing is, I'm a fighter. I like fighting people. On the internet you can fight and fight and ther...

As we return from a nice visit to a national park I'm deteriorating. We're driving past the procession of shop fronts on Sydney Road and I recite the names of as many of the shops as I can out loud, letting my friends know the bush therapy hasn't gone real well. The country air was an attempt to calm me down but all I did was perch on the edge of a waterfall, imagining I was a hero and giving my friends the idea they were about to witness a suicide that would be kind of sort of their fault-ish. I wasn't going to jump from the waterfall, I was too busy posing. I seemed to expend much of my mental illness energy on posing, but then again I had no idea how to behave. I remember wandering the streets of Melbourne and it being very important that I held my face a certain way, like my facial expression was crucial. I was probably only guaranteeing nobody mistook me for a sane person. I mean, it's not like you can talk to every person in the street to let them know you...

I was eighteen and one of the peak local meatheads had just taken a shit in a neighbour's back yard, holding eye contact with the neighbour the whole time. This was Carrum in the eighties. Growing up we moved around a lot but finally settled on the most violent suburb around and there I remained from the age of twelve having horrible experiences until I was twenty-one. Carrum was a hate camp and by the time I left my main skill was drinking until I vomited. I was at the Prince of Wales in St.Kilda, blind drunk, and a friend of a friend offered to buy me a plane ticket so I could get away from all these people. 'These people' were the pissheads I gravitated to because hey, if everyone's drunk, everything's cool, but it wasn't cool, it was sad. Imagine that, a dude takes a shine to you and tells you you're wasting your talents. I didn't know I had any. Around the same time I overheard a friend say to another, "He has no idea how talented he is...