The Dog and Kony Show.

Authors note: This piece is inspired by this article and the events that led up to it. 

Melbourne Comedy Festival Review. 

The Kony Show.

Last night I saw some of the best comedy that I have ever witnessed, in print, in person, on film, ever. Although the crowd was small the message was poignant and most importantly, devastatingly hilarious. There were four main performers, a mother and her two children, Kaylan aged 8, her brother Dylan aged 10 and someone mysteriously referred to as Katheleen. Their lines were delivered deadpan and aside from a few smiles from the kids all the actors took about their task with an enthusiastic seriousness and without a single shred of irony. There were no pratfalls, no crazy antics, no one said the word ‘zany’ and no one got hit in the face with a pie. It was just a group of people going about their business with honesty and integrity with only some t-shirts and posters as props.

I swear, I almost asphyxiated I was laughing that hard. Their delivery was so natural and earnest that I almost forgot that they were performers. They walked that wonderful line that meant that no one knew if they were serious or not and it made the absurd sentences that came out of their mouths all the more amusing. At first the audience was silent, then a few smirks began to play out across the faces as people tuned in to this particular frequency, then the smirks gave way to giggles and before we knew it we were leaning hard on each other trying to breath through the hysteria, struggling to keep our feet.

Sometimes comedy is just comedy, and then sometimes, rarely, it breaks out of its zenith and throws itself out of our sphere of reference to become something else, something almost indefinable. It is sociopolitical, moral-ethic comedy. Because we can relate to what’s happening it makes us question our own lives and circumstances, because we identify with the comedian we can also identify with the subject matter of his jokes. We were laughing not only at the act but at ourselves, laughing at our wretched pathetic loneliness and the ways we try and combat it. Clicktavism, and Social networking, our need to grab on to a cause no matter how far removed or how relevant it is because of our need to feel validated in a digital realm.

The laughter we were laughing was the cathartic. It was laugh therapy at its finest. I’ll probably never get cancer now, no matter how hard I try. The audience became one, strangers were turning to each other and exclaiming, ‘I can’t believe it, how do they keep it up?’ whilst wiping the tears from their eyes. We knew we were part of something special, we knew we were witnessing the birth of something big, the next huge movement that would pick the world up and carry it to a better place. And we were there at its inception.

Later I got to catch up with the actors and they were as funny off stage as they were on. I asked the kids how they felt being involved in the show and they said that they couldn’t be happier, that it was good for children to experience adult situations because it gives them an opportunity to see what exciting adventures awaited them in their adult-hood. I told her that I, for one, can’t wait to see them either. I asked her how she was enjoying her run at the comedy festival and she said “It's bit sad more people didn't turn up, but I feel like I am doing the right thing.” I told her that indeed she was and that I would try and encourage my friends to see what all the fuss was about. “I'm hoping a lot of people see Kony, it is really important,” she said, and I told her that I couldn’t agree more.

Missed conections.

Once again I got an email from, oh I don't know, some fuck face. My spam filter on my email is pretty shit so I get a fair few people trying to phish me. I decided to write back to this one because she sent a photo and "knew" my real name. Tricky.

From: Avrora
To: *************
Sent: Monday, 2 April 2012 2:09 PM
Subject: waiting for your reply!

Hello or G'day to you, **** *****!

In your message you asked only to send you my picture to your personal
email address. Ok, I send it. I hope you like :)

I have some questions. Besides your name, I would like to know in what
city you live. Would you like to meet me as a friend? And of course, I
will be very glad if you send me your picture!

Some info about me:

My name is Avrora (yes, it's my real name).I am 27 y. o. I am a widow.
I don't have kids. I live in the country Ukraine, city Odessa.

I am looking for friendship. I am coming to Australia in 3 weeks. I
would like to find a friend to meet in real.

N.B. I am not interested in virtual sex. I don't need any naked pics
exchange. I don't discuss any sex topics, i.e. sexual fantasies,
preferences in sex, etc. I hope you are not disappointed :)

I will be waiting for your reply. You can write me and send me your
picture to my personal email address

Best regards,
Avrora.

("her picture")




So this is how I replied:


Anal Fissure, how nice of you to write, only, the thing is, I have no idea who the fuck you are or why you're sending me pictures of yourself. You look like a whore or a Russian gangsters wife. Same difference really. You wanna know what city I live in? I live in a midgets cunt and I eat corpse fingers for breakfast. One time I got constipated from all the undigested knuckles. When I finally prized open my asshole and removed the offending matter it looked so much like salami that I cut it up and made it into a sandwich. In doing so I had both a shit and knuckle sandwich all at the same time. It was pretty amazing. If we ever meet I can promise that I will make you one.

Areola, I searched for you on facebook but couldn't find any results. It's cool though, I'll keep looking. I have no reason to stop, currently I am unemployed and besides masturbating, well, there is no besides. I literally have nothing else to do. My fucking arms are like Popeyes'. You know Popeye? You will.

Have you ever been fisted? You look like the kind of Eastern European woman who smells faintly of shit and lube where ever she goes. Like nerds smell like sweat and old cum. One time I laid a fart in my pants that hung around of DAYS but then I realized I had shit myself. Has that ever happened to you?

Have you ever fucked an old guy? I hear that's popular past time in Odessa. That and being sold into slavery. Also, I hear that the percentage of women with fake tits is higher than the percentage of women without them. What the fuck is up with that? Also, whats the deal with all the sexual re-assignment surgery that happens there? I'm pretty free and liberal thinking but I think there may be more to it than that. Perhaps there is something culturally wrong. Have you considered suicide?

I once knew a girl who's breath smelled worse than her ass and once when I was sitting beside her I could smell her vagina. I am actually not kidding about this. It was like old fish on a hot day. But with out that sexy sexy side. I mean, I'd fuck a fish quicker than you could say 'That crooked government official raped me and my sister and will escape punishment because our systems are so corrupt' but I don't live near the ocean so the only thing that I can do is buy a whole bunch of fillet'o'fish from Mcdonalds and pretend. I hate it when the cheese burns my dick though. Then I have to dunk it in cold water. And I hate cold water. It too burns my dick.

You said you didn't want to talk about sex or sexual positions or fantasies or naked pics or sex topics, which is fine, because it's actually one of my fetishes, to not talk about sex topis or preferences. Man, just now when we're not talking about sex my, well, we can't talk about it but let's just say that there was quite a clean up involved. I sure am glad I bought that dog, he comes in handy ;) I mean he eats cum. Which is good, because I masturbate. A Lot.

So I included a picture which I think is a good likeness. I hope you enjoy it. Just so you know, I can fit a whole bunch of shit in my dick. I don't carry a wallet for that exact reason. If we were to meet when we'd walk down the street I'd insist you held my foreskin because I find it much more intimate than holding my hand. Also, that way I could use my hands to signal for help because if I'm walking down the street with you then I've been kidnapped by a Ukranian transsexual and she's here to eat me and absorb my soul.

Do you know where I can find a good witch doctor?

(the picture I sent back)

Pissing in the wind.

At my parents house there are rainwater tanks and there is a hose that’s directly connected to them and the water that comes out of that hose is the sweetest water that I have ever drunk.

I recently quite my job, left after five and a half years in a mixture of shame and disgust, shame at myself not being as good at my job as I thought I was, disgust at the company I worked for, the reasons too numerous and petty to name. I received a pay out of my annual leave and with no real plans or discernable directions in the future, I set off. I didn’t go anywhere, I haven’t travelled, I’ve made a few plans and spent some quality time with friends and I’ve woken up every morning wracked with anxiety over being unemployed.

On the other hand, I’m on a wonderful holiday. I have spent a week at my parents house, seeing parts of my family that I haven’t seen in ages, visiting the places of my childhood and walking down roads that I haven’t walked for nearly 20 years. I pick fresh fruit from trees as I walk past them and blackberries from the mountainous bushes that grow everywhere. They are not quite in season yet, but they are getting there.

Everyday that I spend in the country makes it harder for me to want to return to the city. I keep thinking about the concrete and then I look out the window and all I can see is green. If I wanted to I could lean out and pick one of the plums off the tree, right now the tendrils of a fern are hanging over the screen of my laptop. There is life everywhere here, you can hear it singing in the trees and scurrying through the undergrowth. Last night I went outside and looked up at the night sky and saw the stars as they deserve to be seen. Other people have described it better than me, and they were right. It was beautiful.

Unemployment is a funny one, I have almost started to relax but not quite fully. I think everyday about what it is that I want to do with my life, with my career. I have been trying to help my parents around the house, doing all those little jobs that they have been meaning to do. Everything I try my hand at I consider as an occupation. I was painting a wall and I caught myself thinking, ‘I could be a painter’. I went to lunch with my mother and one of her clients, my mother is a community carer and I had never really seen what that entails. We sat there and had lunch and I listened to a lady with dementia and tried to follow her as she switched subjects mid sentence, and I thought to myself, ‘I could be a carer.’

Sorry, I just had to take a break to pick some salad from the veggie garden. I pulled carrots from the earth and ate them. The day is beginning to cool and I looked around at the trees swaying in the breeze. I thought about the water in the tank, even though it had sat in the sun all day it was still deliciously cool. It was as cold as a running stream, I thought about the rivers in the area, about the top end of Australia and how when I was a kid there was still such things as swaggies. I thought about rainbow trout and clear fresh water streams and I thought to myself ‘I could catch a fish’.

Extort this.

So a little while ago this came in the email. I think it's a very very poor extortion attempt.

From: sumadi wayan
Subject: Emergency
To: su_birdwalk@yahoo.com
Received: Tuesday, 1 November, 2011, 4:33 PM

Hope you get this on time, sorry I didn't inform you about my trip in Spain for a Program, I'm presently in Madrid and am having some difficulties here because i misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money and other valuable things were kept. presently i have limited access to internet, I will like you to assist me with a loan of 2,950 Euros to sort-out my hotel bills and to get myself back home.

I have spoken to the embassy here but they are not responding to the matter effectively, I will appreciate whatever you can afford to assist me with, I'll Refund the money back to you as soon as I return, let me know if you can be of any help. I don't have a phone where I can be reached. Please let me know immediately.

Regards
sumadi wayan



So I responded like this:



Hey Sumadi, I'm so glad you wrote, I had no other way to contact you but now I have your email address! So anyway, its a good thing you wrote when you did because I needed to talk to you about some things. So after you left on your mysterious trip to spain (i know, you're buying sperm so you can impregnate yourself, its ok, i told your parents and they agreed it was the best thing to do as you have had difficulty finding a man to remain faithful to you), anyway, after you left some things happened that you really should know about. Where to start.

Well, the police raided your home and found your frankly astonishing collection of home made child pornography. For some reason you decided to keep it together with loaded pistol and about 6ft of surgical rubber. I don't know what the mask was for and frankly, I don't care. And all that cocaine! You must have been stealing from your company for years! And I did not realise that you had a room in your house that only had butt plugs in it, arranged smallest to largest. How long have you been collecting them? Even the federal police were surprised, and those guys have seen EVERYTHING! And those videos of you being fisted that were on repeat, no wonder your dog is scared of you. Hell, even I'm a little afraid now. Do you shit or does it just fall out of your body like when you have a mouth full of food and lean over and and it just tumbles out? Purely for scientific reasons, I would be interested to know.

So send me some photos of your cunt like you promised. Get some fingers in there you dirty bitch.


When no response was forthcoming I wrote another letter.


Sumadi, I'm sorry if my last letter was a little off colour, I think it's kind of obvious that you have forgotten how we parted ways, so let me refresh your memory.

Your pimp beat me real bad Sumadi, real bad. I spent a week in hospital and my eye is only just getting better. And I don't know why Sumadi, I don't know why. I paid you to let me tear that ass up, and I did, I paid you well, I told you what was going to happen and you were fine with and so I did it girl, I tore yo ass up like it ain't been tore before. You remember girl, how there was shit blood and cum everywhere and you were laying there panting and you said that if I gave you a thousand dollars you would let me shit in your mouth and I did, well, I felt something then, something I've never felt for someone before, and when you went and told your pimp that I had abused you, well, it broke my heart, just like they broke my face.

I loved you Sumadi, and I don't care that you are a crippled transsexual dwarf with an eating disorder and are the victim of a dermatological holocaust, I don't care that you're incontinent and narcoleptic at the same time, I don't care that one time you broke into a rehabilitation center and forced an Iraq war veteran to stump fuck you.

Sumadi, I'm upset because you let mum beat me up like that. I mean, we're brother and sister, couldn't we just have fucked it out?

You broke my heart, Sumadi, I loved you and you broke my heart.

So far I have had no response but still I wait. If you would like to send a really dirty email to su_birdwalk@yahoo.com you just go right ahead, but please send me a copy.

Mean things.

Every now and then I see this old guy on my tram and it’s obvious that he works for whatever company runs our public transport system now because he’s all decked out in the uniform and all his buttons are shiny and he wears a very official looking conductors cap and I’m pretty certain he would have had to ask for it because not every tram guy has one. He looks like he has been working with trams for the last fifty years, since back when being a tram driver was a career, when there were conductors, when it was a respectable job that came with a uniform and a hat and brass buttons that you shined and the passengers knew your name, back when shit used to mean something.

And it kind of kills me. And don’t get me wrong, I am not nostalgic about a past that I have never experienced, oh no, I am being entirely selfish in my effected sadness. It kills me because I am thirty years old and all that I know how to do is work a cash register and say ‘Hi, how you going?’ in a way that makes everybody in the room want to kill themselves. I’m thirty, I work in retail, I have a twitter account called Masturbation Blues and I think that pretty much says it all really.

I don’t even know where I was going with this. White persons problems. The usual Will I lose my job and am I competent enough to find another one, what skills do I have, if any, that would allow me to live my life but perhaps of a slightly higher standard, is it even necessary? When you compare my life to say, that of an infant in some malaria stricken village in Africa, sure, I’ve got it pretty good but that doesn’t stop me from wanting nicer things.

Am I what’s wrong with the world? I am the unsatisfied youth that is youth no longer. I am neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. I am unhappy, belligerent and complacent but not outwardly so. I never got what I was promised as a child so I want it all now even though I’ll never have it. It sucks and I blame the media and anything else within reach because that what we do now. I’m like this because that happened, it’s got nothing to do with the fact that I am naturally a total arsehole and indeed excel at being one.

I’m getting off track. I guess what I’m trying to say is that now that I'm thirty I'm beginning to feel like a man repenting on his deathbed, in the sense that if I don’t do something now then later will suck even worse, you know? Only, he’s worried about the after-life and I’m worried about being homeless when I’m fifty and then being recognised by someone whom I was a prick to. I think it’s a fear we all have.

Anchor point.

My boss is dying. Right now he’s lying in his house and going through the last stages of aggressive brain cancer. Surrounded by his family he is breathing his last breaths and I am heating a burrito.

This is surreal to say the least.

We had a staff meeting at work today and were told that he had only days left, that the company had been sold and that there would be a take over by a larger company whose job it is is to eat other smaller companies. None of this matters.

When I think of my boss dying I think of an old king dying on the throne, only he wasn’t old. He’s only ten years older than me.

It’s so fucking weird and sad and scary. There is nothing that anyone can do. How many words can you say, are awkward gestures and silence a substitute?

I can’t stop thinking about it, its like an avalanche. I have no anchor point, I am buffeted by thoughts and emotions and before I can even deal with them more come. I can’t think straight, I found myself singing ‘who let the dogs out’ for no apparent reason and I keep shaking my head as if to clear it.

I wonder how I will sleep tonight. Probably ok. And the thought of that kills me. Should I be wailing, gnashing my teeth, should I be driven mad by grief and pounding at my breast? I haven’t cried. I probably won't, although it would be nice to.

When I think about going into the store tomorrow I will be all the more aware of everything around me. Everything that is there he designed and built, standing at the counter I will say to myself, ‘He put this here”.

It will seem very empty for a long time.

When I was transferring my burrito from the tray to my plate I was so absent that I grabbed the hot tray with my bare hand. My mind is elsewhere at the moment.

I am going to miss him.

Things that I will miss: A year in review.

My Headaches.

This year I have had about 4 of my cluster headaches and none of them have lasted more than a few hours. No month long cycles, no waking up in agony and throwing up, no ice packs at midnight, no stumbling to work only to collapse in a chair, no shaking, no puffy face and a desperate need for caffeine, no wondering if this is it, if perhaps this is when I finally call time out and make sure that I can never suffer again, no planning my own death and wondering if I will need a will or if a few scribbled lines can suffice.

And god damn it if I don't miss them. Sometimes I think that I can feel them coming and I sort of look forward to it, I think this is it, no doubt, in a few hours I will be sitting up in bed with my legs twitching waiting for that golden moment when the pain eclipses everything else and then starts to fade, that glorious moment where they have peaked and have started to subside, the sweat cooling on my body as relief floods over me like a sunrise, where the three hours sleep that I will get will be sweeter than any sleep that I have ever had.

As much as I hate them they are like some terrible lover that has left me, perhaps never to return, perhaps she will be back next week. Her embrace drains me and leaves me limp and shivering. I have had lovers that have drained me completely and left me exhausted but none have left me with the feeling of relief that I get when she leaves me. She is terrifying and comforting all at the same time, beautiful and vicious, awful and awe inspiring. As much as I wish that I had never met her, I worry that without her I am nothing. I miss her, I love her and I hope to god that I never see her again.

Miss Mary Jane.

She is another lover who has kept me warm and safe and solitary. Hers is an embrace which helps keep me isolated but in an entirely different way. When I am with her I can be alone in a room full of people, I can ostracize myself from my best friends and only regret it until she enters the room again. When I am with her she is the only thing that I will ever need, when I am away from her I know the she is the last thing in the world that I require.

We have been broken up for nearly six months now but I can not deny that I have fallen into the age old trap of sleeping with the ex. Her touch is tender like no others, insidious and addictive. She has been a part of my life for so long that I can't imagine what my life would be like without her. I have this unfortunate feeling that she will always be around, lurking at the edge of my sub-consciousness, she is the booty call that always answers, the lover that never refuses, she takes more than she can ever give and I am prone to weakness and have nothing left to lose.

In reality.

This year the only lovers that I have had have been loss, regret, addiction and despair and not once has any of them told me that they loved me. Not once have we lain in bed whispering sweet nothings to each other, not once have they leaned over and run their fingers through my hair and told me that there is no place that they'd rather be, not once have I looked them in the eye and thought 'I could die happy now'. They fill me only with empty space in the same way that the distances between planets is what makes the solar system the lonely cold and desolate place that it is.