bedlam updates

So I've just done a run through of my chosen material for the show and it went like a dream. The joke consideration process consisted of anything that's gotten a real laugh before, arranged into a coherent world view. It's a very clear picture of what I am, which is pretty much a Gen X Everyman and Fucked Fuckhead.   A few years ago a good comic advised me that by the time you get off stage, the audience should have some idea who and what you are. It's not about telling people your opinions, but telling people what you see and why you see it that way. I've also learned proper stories are a good honest way to honour the fact an audience is good enough to give you their attention. Because most people even slightly outside their comfort zones are thick as fuck and need to spoken to like babies.        I'm doing a live trial show this coming Wednesday upstairs at The Exford. I will have a set list on a great big piece of paper. I've used a set list before ...

So for twenty years I've been barking up the wrong tree with my art practice. No wonder I had a mental breakdown only two years into working with metal to make sculpture. See, I thought you were supposed to focus with maniacal intensity on what you were making and the business side of things would sort itself out. No. You're supposed to be spending a good chunk of that time making contacts, talking with people, networking, schmoozing, marketing, all that shit! Fuck! I started out doing markets, but I would stand around all day bitching with stall holder mates and making almost no attempt to talk to customers. I didn't know I had to. No wonder I became super bitter and depressed and then lost my mind and became a dribbling mess and ended up on a disability support pension and on top of all that had kind of a bad time. If I had actually spoken with potential customers and listened to them my business would have blossomed. Instead I drove myself insane endlessly secon...

Preparation for the Two Bearded Ladies show is going swimmingly, by which I mean I am doing a lot of swimming so I look buff for the time I'm on stage. Wait, did I say swimming? I meant 'drinking'. Judge me and I will put your judgement up my arse. I can't lose. (Note to self: what was that arse business about? Consider seeking therapy and/or ass play opportunities.) I don't consider myself an alcoholic because I don't think it's a disease. You can stop drinking, you can't stop tumours by feeling bad enough about them. I think there is no shortage of stuff people believe right now that 100 years from now will be proof we all have light to moderate head injuries. Not that there will be a 100 years from now if we don't stop passionately believing in Miracle Bubbles(TM) and start making real moves in the actual world. Yeah I know that leaving the world of beliefs for the world of the actual might be too much of a big step for a society built on bill...

(At the moment I'm getting right into a site called Byte Stories that's all about true stories. It's changing my thinking about what's worth writing and what isn't. Here's the latest).      I don't know why I chucked a rock through the newsagency window but I guess I can think of a few possibilities. It was late, so no one was around and by some miracle a rock was right there in the street. Why was a rock just lying around in the paved street of a suburban shopping strip? A strip so ordinary that the milk bar with three steps was called the Three Steps Milk Bar? God put that rock there, surely. I didn't have time to admire my ability to make holes in things because a loud alarm convinced my body to sprint away into the night. The whole event lasted ten seconds tops. The weird thing about that newsagency was that the lady co-owner maintained an awful 1960's beehive hairdo right up until 1980. Here she was selling magazines that constantly...

It would be awesome if people didn't have such tunnel vision about their pet issues, then again one of my pet issues is that civilisation run by empire churns out bubble people as a matter of course. It shouldn't amaze me that activists can be so blind to the connections between climate change and endless war, between arms manufacturers and mainstream media, between everything and everything else. While we must reorganize our friends who've drifted away, or those who continue to fight but without a strategy for victory, it's imperative that we also engage segments of society who've never been organized around these issues. Of course for the sake of getting shit done you need to pick your targets and focus, but very often people become blinkered. And when they do think of the connections between all things it's in some mystical bullshit sense. Let me clear that up: all issues are connected because they unfold and dig in on a finite planet. It's a big plac...

The Prime Minister now wants to suspend reality indefinitely so we can live in his fantasy of the hero leader. What an incompetent. He is incapable of understanding his own shortcomings. We are seeing a man child grow more feral every day as he flails about for a solution to a problem that is himself. PM says Australians have been ‘played for mugs’ by ‘bad people’ and signals sweeping policy shift aimed at bolstering national security You know, I get it, we're all victims of circumstance. In the case of this turkey, he's been groomed from an early age to be what the conservative side of politics calls a "fucking idiot". He was never supposed to have a point, but like benighted cabbages everywhere he's the last to know he's a plant. When I was putting my brain back together after my big mental breakdown all those years ago I experienced a moment of realisation: none of these sane people know what's going on either. I fact, many of them are crazy, bu...

Thanks to the private school head injuries running Australia right now we know that if you are Australian there's a roughly 35% chance you're a worthless organ bank any good person should be legally allowed to slice open with a knife to show your kids how fuckheads work. Our treatment of people who've broken tiny rules is not just world class it's historically accurate, right down to the bottomless cruelty. But look at how we treat our own! Here in Melbourne we've accepted gangs of ticket inspecting thugs on public transport because hey, if you don't have a validated card or you talk back to to the fucking idiots who are all the way into your face on a tram you should of course be hurt badly and the bruising should reach where your inner child lives. In this supposedly easy going nation of laid back types we absolutely accept any kind of violence dropped on rule breakers and back talkers. We not only cop it, we applaud it. Today the Ombudsman found train pig...

An open letter to lots of people (but not you of course). If we don't stop pumping crap into the sky society will be crushed. The crushing has already begun.    Denial is awesome. It helps us process those words into something palatable like, "I will of course survive and live in the vast underground cave palaces built for those of us who are special." You have been watching screens your whole life and it has given you the idea that you are the centre of something big. It has allowed you to sit idly by like a bored god, casually tinkering with your genitals like they're a postman's rubber band. I used to collect postie's bands when I saw them on the footpath. They are useful. They do perish though, losing their elasticity much like your leaking butthole as you suck your couch into your crack waiting for your mission to reveal itself. People have trouble getting motivated. People think everything is bullshit. People say nothing changes. I'd really...

So, March of last year I was one of a crowd of folks going into State Parliament to see Napthine's born-to-rulers, fundies and terrified shopkeeps breathe life into feudal new move-on laws aimed at protesters. The idea was that we would let the world know that Victorians aren't blind to stuff like *inevitably Godwins own blog entry*. The presence of an unusual number of  citizens in the Upper House caught the attention of God botherer Bernie Finn, who heaved to his feet and burbled out a bunch of crap about women and unionists that would make your hair curl, weave itself into little corn rows and fall out gently like acid rain. I'm pretty sure he thinks vaginas are terrorists, he certainly pretends unions are violent bikie gangs from the atheist future. That was the most entertaining part of the night, poorly written fairy tales spoken by grown men apparently desperate to turn Victoria into some kind of.  Some kind of. Some. Kind. Of. Gosh I hate Godwin's Law. Whic...

The new miracle of modern parenting is that it taps the newborn motherfather into ancient wisdom(TM) which causes the parentard to instantly graduate as a medical doctoring expert (children a specialty.) What a golden age we live in, where as if by magic each new parent is granted secret disease knowledge that applies only to their own child. Even if it kills other children. If that isn't unconditional love I am not correctly understanding the precious concepts of the long and fucked now. Measles Outbreak In Germany Outpaces US By About 270 Cases, Yet Vaccination Debate Remains Relatively Silent It's nice to be able to reach for an example of thinking so diseased it causes the spread of real live disease. Just think! It's now possible to kill people just by talking a load of garbage. The latest news is that society will be crushed by 2090 if we don't get a wriggle on, but if steampunk diseases are making a comeback our first step must be to cut off the internet ...

Measles is making a comeback and I couldn't be happier. I once spent weeks in a bed listening to all the other kids having an awesome time outside. Fortunately it was summer so they where having the time of their life, bless. Good thing I was such a huge reader! I passed the time not doing that either because it would have made me go blind because I had measles. I can't be arsed looking up the going blind bit to see if my memory is correct because the risk is I'll rearrange childhood memories only to release hidden ones. Fucking people don't want to vaccinate their kids. Look, all my fantasies are increasingly about killing people, so on one level of course I can get behind a dystopia created by people who through the miracle of childbirth know more than any doctor possibly could. I welcome the dream of doing a short course so I can become a guard at one of the many concentration camps we will be building to house the Parentards. Not a lot would make me happier than...

Melbourne's first cereal cafe is opening and I hope a madman enters and hacks everyone to death. Unless I've got it wrong and it's a serial cafe where each visit ends on a cliffhanger and you have to come back the following week to see what happens next. Melbourne is full of hipster scum who deserve to die and on some days I'm one of them. I want to open a cafe called Grumpy Owner where I bitch to the enthralled customers about Melbourne's proliferation of precious fuckwits into nonsensical shit. They go forever so it would be a sustainable business so 5 fucking eco stars to fucking me. Oh god I hate. A cereal cafe? This is what happens when you tell young people they can be whatever they want to be. You know what young people want to be? Eating fucking cereal. What the fuck do you talk about in a cereal cafe? Or do you watch cartoons and fight over the remote control. In your pyjamas. You total sperm balloons. I will kill you all. That's another idea for a ...

The stupid fucking United States has military bases across the world and at home they are so marvellously super fucking stupid their two year old children shoot them with handguns in their own homes. Or even better while out shopping. The dumbest motherfuckers who ever lived have heavy weapons set up and ready to go in places no American can find on a map. I'm exaggerating slightly: there are 300 million Americans and the only ones who have ever looked at a map are the same prissy assholes who don't vaccinate their children and have a unicorn for a spirit animal. The above paragraph is a free association exercise that will be rewritten over and over  until it says something like, "I love America and I cannot wait to go there and be a stand up comedian rock star. I will suck all 300 million of their dicks if necessary. Actually, are there any Americans in the audience?"     The United States of America is a place but it's also a way of life, the wor...

My mind is a steaming coil of hot joke maggots glistening like chrome pus in a techno kindergarten run by caregivers who only read Ayn Rand as a dry rain of tiny pebbles eats into my scalp one small bruise at a time. Outside in the darkness surrounding this all hours fucked kindergarten of pain a yowling begins and is taken up by every cat on the internet and soon there is no safety anywhere as introverts who thought they could escape and hide wake up as one to the overpowering stench of cat shit and run screaming from their homes, screaming and vomiting corn chips, potato crisps, hommus, the little crackers that go with the hommus and all the other dips, all the other dips, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate milk, hot chocolate, ice cream that costs like twenty four bucks at 7-11, the fucked sausage rolls you get at 7-11 and a Harry Potter wand they accidentally ate whole while watching some shit TV show and pretending it's good or watching some shit TV show on purpose because th...