« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »
May 24, 2006
My Thoughts on Ants
I don’t know why people get so annoyed by ants. They’re just little things that come and take crud and leave. Like I have a bowl of ice cream in bed most nights before I go to sleep. When I wake up the next day, the bowl is full of ants. I think ‘ah, I should do something about that’, but I put it off. Then once I get around to it, the ants are gone and the bowl is clean. Good to go again. Sometimes I think I should do all my washing up by ants.
Posted by Sam Bowring at 01:08 PM | Comments (0)
May 14, 2006
Adelaide Fringe
Dear Diary
Well, it’s been a while. Your glorious owner (me) has been very busy doing stand-up comedy shows in two different festivals here on my home planet of Australia. This entry will concern itself primarily with:
Adelaide Fringe Festival
Adelaide cops a bit of flack for being boring or whatever. I don’t know what it’s usually like, but the Fringe was most enjoyable. Colourful streets and colourful characters, much to see and do. Kent Valentine and I were splitting an hour of standup between us at the Rhino Room, which was programmed for the festival by comedian Justin Hamilton. We got great reviews and didn’t make any money, and I found myself often saying to people ‘oh well, I’ve paid more for holidays which I enjoyed less’, which isn’t true at all because I’ve only ever paid for one holiday, to Thailand, and that was fucking awesome. But it was a nice pithy bit of bullshit to pass off the loss with good spirits. Not that the whole experience wasn’t worthwhile educational yada yada yada.
One thing said about Adelaide which is true is how bad the drinking water is. I don’t know precisely which hobgoblin is employed to scrape out people’s baths at midnight and pour them into the reservoir, but he/she is doing a bang up job. It’s the only time drinking a lot of water with a hangover has actually made me feel worse. It sort of tastes like drinking your own dissolved enamel. Squeakfeather certainly didn’t like it, and insisted on being supplied with guava juice and bottled spring water, as if he was some kind of wanker and not just a flying pink mouse.
I did get drunk a bit, and made some passes at girls, all of which were unsuccessful - thanks mostly to Squeakfeather’s constant interference, whispering stupid things to say in my ear. I guess I shouldn’t blame him entirely, he can find it hard to adjust to new surrounds – there are a whole bunch of new flight paths to learn, strange wind currents etc - even if your main priority is stealing the dessert section out of menus.
One memorable failure: I was talking to a very nice young lady for about an hour in a bar, being quite funny and charming, not at all threatening or sleazy or mad (goodness it was hard). At some stage thereafter I found myself upstairs, taking the first line of speed I’d had in over six years. I swore never to do speed again after having done it once before - let me divert briefly:
I was at uni, there was an annual dance party called The Start Party, and I had taken speed for the first time. The next day at 9am I was coming down, trying to sleep, finding it about as easy as if my bed was constructed from live crocodiles. The walls were breathing, yes, and they had halitosis. I knew that I had to do a subedit of the entire student newspaper (where I worked) before that evening, and I also knew that once I crashed and burned there would be no getting up again for quite a while. So I decided I would go and subedit whilst stuck in the middle of this hell comedown. I was the only in the office (the other staff would all be in later as we had originally planned) so if ever a person came into the office, it was me who had to interact with them. The easiest way to cope, it turned out, was to adopt an entirely hostile demeanour, as if I suspected the person was likely to murder my entire family at any moment. This worked very well in terms of getting people out of the office quickly. Despite a promising start, things backfired when I began to edit a bunch of articles by the newspaper’s designer, Karen. Karen was a good friend of mine, and a roc to lean on when things got hectic in the office. To this day I don’t know whether the articles she wrote were good or bad. What I do know is that I crossed out large chunks of them until they looked like crosswords, and wrote comments like ‘clumsily constructed’, ‘needs to be better written,’ and ‘not your best work Karen’. After that day Karen was no longer my friend, and I never took speed again.
UNTIL
Someone asked me if I wanted a line of cocaine, and I said okay. I’ve never tried cocaine, so I was curious, and also I had begun to feel lately that maybe I wasn’t taking enough drugs. So I thought, okay, let’s try some of this here cocaine and see how we fly.
EXCEPT that the person got it wrong - it wasn’t cocaine, it was speed. They didn’t trick me deliberately, they did genuinely think it was coke. So I took a line of a drug I had sworn off and feared for years, then immediately tore off downstairs to find the nice girl I’d been talking to and yelled in her ear
‘SO, YOU WANNA JUST GO SOME PLACE AND PASH?’
This was admittedly a bit of a leap in the development of the conversation. Much like:
1: So, how are your parents?
2: Oh, I eat my own poo out of a jar with a fork.
So she screwed up her face in surprise, spat out a very valid ‘no!’ and went off somewhere else very quickly. That was okay at the time, it was fun to be so reckless, and I tore off somewhere else. I tore around a fair bit that night, having a pretty random good time. It was only the next day when I found out the line had actually been speed. I guess the moral I took from the whole experience is:
‘I can do drugs safely, as long as I don’t know what they are.’
The next day I forgot about the exchange with the girl. It was a memory held in reserve by my brain, which revels in waiting for just the right moment to recall terrible things. ‘Remember when you did THIS?’ it shrieks with sudden and unexpected joy, days later while I’m doing the washing up. It’s those kinds if days when I don’t change the sink water as often as I should.
Anyway. Many other bits of life went on in Adelaide, but it takes me forever to report on anything properly, so that will have to be it.
Posted by Sam Bowring at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)