Hello people. I have created a facebook group for unvaccinated people in Brisbane who would like to socialise with people outdoors now that restrictions are coming in. If you’re vaccinated and you don’t mind hanging out with the unwashed villagers you’re more than welcome and if you’re one of my friends from overseas who’s interested in what I have to say below you’re also more than welcome to join the group.

So the purpose of the group is to facilitate Socialising, Support and Self-Improvement for whoever is interested in those things. If many people joined maybe people with different interests could link up. For instance I have no interest in getting up early in the morning to go for a walk but some people seem to like that, so maybe they could meet up and do that together instead of going to a café or whatever. That sort of thing. Maybe I’ll start a meetup group or something too if there’s any interest in this.
For myself – the restrictions come in tomorrow, so I figured tomorrow would be a good time to kick things off. I’m not really an organising type of person so tomorrow night I’m going to go to the Venus Rising statue at Kangaroo Point at 8pm, and stand around for a bit. If you want you’re welcome to join me or else if people are interested in doing something another time join the group and we can figure things out.

As far as the group page itself – I want to keep it very personal – posts about socialising, support and self-improvement as they apply to the person posting. So for instance if there was some change in the rules we have going on now and someone felt personally affected or upset about that – that’s a perfect thing to share. But just sharing memes and videos and news articles to be outraged about or prove who’s right or whatever – that shit sucks, I don’t want it in my headspace. Really I hope vaccines and covid and all that stuff don’t really need to come up often if at all and it can just be a nice space for some cool shit to happen. Talk about cool things we want to create or are trying to do. I can probably go on a rant about how you should pour ice water over your head every morning before January 1st if you want to catch that.

Oh yeah if you have any friends that would be interested please invite them. And if we’re close and I tagged you and you have any issues with the politics of this I guess shoot me a message. If we don’t really know each other I’m not going to get into a brawl about politics 🙂
The name of the group is Bootleg Celebration Zones – it’s just I saw something the other day about people being issued tickets for authorised celebration zones and I thought that was a pretty funny concept, that you could keep celebration behind a fence. This group is about free-range celebration.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/339144997593533/

The Unknown, Stand-up, Acceptance and Pussy.

So I’ve been thinking about some things – I feel like a whole bunch of elements in my life have sort of converged, all pointing at the same lessons or wisdom, interested to see what others think of it. Basic premise is that when approaching women or performing stand-up comedy to a crowd of strangers we are venturing into the unknown – we take an action, other people will react, and we have no control over that reaction. We may face rejection but if our self-worth is secure, if we know who we are then the outcome of the action does not really matter. In fact for me at this stage I see a negative outcome as being more desirable than a positive one – my purpose now is to ‘toughen up my leather’ as Patrice would say, to develop a callous where I am so sure of myself and secure in my self-worth that the opinions of others do not matter to me. And by having this idea that I am welcoming failure as an opportunity for growth there may be a bit of a sting at first, but all of the embarrassment and shame that could come with rejection or failure is sort of negated, because I am pursuing my true purpose, which is growth.

I think this desire to confront fear head-on comes from an idea from the life of G Gordon Liddy – a Watergate and Pentagon guy – bit of an asshole/badass. As a young man this dude was deathly afraid of rats so one day he caught a rat, killed it and ate it. I’ve carried that idea with me and used it to inspire me to confront fear in the past – not to rationalise or bargain with our fear, but to kill and eat it, to vanquish it. In order to confront my huge issues with seeking the approval of others, being affected by external negativity and my low self-esteem I started to do stand-up. I figured standing in front of a group of people, saying potentially offensive shit and being prepared for rejection was probably my version of killing and eating the rat. Some back story on this – 4 years ago I tried stand-up 4 or so times and the last time I bombed. But not really just a bomb, this lady emcee sat right at the front of the audience making a big act of shaking her head and being disgusted with what I was saying, even though other emcees had commented about liking my jokes in the past. So when I was kicked off stage she tore into me for what seemed like longer than my 5 minute set, shaming me in front of 30 or so people. I’ve since found out that she’s done that to a bunch of young male comics. At the time I was a real mess – sick with chronic fatigue and depressed from it so comedy had become huge to me, and after that I went home and cried, I couldn’t go back. So that was my rat. My first set back I got up and said I didn’t give a shit about refugees, animals or women. Hahaha. Fuck em.

Now, as part of all this I have tried really hard to cut out my inner censor. I think this is something a lot of guys Robin Cal, are talking about with approaching women. It’s like there is an impulse in us to do what we want to do, but then there is this social analysis that takes place. I’m not talking about being an asshole or something, I don’t want to hurt people, but when I feel this split-second judgement – what if this goes wrong, what will ‘people’ think. Fuck that – the desired outcome is not success (failure is preferable to me), it is to cut this censor out of the picture. It’s like a spark trying to jump from impulse to action – I want to shorten that gap so that my impulses, my expressions of who I am, aren’t getting lost to the censor or in a delay – the gap of thought between impulse and action. I want my impulses to be like an athlete’s muscle memory – get it to a point where I’m not thinking I need to do these things, I am just expressing myself purely, free from the reactions of others.

How do I know what I want to express? It’s usually the first thing I think, and I think of something Patrice O’Neal said about shit tests from women (more on that later) he said ‘you know when a woman does something, and you have a whole body reaction, like why the fuck is she doing that thing?’ It’s not righteous action, and I feel that in myself. As an example when I was driving back from kayak fishing there was a snake crossing the road and I thought I’d like to take a picture of it to put up here or to show my kids. But I’d just passed a water truck watering down dust on the road, and the real reason I didn’t stop and take the photo, my initial thought, was that I would look like a tourist, a pretentious dick taking a photo of a snake when these dudes coming up behind me probably see a bunch every day. As soon as I drove past it I felt that feeling, but I also immediately started justifying being a pussy – I was going too fast, didn’t have time to stop, had things to do, it probably would be gone blah blah. So I missed that one, but I noticed it and vowed to address it, so yesterday I went out and anytime I saw something interesting I stopped the kids in front of people and took my time taking shots of things.

Some amazing things have happened to me recently because of this attitude, I have done things and had people say things about me that I never would have imagined happening. I approached this cute chick at meditation (11 years since I’d last approached a woman) and just laid out that I hadn’t been interested in women but she had inspired feelings in me – not out of proportion, but just made me see the spark, the good feelings that a woman could add to life, that out of all the women I’d seen in the past 9 months it was her that had done that. I told her that I could accept whatever she said, but that I couldn’t accept me not expressing what I had thought and felt. She said it was refreshing and no other guy had ever talked like that, so honestly and open, with her before. I’ve been cracking maybe dangerous jokes, confronting the possibility of upsetting people to say what I think is funny because I want to sharpen those reflexes for my comedy. I haven’t had a disaster yet but I look forward to it when it comes. Because of this though, this young comedian I’ve befriended said to me after a show the other night – ‘man you just say whatever you feel.’ This is something that could never have been said of me before and it was so affirming to have someone external notice that I am behaving in the way I want to live my life.

The final big incident was me starting a conflict with a big Eastern European body builder guy – I threw some palm fronds from his trees back over his fence, he threw them back, and then I threw them back over again. I was being a cunt and the fronds meant nothing to me, would add literally 1 minute to my work, but when I saw he had thrown them back and thought about accepting it I just felt that disgust with myself for thinking about letting it go. Sure he could have punched me in the face, and maybe when I’ve locked this behaviour in I can afford to be more judicious in how I deal with some situations, but for now I am sticking to the principle, and because I felt fear in this situation I had no option but to confront it. At this point I would rather be punched in the face than go back to living the way I was. I thought of all pussy ways to deal with it, like throwing them back over when I was about to leave and driving off but instead I threw them where he would definitely see them, like a grade-A asshole. So he came out and got in my face, but the weirdest thing – wanting this conflict, knowing in a way I was in the right, not afraid of failure, I was not shook at all. It was the strangest thing – in the past I’ve been in conflict with women giving me shit while I’m working and I’ve finished that interaction shaking a bit from the adrenaline of confrontation. This time this dude said ‘why you throw, you scratch my deck, very expensive, I clean branches myself.’ And I said ‘so you’re gonna come around and pick them all up then?’ Hahaha. We talked a little more and by the end he went ‘huh!’ and laughed in an incredulous way that I wasn’t intimidated by him then grabbed my bicep and shook my hand. It was the fucking craziest thing, and then when it was done I might have had the slightest little shake, but almost nothing, I just didn’t give a fuck because I had lived my purpose and expressed myself.

Alright, so last point I think. This comes from the idea of shit-tests, like Patrice gives the idea of his girl asking him what side of the bed he wants to lie on, but she knows which side she wants and he feels his physical revulsion to this unrighteousness. So as I understand it the purpose of a shit test is to figure out if a woman’s man is still the man to be leading her, if he’s got his shit together. I read this book about comedy that said that laughter is a response to fear averted, that this fear is like static electricity in the air above the audience – taboo topics, tragedy, and the comic is the lightning rod that grounds that, for all the people to feel relief through laughter.

So I guess the final idea is the idea of acceptance, which takes meditation and time to fully embrace. To just let go of things – as my meditation teacher says ‘The truth is.’ With the ‘is’ italicised. There’s no arguing with that, it’s all you have, there’s no way that things ‘should’ be, only how they are, and when you really come to grips with that, the unknown isn’t so intimidating, it’s only the gateway to another situation to accept and take good action on.

So on the call Thursday (my time) we were talking about the idea of internal confidence Vs confidence based upon competence. Was talking to Jack about being comfortable in familiar surroundings but somewhat lost when out of our elements.

My journey for the past couple of months has come from a place of recognising that my ex and her abuse was a mirror for me to see my own flaws – I didn’t have boundaries, my self-worth was low and as a result very dependent upon the opinions of others. So I recognised this and wanted to toughen myself up.

So my aim is to get rid of this social censor as much as possible and live by my impulses. We can’t live just by our impulses obviously and like Mayeda is talking about we can fly too close to the sun but for mine most of us seem to not even stretch our wings

Alright Jack Tripper you lazy hoe, actually redoing this is good for me to simplify/clarify the concepts. So I see us as having a true expression – how we really want to be, act and present ourselves. This true expression must jump a gap into action, like an electrical current jumping a gap or a synapse in the brain. Between true expression and action we have the social censor – fear of social shame/stigma is a huge, primal force on us – as monkeys/early humans to be cast out of the group meant death.

So if we look at your issues as an example since you made a smartarse comment J – your social censor is like a dude sitting at a desk, taking your impulses, scanning them for possible negative repercussions and then approving them, moving them on into action. This is all fine in a familiar environment – what we talked about regarding internal confidence Vs competence-based confidence. So in your familiar turf you know all the rules and variables – your censor is dealing with the same forms he always does, just rubber stamping them and shunting them on. When you get in an unfamiliar situation all of a sudden there are a lot more variables to consider, or if you are around big personalities the possibility of being dominated or embarrassed, increases, the stakes are raised. So you censor is now working in overdrive to parse every action you could take and their possible repercussions, trying to deal with unknowns to see if it is safe for you to open your mouth, and overwhelmed, you shut down.

What I want to do is to reduce the gap between my impulses and my actions and words so that I am living my true expression. I spoke about this on the call as well – that you and I can probably usually get across what we want out of a situation, but sometimes we really have to torture words to get to that point, whereas someone like ____ just cuts straight through that shit and says what he is feeling. So it’s about expressing yourself truly, and being confident enough to accept the consequences whatever they are.

So, how to do this. Mindfulness helps a lot – firstly to reduce extraneous thoughts, allow us to hone in on our true impulses, and to be aware of when we are going against them. I give the example of a whole-body revulsion, once you’re attuned to this you can feel yourself bitching out and making excuses and it is sort of disgusting, dying a little death. I gave the example of a dude deathly afraid of rats, who killed and ate one. So two steps to this process – first catch the rat – identify the inauthentic, avoidant impulse, and then eat the rat. Not pet it or become used to its presence but overcome the revulsion and fear and consume it, dominate it, which means doing the opposite of your pussy impulse and confronting your fear.

The final part to this is the idea of acceptance, again from meditation, that the truth is, that there is no ‘should,’ so I accept whatever outcome comes my way without emotion, basically don’t give a fuck because it won’t change anything. It’s a work in progress for me but I’m getting pretty good at it.

So in reality I am trying to retrain my brain so that acting on my impulses becomes my natural way of being. What _____ said about being careful around this is of course true – if the big dude last week had face tatts and a hell’s angels vest on or I was in a shitter area I would have handled it differently but for me it was about testing my limits within what I judged to be basically safe parameters. Same like you don’t want to test this out with that gay employee or whatever. So it’s not just those big things I am doing, but things every day, small things – not giving a fuck if someone sees me bopping along in my car to music or whatever, making a conscious effort to not care what they think and do what I feel. Any little thing where you feel the inner-bitch making excuses. If we get on top of this all these dudes talking about missing out on the opportunity to hit on a girl because of analysis paralysis won’t be doing that shit anymore, they’ll have trained out the milksop and be ready to act upon their impulse as soon as they have it.

So my aim is to get rid of this social censor as much as possible and live by my impulses. We can’t live just by our impulses obviously and like _____ is talking about we can fly too close to the sun but for mine most of us seem to not even stretch our wings.