1980

• Born in Burnie Hospital on the north-west coast of Tasmania on June 12 at 7:33am.
  
  
• I meet my Mum, Nan, Pop and Uncles.

1983

• Insist that my name is Carl, to our neighbour, for some reason. Also ask if she has any milk and cookies.

1984

• Write my first ever creative piece. A poem: “Going up hill is hard to do, not unless you just say ‘q’ then someone will come up and say ‘hi you’ then you’ll think of something better to do.”

1985

• In kindergarten I write in my book: “My name is: Justin and I like: writing.”
  
  
• First listen to Popcorn on a tape – it blows my little mind.

1986

• Get lost at Devonport country music festival until a man in a big hat takes me up on stage and makes the whole crowd wave at me.

1987

• After being given a choice between Scouts and the Surf Club, I begin a seven year career with the Burnie Surf Life Saving Club nippers. I can’t tie a knot but I look good in Speedos.

1988

• Stop wetting the bed.
  
  
• Queen comes to Burnie. The lady, not the band.
  
  
• Have first major tantrum as an artist when I am unhappy with my efforts to draw a Lamborghini in the story I am writing about a talking car. Spelling it is also hard. Mum helps out.

1990

• Become seriously interested in music, in particular the Rage top 50. Each week I take note of the positions of songs and how much they’ve moved since last week.
  
  
• First hear Guru Josh’s Infinity – 1990’s: Time For The Guru. For most of my life this will become my favourite song of all time.

1991

• Under the influence of my Uncle Ken, who has forged his own music career, I start playing guitar. Song Of Joy is the first thing I learn.
  
  
• Gain first acting role, I play Dick Whittington in our class presentation of Dick Whittington.

1992

• Somehow, go out with my first ever girlfriend, Tennille Alford. She breaks up with me after getting a lift in my Mum’s yellow Volkswagen beetle. We never kiss. (see: Early Girlfriends)
  
  
• Have first taste of live music performance. An instrumental duet with my best friend Nick Muir and Way Out West with our music class outside Kmart.
  
  
• Buy first ever album – Def Leppard’s Adrenalize on cassette. Mrs French won’t let me put it on at a sock dance as the lyrics are too suggestive.
  
  
• Finish my time at Montello Primary School.

1993
Saturn Returns

• Start high school at Parklands High. I have the wrong jeans, the wrong shoes, the wrong haircut, but have not learnt to be self conscious yet.
  
  
• First hear Loser by Beck. It blows my bowl cut.
  
  
• Become a Christian during a religious based youth camp when Matt, our twenty-something cabin leader suggests he prays for us and asks for God to enter our hearts. It seems fair enough.
  
  
• Discover some old 70’s porn mags in my Uncle’s collection of things at Nan & Pop’s. While looking at the pictures is okay, one day I read one of the erotic stories. The descriptions of sex disturb me for weeks, and I develop the kiddie version of depression. (see: The Birds & The Bees)
  
  
• Keep a diary that I will later use to comic effect. (see: High School Diaries)
  
  
• Become an adult, unofficially. After a bad day with my Mum. She has a mental illness. (see: Columns: Mental)

NOTE: The years 1992-1993 are explored in detail in the childhood memoir Get Up Mum. 

1994

• Drift away from my primary school friends and manage to dwell on the fringes of the cool group. Being a wise-cracking nerd with coke-bottle glasses gives me loads of novelty value. Girls are not attracted to novelty value. Learn to be self-conscious.
  
  
• Finish my time in the Burnie Surf Club. In my senior year I am voted club captain.
  
  
• After wearing too much hair gel and sitting next to Elvis Connelly on the school bus, Grade ten Matthew Rolls says the immortal words: “Hey look, there’s Elvis and the Fonz,” earning me the Tasmanian nickname that will stay with me the rest of my life. I spell it ‘Phonze,’ to break away from the traditional Happy Days character.

1995

• Start wearing contact lenses.
  
  
• First hear Here’s Johnny by Hocus Pocus. When everyone else is listening to Dookie by Green Day, I become obsessed with the trashy hardcore techno of the time like Tokyo Ghetto Pussy and Forever Young by Interactive. Whenever Here’s Johnny comes on at a school social, everyone turns to me accusingly.
  
  
• Write my first serious and comedy songs. I Will Never Leave You is a six minute ballad about a father going away to war. Home And Away Song is a one minute ditty satirising the recent events on Home and Away. I play the song at the school talent quest, along with Don’t with my best mate Josh Earl, which we steal off a Lano & Woodley performance I see on the Today Show. We win the audience vote but get no prizes from the judges.
  
  
• Record first ever tape of my music Justin’s Guitar Songs. It is a mixture of originals and covers including Way Out West and Day In The Life Of A School Kid. It is recorded sitting on the toilet, with my Walkman microphone blu-takked to an indoor clothesline. (see: Bedroom Records)
  
  
• Write a letter to my cousin Carly Heazlewood. Her Father Max (my Uncle and Godfather) had a falling out with my Nan & Pop, so although she lives in the same town, we haven’t seen each other since we were children. I am thrilled when she writes back. It kicks off a fruitful friendship as we become fast pen friends.

1996

• Have my first proper kiss with a girl, Chantel, on a Christian camp. We bump teeth.
  
  
• Take up regular 6am swimming training at the Burnie Swimming Club, though I don’t compete in meets and none of the private school kids ever talk to me. I win all my races at the school swimming carnival, but miss out on the record for the fifty metre freestyle by .1 of a second as Josh teases me about my bathers and I miss the start. Later, a grade nine girl says: “when you were up on the blocks, we could see your penis.” I go on to be the Division B Inter-High swimming champion in my age group.
  
  
• Become Vice-President of the SRC.
  
  
• Girls finally notice me. I manage a string of flings, including Natalie Everett, a friend of Carly’s. It means we get to hang out in person after a year of writing letters.
  
  
• Get first job at KFC, frying chicken and cleaning ovens out the back. It’s hot, greasy, demanding work. I make $4.70 an hour.
  
  
• Record first proper collection of songs Ad-Liberation. Includes End Of The World and Thought She Loved Me, a ballad about breaking up with a girl, even though I’d never had a proper girlfriend – I just figure that’s what you write songs about.
  
  
• Have first ever drug experience, smoking a joint with my best friend Billy. I freak out, think I am going to die and get driven to hospital by his Mum. She is not impressed. My heart continues to beat irregularly for most of the year. Our friendship doesn’t really survive.
  
  
• Perform again in the high school talent contest. We do a bunch of sketches I steal off a local uni revue, as well as a parody of Gangsta’s Paradise, called Parklands Paradise. Again, we win the audience vote but the judges award goes to two girls dancing to Cotton Eye Joe.
  
  
• Begin first vaguely proper relationship. It ends a week later because the girl cheats on me. She apologises by sticking the lyrics to Roxette’s It Must Have Been Love to my locker.
  
  
• Write short film script Infinity for English writing project. It’s about a DJ who claims if you plug speaker wires directly into your ear, while high on a certain drug, you can ‘become’ the song you’re listening to. It’s a reflection of the intensity with which I trip out while listening to techno songs in my bedroom. Infinity by Guru Josh is still a huge influence, particularly the arpeggiated synth breakdown. (see: From Popcorn to Infinity and Beyond)
  
  
• Take up smoking after having eight Peter Jackson super-mild’s in a row with Danny Flight behind the Parklands High School gym.
  
  
• Enrol in The Writing School, a creative writing correspondence course I find in That’s Life magazine.
  
  
• Finish up High School. The end of year party is at Jamie Upson’s house. I am hugging my male friends, pashing Jennifer Leeson, swinging on a clothesline, sculling Hahn Ice to TISM’s He’ll Never Be (An Old Man River) from the Triple J’s Hottest 100 with the ice cream on it.
  
  
• Begin first major relationship, via letter, with Erin Moore, a girl one grade below me whom I’ve had a crush on all year.

1997

• Get to Hellyer College. Become extremely intimidated by all the Year 12’s and end up lurking at the TAFE cafeteria eating chips and gravy with close male friends.
  
  
• Record second collection of songs on cassette, Rhetorical Verses.
  
  
• Perform in the College musical Godspell. I am a member of the chorus, and also part of the warm up entertainment as people walk in. I write one of the first songs for future album Birthmark called Gospel about how God “wouldn’t leave you in the lurch” or “fall asleep in church.”
  
  
• Lose virginity, in a hotel room, after a Silverchair concert, in Hobart.
  
  
• Find out from Billy that the joint he’d been given a year ago had been laced with L.S.D.
  
  
• In relative secrecy from my friends, I continue to pursue Christianity. I pray every night and attend church with my Mum most Sundays, a new experience for both of us.

1998

• Hit year 12. Get confident.
  
  
• Become president of the SRC. My most successful campaign pitch is a poster with a piece of toast stuck to it that reads: “This is a piece of toast. Vote for Phonze.”
  
  
• Find a new gang of crazy arty friends.
  
  
• Through my new best friend ‘Lix’ Walker, a melodramatic girl who ranks her friends from one to ten, I begin my involvement with Youth Insearch Australia an organisation that holds camps to help teenagers deal with issues in their lives.
  
  
• Turn 18 – despite my Mum’s requests not to, I stage an unauthorised party at Highclere Hall which 200 people turn up to and trash to the value of $300. Hold a benefit in school cafeteria, raise $80. (see: My Disastrous 18th)
  
  
• Begin playing music regularly at school concerts. Write comedy songs Vee-Dub, The Environment Song, Disco Chicken and a very on the money parody of Denis Leary’s Asshole called I’m an Aussie, which I swear would have done well if released at the time.
  
  
• Break up with Erin in our 19th month. I do the breaking. I begin a long distance relationship almost straight away with Jade Hallam, a Youth Insearch leader from Deloraine.
  
  
• Discover op shopping after wandering into a second hand store and finding a chocolate brown ‘New Breed’ press stud shirt. (see: Little Op Shop Of Horrors)
  
  
• Mum starts receiving regular visits from travelling Mormons. I sit in on the lessons. While I find them friendly, I can’t get over how pushy they are about being baptised in their church.
  
  
• Have second major drug experience, and my first ever bong. I can’t remember much about but apparently I spend the night talking to people out of my bum and sticking clothes pegs to my face. Conclude that maybe drugs aren’t for me.
  
  
• Write short story Noisy Skin for my Writers Workshop major piece, about a boy who goes to school naked for no apparent reason and has charges pressed against him by a girl who takes offence. He is befriended by the school counsellor, a former hippie, who encourages his actions.
  
  
• Write Smells Like Hellyer Spirit which becomes the unofficial Year twelve leavers anthem.
  
  
• Win school prize for creative writing and theatre performance subject award.
  
  
• Decide to do BA in Professional Writing at the University of Canberra after picking up a pamphlet in the career advisor’s room. I apply without even bothering to check if it’s offered at any other unis. Canberra seems fine as my Uncle Ken lives nearby in Michelago. Up until that point I’d been firmly set on the concept of staying in Burnie and training to be a cadet journalist at The Advocate. My theatre teacher Amanda Muruste talks me out of it.

1999

• Record my first CD Birthmark in Marcus Wynwood’s bedroom in Penguin in the January holidays. It is a mix of comedy and serious songs, ranging from Disco Chicken to Down By The Sea (written after a bad day with Mum). It features dodgy singing but some eclectic uses of backings and harmonies. It includes a mock tribute for my hypothetical school band Community Scooter where I refer to myself as “the genius, the enigma, the John Lennon.”
  
  
• Continue to go out with Jade, but she withdraws because she knows I’m going away. This upsets me and causes us to have a messy break-up.
  
  
• With one week until I leave for Canberra, I meet Jacci Holness at a party and start going out with her. We can’t get over the fact we have the same initials (JMH), are both Gemini’s and both go for Carlton. Jade is furious and refuses to speak to me. As an explanation of how much I loved her, I post her a detailed diary of our relationship that I was planning to give her on our one year anniversary. She burns it.
  
  
• Move to Canberra.
  
  
• Move into University Ressies, the largest in Australia. Befriend Tammy Nicholson, Adam Forbes, Matt Kelly and the gang through Three Dice, the student theatre company. The society runs Theatresports competitions, plays and alcohol based theatre camps at Batemans Bay.
  
  
• Audition for my first play Psycho Beach Party. I’m given the role of gay surfer Provoloney, and told I have to pash Matt on stage. Now it feels like I’m really at Uni. I don’t tell Mum.
  
  
• Star in second semester play Baby With The Bathwater as Daisy, a bisexual boy who’s been brought up as a girl his whole life. It feels like I’m really, really at uni. 
  
  
• Form the band Urban Turban with Adam and Matt. We play our first gig at 9am the morning after an all-night dance party. The limited audience are hung over, crotchety and throw rubbish at us. At the end of one particularly beautiful and original ballad Matt says very slowly and precisely: “Fuck. You. All. Alright, we suck we’re havin’ a break.”
  
  
• Adam and I win the Uni ressies talent night Ressies Revue with I’m an Aussie and a new song Spankees Lunch. For our efforts we win a mystery flight to Brisbane. As we have never been there before we wander about aimlessly before deciding to go watch the latest James Bond film at the cinemas.
  
  
• After maintaining a relationship where we only see each other 17% of the time, Jacci and I break up. I almost immediately start going out with Margi Locke, a girl involved in Three Dice two years older than me. I am turning into a serial monogamist.
  
  
• Toby, the president of Three Dice, persuades me that I shouldn’t call myself Phonze because it isn’t very cool. Based on a 3am rendition of Spankees Lunch he gives me the nickname “Spankees.”
  
  
• Make a vow not to get my hair cut for a year.

2000
Saturn Returns

• Margi comes to visit me in Burnie – my Canberra and Tasmanian worlds combining for the first time. We have some fun in Cradle Mountain, but there are some dodgy moments including taking her to a Burnie pub where a man with no ears accosts us, and choosing to go and drink with my school buddies at my old primary school, leaving her at home.
  
  
• As soon as I get back to Canberra she breaks up with me. It’s all the more awkward as I’m due to stay at her place as Ressies hasn’t opened up yet. Toby knows the reasons why, but doesn’t tell me. This is the beginning of his power over me.
  
  
• After being best friends for a year, Tammy and I kiss. We start going out.
  
  
• Continue my pursuit of Christianity by making contact with the youthful Catholic priests on campus. They pressure me about my sexual involvement with Tammy.
  
  
• Start writing for the University magazine Curio. The editor is exasperated that “no one round here gives a shit.”
  
  
• Via Youth Insearch, I attend a three-day workshop of popular American motivational coach, Tony Robbins. This includes a session where I walk on hot coals. (It does hurt.) While I find a lot of good in the workshops, I am amazed that Tony doesn’t turn up on the third day and instead gets his helpers to run the sessions.
  
  
• Star in Skin, a comedy about the porn industry written by Toby. I play Jack Hammer, a porn-star who ends up being gay. I start to wonder if I’m being typecast. In the play the actors are asked to simulate sex scenes, wear strap ons, and watch porn on the theatre camp. Many of us, me included, are not very comfortable with this. We are made to feel silly for complaining and I end up keeping quiet, much to my personal detriment.
  
  
• Jack Hammer has a secret identity as an Aussie bogan. I take the role so seriously that I have my long blondish hair, not trimmed for a full year, cut into a mullet. I return home to Tasmania with this mullet. One night I am out in a Burnie pub wearing a West Indies cricket shirt. I still get called poof.
  
  
• The Uni film society makes a short film based on my story Noisy Skin which I wrote in Year 12. It’s about a boy who goes to school naked. I play the lead. Tammy brings her parents on set one day. I am standing in a carpark wearing speedos and a Carlton scarf.
  
  
• Move out of Uni ressies into a sharehouse dubbed ‘The TAJ’ (our initials) with Tammy and Adam. We take great delight recording a hit phone message: “This is no mirage, you have called the TAJ, Tammy Adam Justin (you have a good day we’re trustin’), we are all at large, so please leave a mess-age.”
  
  
• Adam and I start the Harmonica Lewinski’s Muso’s Club on campus, as a way to create our own folk gigs. We end up spending all the club money on sausages and haircuts.
  
  
• For one of my Literary Studies presentations on Australian Literature I take along a tape deck and play a synth version of the War Of The Worlds theme while performing an interpretive dance. After a minute I press stop and read my essay as if nothing has happened. No one ever mentions the dance. 
  
  
• Complete my leadership training with Youth Insearch. At the graduation I am MC, which I find incredibly difficult in my increasingly troubled state. (see: The Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Had To Do)
  
  
• Enter the ACT campus band competition with Urban Turban and The Harmonica Lewinski’s, so we can separate our serious and comedy songs. The Harmonica Lewinski’s make it into the ACT finals. One of the judges writes: “Guitar playing seemed to be out of time, but couldn’t tell if this was on purpose as some kind of musical protest.” It isn’t.
  
  
• Adam and I win Ressies Revue again, with a self-indulgent forty minute comedy blowout we knock up the night before. Set includes Home Brand Man, an acoustic rendition of Rockafella Skank, Adam’s song Rainbow Honey Eater, and me taping the 500+ audience saying an answering machine greeting for me to use on my ressies phone.
  
  
• Three Dice don’t have a second semester play, so instead Toby creates Theatre Jam. It’s serious theatresports, where we improvise short plays that last up to twenty minutes. Some of them are very good. Despite reeling from Skin, I’m under the spell of Toby’s charisma. Everyone else involved is older than me, and tease me for being such a convincing mental cripple.
  
  
• Spend a lot of time down by Lake Ginninderra, marvelling at the sunlight diamonds on water, writing in my journal, trying to regain control over my life.
  
  
• Record two debut albums for both bands in three days at my Uncle Ken’s studio in Michaelago. Highlights include I’m The One Who Loves You (I’m The One That Needs You) which is written while we wait for Ken’s computer to work. While Songs By The Bushfire captures the spontaneous, madcap energy of the Harmonica’s, there are mixed feelings about the rushed nature of Meet…Urban Turban.
  
  
• Attend lectures given by deadpan writers who tell us that only 1% of us will ever make a living from our art.
  
  
• Win ABC radio’s Heywire competition for Canberra, with a three minute radio documentary done in the style of a Triple J ‘J-file’ about how Urban Turban struggled to find a scene because Canberra Uni students are all about raves and doof.
  
  
• Bring home Radiohead’s Kid A. Adam and I lay on the floor in the dark and listen to it in its entirety. (see: Treble Treble #2 – The National Anthem)
  
  
• Secretly, I spend most of the year feeling very depressed.

2001

• Walk the overland track, a five day bushwalk from Lake St. Clair to Cradle Mountain with my Nan, aged 75. (My Nan, not me). This includes a near-death experience, after getting caught on a precarious rock face on Barn’s Bluff.
  
  
• Return home to Canberra. Attend a five day national Heywire camp, which includes an all expenses paid trip to… (drumroll) … Canberra.
  
  
• Start writing for local streetpress BMA. I repair Curio‘s lagging relationship with record companies and score stacks of free CD’s by the likes of Sparklehorse and Orbital.
  
  
• Read A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. It’s the best book I’ve ever read and has a profound influence on my writing. His philosophy is “more is more” when it comes to sharing, comparing it to “making electricity from dirt.”
  
  
• After having a complete fallout in confidence, I go out to my Uncle Ken’s farm, and write what will become my column. I call it Being Justin Heazlewood, inspired by the Spike Jonze movie. It is an autobiographical conversation about myself to myself. It’s published in Curio.
  
  
• Become co-president of Three Dice.
  
  
• Urban Turban play at Indyfest, Canberra’s showcase of indie bands. A girl in the audience describes the set as “nice.” The drummer from the Go-Betweens is there and gives us an insight in how to be jaded about the industry. Adam and I share a taxi with the A&R guy from Sony. (I’m chuffed when he says Beck’s Mutations is his favourite album because of the lyrics).
  
  
• Enter Triple J’s Raw Comedy – I make it into the ACT finals, but find it all a bit mucky. I am beaten by a guy telling stoner jokes.
  
  
• The Harmonica Lewinski’s rerecord Spankees Lunch at a studio in Wollongong. We continue to do sporadic gigs at the Pot Belly and Shooters. Late in the year, almost a year after recording them, we launch the two albums at the University of Canberra bar with a “CD Lunch.” This joke backfires, as even though it’s advertised as 6pm, most of the punters turn up at lunch time. Urban Turban play their first and last gig at key Canberra establishment Tilley’s. Matt pays out the now deceased David Branson who performs a very strange poem about eating his own face.
  
  
• After growing unrest, Urban Turban disbands.
  
  
• Best Tassie friend Lix is concerned that the nickname Phonze isn’t surviving on the mainland. She takes it personally that I’m calling myself something else.
  
  
• As a 21st present to myself, with the help of Uncle Ken, I make The Conception Album, a collection of about 30 little musical snippets and demos I’ve recorded on my Walkman over the last three years. The collection includes the riffs for future songs I’m So Over Girls, Weird Dream and Folkstar.
  
  
• Continue my pursuit of Christianity. I find myself growing increasingly alienated from the fun sexy world broadcast around me. I can’t watch Secret Life Of Us.
  
  
• Perform first paid solo comedy gig supporting Rash Rider and Pommy Johnson in the UC Bar. It goes well.
  
  
• For my major writing project, I pen a feature length play, Cyclone Beryl, a comedy about the Australian Music Industry. I write the first draft out on Ken’s farm.
  
  
• September 11 happens. Ken doesn’t have a TV so I listen to it all on the radio, which is haunting.
  
  
• Graduate University, receiving a High Distinction for my play.

2002

• Come to terms with not having school on after eighteen years.
  
  
• Start working at the Canberra Labor Club. As I am the only employee with mid-length hair and glasses, I pick up the nicknames: “Shaggy”, “Shags”, “Shagadelic”, “Shagster”, “Harry Potter”, “Austin Powers”, “The guy from Oasis”, “The guy from Weezer”, “The guy from The Lovin’ Spoonful”, “The guy from The Seekers”, “The guy out of Pulp”, “Keith Richards”, “John Lennon”, “George Harrison” and “The security guard in A Clockwork Orange.”
  
  
• Begin training with Lifeline to be a telephone counsellor.
  
  
• After attending a Christian camp and feeling tired of sitting on the fence, I vow to fully commit by becoming celibate. This doesn’t do wonders for my sex life.
  
  
• The Harmonica’s enter Raw Comedy with I’m an Aussie. We are well received but get nowhere. Around this time Bloke is released by Chris Franklin, and I feel an opportunity has slipped by.
  
  
• After being asked to present at the Heywire Youth Forum, I write Radio Edit Of My Soul, with the express notion that Triple J’s Morning Show will do a live broadcast the next day, be in the audience, like it, and want me to play it live on air.
  
  
• This happens.
  
  
• After nearly leaving, I double back and ask producer Vicki Kerrigan if there’s any way I can be further involved. She suggests hooking up with Jim Trail and recording some stuff. I do. Vicki describes my songwriting as “Bedroom Philosophy.” Francis Leach plays my songs every Tuesday morning, paying me $70 per song.
  
  
• Have the ecstatic sensation that a career as an artist is possible.
  
  
• Realising that my guitar has a terrible pickup, I take it to a music store to be replaced. The salesman says “you could spend $400 on a new pickup, or you could buy this.” He hands me a Maton guitar. It’s love at first strum. All my songs sound 250% better. I settle on a Maton 325C.
  
  
• The first song I write on the new guitar is Kelly The Deli Girl. I dub the guitar “Kelly.”
  
  
• Record the first batch of songs, including Dr Karl a parody of Aqua’s Dr Jones sending up the fact Dr Karl changes his mind on-air a lot. At the time he seems touched but Tammy later hears him refer to it as “that awful Dr Karl song.”
  
  
• After hearing My Nan Really Likes Radiohead, Gaby Brown starts replaying them on Saturday mornings, paying me $30 per song.
  
  
• Become songwriting obsessed. I am often found lurking near the poker machines at work, writing lyrics on the back of a Keno ticket. During this period I write Happy Cow, Golden Gaytime, Generation ABC, Jesus On Big Brother and Folkstar.
  
  
• More and more people hear me on the radio. I find myself playing down their compliments and acting sheepish.
  
  
• Film two pilot episodes for The Bedroom Philosopher Show for ABC’s Fly TV in Sydney. It is a combination of film clips for my songs and sketches. It includes me trying to be a model for Chadwick’s agency in Sydney and going to a bowls club to record their reaction to Radiohead. I am incredibly chuffed and think this might be the big break I’ve always dreamed of. I’m worried about telling Matt because he’ll be jealous.
  
  
• Begin writing humorous opinion column Struth Be Told for Canberra street press – a progression of Being Justin Heazlewood.
  
  
• Receive my first fan letter. An email asking about Jesus On Big Brother. I re-read it several times, amazed that a stranger would write to me. After years of standing awkwardly in the kitchen, people are turning up to my party.
  
  
• Begin the routine of writing a blog style diary on my laptop. I write 2000 words every few days. This coincides with an increased distance between Tammy and I. On one particular day I write: “Everything in my life is surreal at the moment. Especially this Triple J thing, when anyone mentions it, I say, ‘yeah…it’s so surreal’ and my usage of that word has shot up about 78% with a  bullet. But that does it even mean?  What can it mean when my life is surreal all the time? What room is left for the real?”
  
  
• There is growing tension between Adam and I also. Due to contention over its consistency, the Urban Turban album is deleted. This is relatively easy as it has never been released. I take my songs and turn it into a lightly distributed solo album.
  
  
• After two and a half years Tammy and I break-up. It’s vaguely mutual yet ambiguous.
  
  
• The Harmonica Lewinski’s break-up. We play our last gig at the Pot Belly in late June.
  
  
• Perform strange, solo guest spot at Ressies Revue as ‘Urban Turban.’
  
  
• Move out of the TAJ, under a hail of stress, resentment and curtain linings that our landlord says we have to wash and iron. Adam and I don’t speak for three months. It’s the first proper fight I’ve had with a friend.
  
  
• Move into another house in the same street. I live with two girls. One of them is a brat – either watching her Midori sponsored Schoolies video or pretending to dry-reach because I’ve left a banana in the cupboard.
  
  
• In August, play my first live shows as The Bedroom Philosopher, performing at the Street Theatre, The Lighthouse and the Phoenix Bar. I decide to wear my Nan’s 1970’s blue ski-suit. It makes me feel protected and fits in with the ‘blooperhero’ concept. I’m panicked, bumbling, nervous and awkward. It seems convenient to make this my character.
  
  
• Record Ian Thorpe Was Bored, the last song for my Morning Show segment. They are going on holidays, and I can sense the wind down of my own song writing blitz. I have written and aired twenty five new songs in a six month period.
  
  
• Do first gig in Sydney, MCing a CD Launch. The crowd seems to like me but the bands seem to hate me. I meet Caitlin, the girl I will eventually move to Sydney for.
  
  
• After deciding to move to Sydney, I experience an anxiety dream where a black shape is flying along the road outside Nan & Pop’s house. It has a frightened man’s voice and keeps saying “I’m scared I want my Mummy.” It flies through the window towards my face and I catch it. I wake up with a shadowy imprint in one eye. I rush to the ophthalmologist. He says I’ve suffered a retinal haemorrhage. One of my blood vessels has tried to push through my retina, like weeds grow through cracks in the footpath. I’m terrified, but it heals quickly and leaves only a small but permanent point of damage in my vision.
  
  
• Controversially, I go out with Caitlin, ten years my elder. I say goodbye to Canberra and move to Sydney.

2003

• Hate Sydney.
  
  
• Go on the dole.
  
  
• Discover that the girl I am in love with lives in a cockroach infested inner city office space, directly next to her father’s office. whose secretary is her jealous ex boyfriend.
  
  
• Move in with my ten year old cousin’s family in Blacktown, alongside three generations of women (her Mother and Grandmother). The grandma doesn’t let me watch The Simpsons or use the phone after nine.
  
  
• Discover the girl I moved to Sydney for is neurotic, unbalanced and unconvinced I love her because I’m “young and naive.'” For the first time in my life I have my entire existence and belief system questioned to the core. I am desperate to prove myself.
  
  
• After finding a mysterious $600 in my bank from the ABC, with no explanation and with key encouragement from Matt – two days before the deadline – I enter my debut show Living On The Edge…Of My Bed in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
  
  
• After borrowing $1000 off Nan and Pop, I produce 500 copies of the Bedroom Philosopher album of the same name. Nan & Pop Records is born. The album is a modest, unmastered affair, featuring twenty tracks from my Triple J segment. Having already decided on a tracklist, at the last minute I get my girlfriend to pick them, so that whoever plays the CD will find that the track listing is different to the album listing. We think this is funny. Friends and radio DJs do not.
  
  
• To promote my Melbourne show, I set the world record for continuous performance of John Farnham’s You’re The Voice outside Flinders Street Station. I plan to go for twelve hours but after nine hours friends convince me ‘that’s enough.’ While my voice holds up, my wrist develops RSI from strumming. I appear as the odd spot on Channel Seven news that night. They say I am promoting the comedy festival and don’t mention my show.
  
  
• Perform nine shows at The Butterfly Club. I am nervous as hell, in a small room, performing two-bit material in my Nan’s ski suit. Each night I end up crawling off stage drenched and confused.
  
  
• Under Matt’s advice, I stop shampooing my hair, deciding that the shampoo and conditioner routine is a scam. I’m sick of my hair being too fluffy to manage every second day. My hair soon adapts, learning to ‘self oil.’
  
  
• Perform two sets at the National Folk Festival in Canberra. During one impassioned version of Disco Chicken I roll on my guitar lead so that it pushes through the wood of my guitar. I borrow Soursob Bob’s guitar and almost do the same thing with his. My stage ethos is that songs and comedy aren’t enough, I need to be a madman clown as well.
  
  
• Discover Tug Dumbly and Bennito Di Fonzo’s regular poetry/music night Bardflys. It’s my saving grace in Sydney. (see: Bardflys: A Sketch)
  
  
• Move house, and live with the girl that will inspire the song ‘Megan the Vegan.’ I’m told I can’t eat meat in the house.
  
  
• Tammy and I remain terrific friends. The Sydney girl is extremely jealous and threatened by this.
  
  
• Play a gig at the Cat and Fiddle pub which no-one turns up to. I have to contribute my own money to pay for the sound guy and then walk home in light rain. (see: You’ll Never Make Any Money From Wobbleboarding)
  
  
• Complete my first and last two weeks of full-time work, at a call centre as a Vodaphone consultant. I’m on Team Schumacher.
  
  
• After nine months I break up with Caitlin. It is the most emotionally damaging relationship of my life. After remaining friends for a while I discover she still has my email password auto-saved on her laptop and has been reading my mail.
  
  
• In both my personal and professional life, I consider myself to be in a rut.
  
  
• After an intense ten year journey, I decide that I am no longer Christian. I still believe in God. (see: If You Could Rid The Earth Of One Thing What Would It Be?)
  
  
• Play my first gig at Charlie Pickering’s comedy venue, the Mic In Hand in Glebe. Until this point I have considered myself a musician who happens to be funny, rather than the other way round. I do a ten minute support slot before Wil Anderson. I play My Nan Really Likes Radiohead first up. People go crazy. It’s the best reaction I’ve ever had to my stuff. During a version of Here’s Johnny the microphone stand droops down. I go with it and end up on my knees singing into the mic – the place erupts. It is a sublime moment.
  
  
• Chris McDonald, a potential manager approaches me after the show saying he likes my stuff. My confidence is restored.
  
  
• After being driven to near-madness by the extreme exploits and clickiness of the ‘Megan the Vegan’ house, I move to Sydenham, living with Jim, a sixty year old retired Canadian school teacher and a Vietnamese Uni student. The house is directly next to a train line and underneath a flight path. One day there is a plane and train going by at the same time and the phone rings and I scream.
  
  
• Find myself unable to create a follow up segment on Triple J, but do some work experience with the Morning Show. I produce four segments combining voxpops, music and poetry called The Heart Of The Bollocks. It doesn’t make a huge impact and it feels as though the Triple J door has closed.
  
  
• Create a fortnightly Ezine LapTopping. It embodies my desire to keep in touch with as many people as I can.
  
  
• Hold a CD Launch in Canberra. To promote it, I set the world record for continuous performance of Daryl Braithwaite’s The Horses while riding on a horse carousel, on Melbourne Cup day (Thirty minutes). I want to go longer but the owner of ride reckons ‘that’s enough.’
  
  
• A year after filming the pilot for The Bedroom Philosopher Show, Fly TV is axed. Only two film clips make it to air. I am sent the two unaired videos in the mail. It’s only about a quarter of what I filmed with them. While I am sitting on my bed staring at them, I receive a one-off anonymous text from a Struth Be Told reader telling me to ‘keep it up.’
  
  
• Chris agrees to manage me. It’s heartening to finally have someone in my corner. He is a dock I can tether my little boat to.
  
  
• Decide to leave Sydney.

2004

• Perform a spot at the Falls Festival in Marion Bay, Tasmania, alongside best mate Josh Earl, who is now also doing musical comedy.
  
  
• Perform at the Hobart Comedy Festival. I do 10-45 minute spots over 16 nights. (The 45 minute spot is supposed to be 15). The Hobart audiences are warm and supportive and my confidence soars.
  
  
• Fall nutso in love with Janita Foley, a vague and cryptic fellow comedian. Spend the best part of the year being embroiled in her abstract tundra.
  
  
• Perform at the Hobart Comedy Gala, supporting the likes of Lano & Woodley in front of 1600 people. I get to tell Frank Woodley how Josh and I used to rip off Lano & Woodley. He is interested.
  
  
• To promote the festival I set the world record for ‘Boon Rapping’ (Reading David Boon’s autobiography in a hip-hop style.) I set the record at 12.5 minutes. I want to go for longer but the Comedy Festival promoter reckons “that’ enough.”
  
  
• Write throwaway song I’m So Post Modern. It’s a lyrical exercise in being as random as possibly. First perform it to Josh, Janita and her brother Joe in Launceston. It gets the first of many laughs.
  
  
• After a couple of years of passionate suggestions from friends, I move to Melbourne.
  
  
• Love Melbourne.
  
  
• Move into a terrific share house in Clifton Hill with four others and a troubled cat named Squirty.
  
  
• Participate in three shows for the Big Laugh Comedy Festival in Parramatta.
  
  
• With a lot of help from Chris, I put my second show In Bed With My Doona in the Melbourne Comedy Festival. It is a runaway success. (It runs away with a lot of our money.) During this phase I am donning short green pyjamas, and often make the joke that I look like Harry Potter working at a gay Irish McDonalds in the 1970’s. I also spend a lot of time talking to Kerry The Metaphysical Drummer. The show gets some good reviews, and one Saturday night I have a killer opening, but manage to blow it half way through. I keep trying to pull off semi-improvised, schizophrenic conversations with myself, but my skills aren’t developed enough to keep the vibe afloat. This night is full of important industry types including the head of Token and an Age reviewer. I vow never to know when important people are in the audience.
  
  
• To promote the show, I perform another publicity stunt. This time it’s a ‘bed-in’ protest, as I say I’m being deported back to Tasmania for not having the right passport. I lie down on a mattress outside town hall. Conveniently, Triple J breakfast are doing a live broadcast anyway, so there’s a lot of girls running around in their pyjamas and it appears as though they could have come out for me. The ‘difficult fourth stunt’ confuses all and amuses few.
  
  
• After a moment of insanity my attempts to trim the back of my hair ends up with me completely shaving the back of my head, but leaving my fringe as normal. I accidentally give myself a trendy Melbourne undercut ahead of its time. (see: Artist Loses His Head But Not His Style)
  
  
• After a couple of years of being published, I join the editorial committee of national youth literary magazine Voiceworks.
  
  
• My Uncle Nigel dies after being hit by a train in Lithgow on the 24th of April. It is my first experience of death.
  
  
• Josh Earl and I form a comedy bloopergroup The Renegades of Folk specialising in folk covers of electronic songs.
  
  
• Record debut studio album In Bed With My Doona with my Uncle Ken Heazlewood in Emu Plains, NSW between July and October. The entire recording, mixing and mastering process takes 140 hours, about 70 of these are spent on Folkstar. The album is my life’s work.
  
  
• Embark on my first ever tour, taking in Melbourne, Canberra, Albury, Woolongong, Sydney and Perth.
  
  
• Become the Victorian State Coordinator of the Australian Songwriter’s Association (somehow).
  
  
• Am shortlisted for a Moosehead award, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s grant for innovative and fresh show ideas. The potential show is called The Bedroom Philosopher’s Super Fun Happy Sleepover Camp of Yay!
  
  
• At a time when I am about to produce 500 copies of my album, I win Plover Idol a take-off of Australian idol at the This is Not Art Festival in Newcastle. The prize is $1000 of CD reproduction. During the set, I play Megan The Vegan and Megan’s ex boyfriend (the electro musician Toecutter) is one of the judges. He is interested. During the song I mention Systems Corrupt (go on, look them up on google), an underground posse of which Megan and Toecutter are members. Many members are in the audience and go wild at being mentioned. I end my set with an unhinged acoustic version of Aphex Twin’s Come To Daddy complete with primary school singalong verses erupting into primal screaming. For my encore, I stand on a table in the middle of the room and play Everybody’s Got The Same Insecurities As You. On my walk back to to the stage some indie-goth girls start tugging at my pants, so I lie on my back and scream “Tear me apart! I hate myself!” It’s a personal victory. (see: Bedroom Philosopher Gig Round-Up)
  
  
• After sleeping with Gemma (a fan), she writes about it on her blog within twelve hours. I find it the next day and am weirded out. I ask her to take it down, for fear that my Mum might see it. She is unimpressed. (see: A Story No Blogger Should Miss)
  
  
• Launch In Bed With My Doona at Stagetime, a comedy room run by Charlie Pickering. He is very supportive of my album and takes it into Triple J for me.
  
  
• First unofficial album single I’m So Post Modern is placed on light rotation on Triple J. It is particularly popular on Super Requests. As the song is written in Wingdings, some DJs can’t find it on the album. Also, the ‘Play me! Play Me! Play Me!’ written on the spine makes them think the album is called that. Once again my playful subversion of the medium inadvertently sabotages commercial success.
  
  
• My poetic alter-super-ego Super Poet makes his debut at a Melbourne poetry gig.
  
  
• Finish the year with a set at the Falls Festival, playing after Butterfingers to 2000 people. A young girl approaches me and offers to have my baby. My response is: “What’s your bloodtype?” Later, I spy Sarah Blasko and awkwardly give her my album. (see: The Blasko Zone)

2005

• Sitting in my childhood home in Burnie late one night I start writing a song that goes “Hello! My name is Wow Wow. I am here to tell you some stories.” I write the whole song while pissing myself. The voice is a combination of my cave man voice with a dialect inspired by an alternate personality that the Sydney girl had. To me, Wow Wow is a little caveman trying to understand the world.
  
  
• Perform at the Hobart Comedy Festival. This year I am asked to perform In Bed With My Doona. They even have a racing car bed on stage for me, on loan. During Folkstar I jump on it and break it. Wow Wow proves to be a big hit, getting lots of laughs.
  
• Fall very hard for manic pixie dream girl Janita Foley who is also on the bill. She does surreal comedy including a parody of The Waif’s London Still called I’m in Launceston. She is going out with another comedian Fin from Adelaide who feels like a bit of a love rival. On one rather bleak Sunday we all watch Donnie Darko together. It really cuts me up.
  
• Hear Boards of Canada for the first time. The song Eagle In Your Mind is the most haunting thing I’ve ever heard. It feels dangerous to be around music that moody.
  
  
• Perform in Laughapoolooza at the Kaleide theatre – a prototype musical comedy gala that my manager Chris has devised. I come up with the name. It’s one of the early gigs for Tim Minchin, who performs in shorts. He’s inspired by Josh who dresses fashionably. Chris begins courting me with the former manager of TISM. whom I’m very intimidated by.
  
  
• Participate in the Big Laugh Comedy Festival, playing five shows with Nick Sun and Sam Bowring.
  
  
• During a late night spot at the Seymour Centre, I flip out. Dismayed that the audience aren’t into me, I put down my guitar and rip off my shirt. I start screaming that I’d die for musical comedy. I turn around and pick up a huge metallic abstract sculpture behind me. I scream “Fuck art, it’s all about comedy,” lugging the artwork and trying to put it in a little metal bin. After being helped up I am informed that the artwork has a price tag of $25, 000. The venue manager is later heard saying “yes, but why did he pick it up?” Chris asks his Dad if he got it on tape but he replies: “No-one would want to see that.”
  
  
• Perform third Melbourne Comedy Festival show Pyjamarama. It’s a ramshackle little show, which showcases the ‘unhinged’ Bedroom Philosopher period. It features Alf singing Creep (me hiding behind an Alf doll on my guitar) as well as live hit I’m So Over Girls and me rapping Folkstar to a backing while destroying the stage. While there is good initial buzz, it doesn’t turn into strong numbers. I once again manage to do my worst show in front of Helen Razor who is reviewing for The Age. A reviewer from Chortle, a UK comedy website, gives me the best review of my life, stating that I am the “Jarvis Cocker of stand-up.” Backstage at Laughapoolooza I meet John Safran, whom I’m a huge fan of. We bond over our mutual dislike of the new Simpsons. John describes me as “The most awkward comedian in the festival.”
  
  
• Perform in all six Laughapooloozas during the festival, including one filmed for a DVD release. It is not a pleasant experience. I’m terribly nervous, and break a string and knock the microphone over during McRock. I go overtime and am vilified backstage (mostly by my close friend Jo who is working at a tech). It is one of my lowest performance moments. Despite more on stage confidence, I am finding the comedy ‘Industry’ increasingly intimidating, reacting by falling silent around peers. My ‘networking’ involves me lurking near Rove while scrunching my flyers.
  
  
• After the Comedy Festival awards night I perform Anarchy In The UK for the Scared Weird Little Guys Superband. At the end, it seems like a good idea to take all my clothes off. The performance appears in the special features of an upcoming Scardies DVD. I write to their manager, the same one Chris has been courting me with, requesting for my ‘special features’ to be pixelated. They aren’t.
  
  
• Chris informs me that while he has tried to sell me to key television producers, the industry considers me too “reckless and unpredictable.” The words cut deep. I feel like I’ve let everyone down. 
  
  
• Secure national distribution for In Bed With My Doona through MGM.
  
  
• I’m So Post Modern is in the top five most requested songs on Triple J’s Super Requests during two days in April and two in June. It is still being regularly requested six months after its radio debut.
  
  
• I’m So Post Modern is featured on Triple J Super Request compilation Dog’s Breakfast, alongside the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, Marilyn Manson and such novelty favourites as King Missile’s Detachable Penis and Dana Lyon’s Cow’s With Guns.
  
  
• Go on a date with Paris Wells. She saw Pyjamarama and kept emailing me asking about my Alf doll. We kiss briefly but then she has to go to a party.
  
  
• In July, I begin some preliminary writing for a new sketch show being planned for Channel 10 called The Ronnie Johns Half Hour. The show is based on a uni revue stage show created by Chris. It’s the first time I’ve written a TV sketch but quickly get the hang of it.
  
  
• During a gig in Hobart, I meet the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, Anna Knight. We have some nice conversations, but she is in a relationship.
  
  
• Am asked to open for long time musical comedy heroes Tripod on a fourteen day regional tour of W.A. This includes Broome, Port Hedland and Kalgoorlie. It is about the best two weeks of my life. At a party one night I snort what is probably speed for the only time in my life. It doesn’t do much except make me wet the bed. 
  
  
• In October, I temporarily move to Sydney to write for Ronnie Johns Half Hour. I live in Alexandria with a friend of a friend and his three dogs. I have never lived with dogs before, nor particularly liked them. This time round, I don’t hate Sydney nearly as much. It’s the first time I’ve been able to live off my creativity. I am paid well but save no money. I find writing for television more disillusioning than I had imagined. Although many of my sketches get through and I am well praised, I’m a little miffed that I’m not asked to perform. I appear on one episode, busking I’m So Post Modern.
  
  
• Go out with Erica Englert – a wacky, hell-cute performer. It doesn’t last long. At dinner she tells me I could be a lot further along in my career, that I wear glasses to hold onto a high school idea of myself and that we should break up. She still owes me $150.
  
  
• Try my hand as the warm up guy at the Ronnie Johns live nights. This involves walking out in a cold, sterile television studio and geeing up a crowd of young, middle class ‘wogans’. On top of being funny, I must also wear an ear piece and constantly be aware of what the director is saying. I am challenged. During one stint of handing out merchandise to the crowd I hit a lady in the face with an Australian Idol notebook. On top of this, the regular warm up guy sits in the audience watching me. After three goes the director decides ‘that’s enough.’
  
  
• Perform at the Falls Festival for the third year in a row. This year I am up against Sarah Blasko. A good crowd turns out to witness me. At one point I stop, listen to Sarah on the big stage for a while and scream “Damn it Sarah – you know I love you, but there’s no need to rub it in!” For the third year in a row I spend my Falls Festival time wandering around in a depressive stupor. (see: New Years Grieve)

2006

• I’m So Post Modern is voted #72 in Triple J’s Hottest 100. With no money and no ideas I enlist the help of Ronnie Johns performer Dan Ilic and make a film clip for it. It’s a lo-fi animated karaoke affair, it’s climax made up of a montage of photos sent to me by LapTopping subscribers. The song is chosen to appear on the Hottest 100 DVD.
  
  
• In forums and conversations, people are often focused on whether the song is post-modern or not. The seriousness with which it is analysed bemuses me, as it was just meant to be silly.
  
  
• Finish work on a new remix of Folkstar entitled Folkstar (Pooglet 78″ Mix). It includes altered lyrics and resung vocals, delivered in more of a Beastie Boys style. The new remix is added to the latest batch of Doona albums.
  
  
• Deliver an address at University of Canberra’s commencement ceremony. My advice includes consider lectures like gigs you’ve already bought tickets for, as when you work it out each one costs about $50.
  
  
• Go on JJJ’s Like A Version segment. I perform one original, which is a version of I’m So Post Modern with twenty-six new lines and a ‘chorus.’ For my cover I take Matt Kelly’s advice and write an acoustic megamix of thirty songs from the Hottest 100. It proves hugely popular on radio and at gigs. I consider releasing it, but the copyright implications are tremendous.
  
  
• My love life is a tangle of flings. I am seeing Melita and Monica in Sydney and Melbourne without telling either. A friend later says the word on the street is I “pretend to be lonely and awkward to get booty.” (see: Beware The Indie Sleaze)
  
  
• Life in Sydney starts to feel quite lonely. On one Sunday afternoon when I can’t find anyone to hang out with I sit on my front porch and write Circus Bear. It marks the end of Bedroom Philosopher innocence and the beginning of my ‘serious phase.’
  
  
• Wind up Sydney operations in March and return to Melbourne. Ronnie Johns Half Hour has rated fairly well during the year and a second season appears likely. The Chopper character is particularly popular.
  
  
• The Renegades of Folk perform their debut show in the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Audiences love it but all our friends and peers seem to hate it. We also find it strangely impossible to get reviewed.
  
  
• First meet future band mate and close friend Andy “Nature Boy” Hazel, who bounds up to me after a show.
  
  
• After some match making from Sam Simmons, I fall deeply in love with Anna, the girl I’d met the year previous. We go out, both figuring we were out of each other’s league.
  
  
• During an outdoor performance in the Comedy Festival, I am disturbed by the presence of a man in a purple Comedy Channel Star suit. I make up a song with the chorus: “Let’s all push over the Comedy Channel star.” Suddenly two young punks run from nowhere and crash tackle him to the ground. The actor inside eventually presses charges against me for inciting violence. (see: Bedroom Philosopher or Bedroom Terrorist?)
  
  
• Finish work on yet another upgrade of Folkstar. this time, adding the genius double bass exploits of John Maddox. This version Folkstar (Pooglet With Strings Mix) is deemed the official second single from In Bed With My Doona and is sent out backed with a remix by Pomomofo (featuring new friend Nikos Andronicus who was a co-writer on Ronnie Johns). A limited edition maxi-single is produced, featuring other remixes of Folkstar and I’m So Post Modern, plus some live recordings from a drunken session in Albury for a forthcoming national tour.
  
  
• Organise my first proper national tour playing Melbourne, Hobart, Canberra, Sydney, Newcastle and Brisbane. I play music venues with mainly straight musical supports. While an enormous job to orchestrate, it is an unprecedented joy to perform, with especially healthy turnouts in my home bases of Melbourne, Canberra and Hobart. (see: Nationalish Tour Diary)
  
  
• Change management. As Chris’ commitments with Ronnie Johns grow, I decide to start working with a friend Saskia Moore after a 2am discussion over a chicken schnitzel sandwich at famed Melbourne establishment Golden Towers.
  
  
• Folkstar, while never gaining the popularity of I’m So Post Modern, gets a fair work out on Triple J, mainly on Super Requests.
  
  
• Ronnie Johns is commissioned for a second series. In conjunction with this, I am offered the lead role in Nick Coyle’s brilliant The October Sapphire to be performed at the New York Fringe Festival. As I can’t afford the trip to NY, I decline. To my joy (and benefit of my relationship), Ronnie Johns allows me to write from Melbourne.
  
  
• In September I begin work on a new album Brown & Orange. I again work with my Uncle Ken in Emu Plains. This album aspires to be a more ambitious affair and Magical Mystery Tour comments are bandied about.
  
  
• Support comedy icon Flacco for three shows in Melbourne. He is very supportive of my work which I find inspiring. 
  
  
• Beat publish my story about meeting Sarah Blasko. Her publicist contacts me and sends a copy of her second album. The publicist states: “we don’t normally encourage stalking but we think you’re pretty funny.”
  
  
• Perform a two week season in the Melbourne Fringe Festival with the show Living on the edge…of my bed. It’s a combination of new and old material, which is moderately successful. I am perturbed after industry bookers state they enjoyed my show but wouldn’t book it as it was a ‘gig show’ not a ‘show show.’ I experience anxiety about whether recent songs like The Happiest Boy are funny enough for a comedy audience.
  
  
• Saskia puts me in touch with musician Martin “Moose” Lubran, who agrees to act as producer, engineer and collaborator. Marty has a strong music and comedy background, having written music for Working Dog. In November, I wind up work with Ken and begin the more sonically intensive side with Marty. This includes the use of session musician playing drums, violin, trumpet, piano, slide, banjo and sitar.
  
  
• Forget I’m making a comedy album.
  
  
• After being days away from the Melbourne Comedy Festival deadline, I have a realisation that I don’t want to perform in comedy rooms anymore, but would rather focus on music venues.
  
  
• Andy Hazel continues to text me wanting to jam. I’m not confident about playing with other musicians and have been acting distant. I finally agree after realising that “jam” doesn’t have to mean improvising on blues riffs, but simply Andy playing bass on my songs. We talk about the concept of a band.
  
  
• On Christmas Eve, back in Tasmania, I drunkenly ‘don’t fend off straight away’ an old friend Catherine who makes a move in the back of a taxi after the Wynyard Christmas Parade. Anna makes the trip over on boxing day and I tell her about it.
  
  
• My Pop falls ill, making it a very stressful Christmas period.
  
  
• One of my childhood cats Misty must be put down due to liver failure. Anna is by my side, making the whole trip utterly mournful. We make it through together.
  
  
• Perform for the fourth time in a row at The Falls Festival. This year I am given a proper 20 minute comedy bracket, playing alongside Charlie Pickering at Hobart and Lorne. I inadvertently start a verbal war between Tim Rogers and Charlie Pickering when a brief impression of Tim Rogers experiencing a meltdown is misreported as being Charlie’s work. Tim offers an onstage warning to Charlie who spends most of his Lorne set bagging Tim out.
  
  
• Anna and I end the year drinking warm champagne and watching Wolfmother. Take stock of life and realise (for the first time?) I am in a particularly joyous and cherished position.

2007
Saturn Returns

• Continue work on Brown & Orange. The album doesn’t have a specific timeline, and so I’m given a lot of space to explore my artistic whims. I’m at my happiest when in the studio.
  
  
• Perform three shows in the Adelaide Fringe Festival in February. They are my first since putting myself in the music category. I am still quite nervous about what the reaction will be. I find banter the hardest to gauge. The shows go well, and the new songs such as Party In My Head seem to work.
  
  
• Centrelink pins me with its worst requirement yet. Three weeks of daily intensive job search training at Preston. I find it enormously demoralising. We are asked to say five words that describe us. Mine are: Desperate, broke, nervous, determined & resourceful.
  
  
• While MCing The Local comedy night in St Kilda I have to introduce Wil Anderson. I recall that he seemed to be a bit rude and aloof to me, backstage at Triple J back in 2003 when I had my songwriting segment. As his intro, I recall the incident in a deadpan and awkward manner. It creates a strange atmosphere, which doesn’t effect Wil’s performance at all. The word on the street is that I dissed him onstage. 
  
  
• After five years I stop writing my column Struth Be Told for Canberra streetpress BMA. I am so frustrated financially that I politely demand to start getting paid and shop the column around nationally.
  
  
• Decide that I need to gather a backing band to recreate the new material on stage. After a call out I select new friend and fellow Tasmanian Andy “Nature Boy” Hazel (who studies Naturopathy) on bass and first year VCA student Hugh “Mad Dog” Rabinovici (he says ‘Mad Dog’ a lot) on percussion. We begin a rigorous weekly rehearsal schedule. I find the boys an absolute pleasure to work with. It’s a relief as I’m still quite insecure about my ability to musically mix well with the other children.
  
  
• Play our first gig at the Espy in St Kilda. It goes quite well. A medium but appreciative audience seem to like us. Unlike the support band, who do not. One of them swears at me for touching water that was in his rider. It seems to say ‘welcome to music.’
  
  
• Pop passes away in May. It is heartbreaking to see him in his final moments, paralysed. (see: Wearing Pop’s Clothes)
  
  
• Anna and I celebrate one year together. We are like two peas in a sensitive, witty, loving pod.
  
  
• Play a solo residency at Wesley Anne. I am still struggling to find my feet in a musical environment. I have no trouble playing the songs, but tend to overanalyse how much humour I should be expressing.
  
  
• Turn 27. It feels like a big age.
  
  
• Hit the first of several Saturn Returns mental walls. The internal arguments about what The Bedroom Philosopher should be unsettles other parts of my personality. I find myself sweeping an angry comb through all elements of my life such as my friends. My Facebook inventory plummets.
  
  
• Perform solo gig at the Stagedoor Cafe in Burnie. It is my first gig in Burnie since I played Pool Jam at the Burnie Olympic Pool in 1998. My Nan, Mum and Uncle Ken are present, along with some joyously rowdy old high school mates, creating a special atmosphere.
  
  
• Perform second gig with the band at The Tote. This is highly attended by all my friends, and big acts like The Basics share the stage. I hate my performance and feel under prepared. Marieke Hardy is in the audience, who I am gloomy to disappoint. 
  
  
• After hassling the editor I have my first column published in national magazine Frankie. I have been admiring their work for a while and it feels like an important victory for my writing.
  
  
• Perform with the band at The Annandale in Sydney. It’s a huge crowd but we are mixed like a rock band so no-one can really hear the words. I am genuinely bamboozled about whether I’m doing the right thing. Some fans down the front request Megan The Vegan but I refuse (later wondering if I’ve lost the plot.) My friend Nikos suggests I could play electric guitar in some songs. Based on this survey I rush out and buy one as soon as I get back to Melbourne. A Mess + Noise reviewer dismisses us as being “enmeshed in gimmickry.”
  
  
• While in Sydney I share a joint with good friend Leigh Rigozzi. We listen to Ween and I can’t remember laughing so hard. It’s my best ever drug experience.
  
  
• Quit smoking. This is the biggest attempt in a few years. I vow to the heavens and all before me that no longer will my health and singing voice fall pray to this vile, pathetic, pointless vice.
  
  
• Start smoking again. (see: Fun Size Suicide)
  
  
• Play a residency with the band at The Empress. I am still far from comfortable on stage, and am struggling to make sense of the electric. I continue to be berated for not playing Megan The Vegan. There are many who dig the band and new material as well. New song Medium Ted goes particularly well.
  
  
• The Happiest Boy – the first single from Brown & Orange is released in October. This seems fitting as it’s a song I’d reluctantly scratch from my comedy sets for not being funny enough. The film clip for it is astoundingly good. My friend David Blumenstein AKA Nakedfella has worked on it on and off for nine months. It is well received, although the song receives a scathing review in Brisbane street press for not being as funny as I’m So Post Modern.
  
  
• Radio barely touches the track. It isn’t surprising as it clocks in at 4:36. Marty had a lot of trouble mixing the song as I didn’t play to a click track. 
  
  
• Frankie regularly publish my columns. I get my first piece in Triple J’s magazine JMag.
  
  
• Support 80s iconic children’s performer Peter Combe on a ten show renaissance tour in music venues. The crowds are huge and enthused. I find the gigs a breeze to play and build my set around my many songs featuring nostalgia and pop culture references. (see: Peter Combe Tour Diary)
  
  
• Continue fierce internal battles about my new direction, and countless email conversations with my manager. I feel like a leaf in the ocean, constantly swayed by different opinions about what I should do. (see: Infrequently Asked Questions)
  
  
• My oldest childhood cat, Blossum, passes away at the grand age of twenty.
  
  
• Negotiate myself a $125 fee per column to resume writing Struth Be Told for BMA. With practice, I am getting better at asking to be paid for my work. 
  
  
• The process of recording Brown & Orange deteriorates. A lot of time is spent attempting to record songs that aren’t working out, such as Acronymphomaniac. In a panic about time, I decide to drop them. Mixing begins on the demanding second single, Wow Wow’s Song which features over forty tracks (most of them sitar).
  
  
• Embark on national tour for The Happiest Boy. Overall it is an unpleasant experience. Numbers are well down from the previous tour. I am disorientated by the set up of music rooms, developing a pet-hate of Dance Floor Gap –  the sensation of playing to a black void because everyone is lurking up the back. (see: The Happiest Boy Tour Report)
  
  
• Frustrated about money, I take on a bar job. It’s my first proper job in two years.
  
  
• After submitting short comedy pieces to The Big Issue, they start publishing me in their Ointment section.
  
  
• Difficult second single Wow Wow’s Song (La La La) is taken to Hothouse studio to give it the polish it needs. I am not allowed into the final mixes and can only monitor its development by emails. I find this process incredibly stressful and feel as though I’ve lost control of the album.
  
  
• Begin counselling for the first time in years (as in, being counselled) after having a sense of losing my way. I want to protect myself and my relationship.
  
  
• Anna breaks her ankle while running for a tram in vintage shoes.
  
  
• Pop receives some kind of bonus payout from Veteran Affairs. It’s bittersweet considering it could have come years earlier and boosted his retirement. Then divide the money up and I receive $3000. I spend it thusly: Guitar case $250, iriver (digital recorder) $330, Officeworks stuff $220, Hard drive $80, Korg pedal tuner $160, Guitar strings $140, Saskia management money $550, Paying people back $650, Musical instruments $50 & Second hand mags and clothes $100.
  
  
• Support Tripod on their Christmas tour of Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne. I am elated yet bemused to find myself confident and successful in front of a comedy crowd. I acknowledge my addiction to laughter and natural abilities as a comedian. It’s a joy hang out with Tripod again and they lend valuable ears to my thoughts on music and comedy. In the program in Adelaide I am billed as ‘Jason Heaslewood.’ (I can’t help but assume this is because Tripod’s management agency Token also represent Wil Anderson and are getting back at me for my untoward antics at The Local.)
  
  
• Return home to Tasmania for a holiday only to find my Nan violently ill with gastro.
  
  
• Anna comes over and we have a lovely New Year’s Eve in my home town of Burnie. It’s the first time in years I haven’t been playing at Falls Festival and I’m relieved. The sight of a pretty girl in a 50’s dress on crutches and a boy with mid-length hair, retro shirt and glasses are too much for the townsfolk. We are stared into submission and hide out in a beer garden watching the fireworks. In an up and down year riddled with frustration and personal bitterness, I look forward to the metaphorical slate being wiped clean and vow to focus on the positives in my life.

2008

• Centrelink cuts off my payment, souring a Hobart trip with Anna.
  
  
• Buy several JJ Cale records at Salamanca Market. He is Uncle Ken’s all-time favourite musician and I begin my lifelong admiration of his smooth sound as well. As the German record vendor tells me matter of factly “he is the king of cool.”
  
  
• Work on Brown & Orange ceases. I grow heavily anxious about its completion. A radio-edit for Wow Wow’s Song (La La La) is knocked up, with the single set to be released in February.
  
  
• Add Michael “Flute Magee” O’Connor to the band. He is an amazing flute player I once saw at a friend’s gig. I dub the new trio The Awkwardstra.
  
  
• Play Melbourne Big Day Out for the second year in a row. We’re tucked off in a weird side tent but punters react well to the new songs.
  
  
• The business partner of the man who created the Golden Gaytime emails me to say he heard the song on Triple J and would like a copy. He tells me the story of how the ice cream was created – the biscuit factory next door kept throwing out bags of broken biscuits, so a method was created to blow them onto ice cream. Genius.
  
  
• Perform with The Awkwardstra at the Perth International Arts Festival. They fly us there, put us up and give us lavish backstage platters. It’s the best I’ve ever been treated for a gig. We go appropriately hard on the last night, winding up in the hotel pool and drinking red wine in the sauna. (see: Festival Tour Diary)
  
  
• Frankie credit me as a senior writer.
  
  
• My long-time hobby of collecting vintage 1970s ties goes into hyper-drive. I discover E-Bay and spend many an idle moment bidding on ties. My collection balloons to one hundred and fifty and is featured in the Frankie collectors page.
  
  
• Decide that the next single Wow Wow’s Song (La La La) must have a film clip and embark on an epic journey to get it made. I employ a small crew of people to help realise my extravagant concept. We shoot it in February at a green screen studio. While work on the album has reached a tense stalemate, it feels good to move ahead on something.
  
  
• My share house gets an N64 with Mario Kart. It takes me back to my first year uni days and I spend an awful lot of time playing it. Between that and E-Bay my ability to focus depletes. (see: Welcome To Mario Kart)
  
  
• Develop permanent tinnitus after seeing Ween perform a marathon three hour set at the Forum. It’s most disappointing as my Mum has warned me about loud rock bands most of my life. (see: Fucking Tinnitus)
  
  
• Perform a string of poorly attended gigs in Melbourne. It’s a sore come-down after the heights of Perth, and with the second single delayed I am confounded about how to maintain momentum.
  
  
• Start working casually for the first time in years, pulling beers at Trades Hall which is frequented by comedians. It feels like a fall from grace to be on the other side.
  
  
• Perform solo at Melbourne Comedy Festival supporting Tripod at the Forum. Also perform in several other comedy variety nights, but find the crowd reactions disappointing. I wonder if I’ll ever be happy where I am.
  
  
• After a lot of planning, I play a set of my serious songs under the name Windsor Flare. It feels important to finally give these songs, some I’ve been carrying around for ten years, their own space.
  
  
• My mood reaches an all-time low on the most inappropriate of days, my second year anniversary with Anna. The next day I ask a G.P. to prescribe me anti-depressants. (see: Ranty-Depressants)
  
  
• Mysteriously, I am given no more shifts at my bar job. I begin working at a boutique vintage store in Fitzroy. I figure just standing around looking cool will be enough. It isn’t. Being fired from two one day a week jobs doesn’t aid my confidence. Continue my Centrelink hoop jumping.
  
  
• The Brown & Orange studio situation deteriorates. I literally rescue my album by going to the studio with a hard drive. I take the incomplete tracks to new producer Chris Scallan at Soft Centre Studios in Northcote. Mixing begins almost immediately with intent to finish it within a month. It is an incredible relief. The drama that has unfolded has taken a serious toll on my career. Andy is a tremendous support through all of this.
  
  
• Work on the Wow Wow’s Song video stalls for several months. The designer working on the rendering runs out of time. I feel doomed.
  
  
• Turn 28. In an attempt to celebrate my wonderful friends I make them all a Mix CD.
  
  
• Part ways with Saskia. As she was dating Marty (the producer of the album), she settles the remainder of his recording fee by letting him keep her whitegoods.
  
  
• Decide to make a clean start with the album and clip. This is difficult as I owe a lot of money. Close friends bail me out with loans.
  
  
• Begin working with percussionist Jamie “Hitz Rodriguez” Power, who is introduced by Andy. I also add sitar and electric guitar to the band via Gordon “Gordo” Blake who I meet at a bar. They are valuable additions to The Awkwardstra and I get a sense of us gelling.
  
  
• Anna and I have the first of several break-ups. We are in love and at a loss. Apparently love isn’t enough to keep two people together. It’s the first I’ve heard about it.
  
  
• Decide to go off the anti-depressants. I can’t cry during my own break-up.
  
  
• Move house. After four years in the same place I opt to live with an ex-Voiceworks friend and two others. It’s Change O’clock.
  
  
• Ban myself from E-Bay, and put a serious limit on my boutique tie shopping after I buy forty in one go. My collection pushes three hundred (approximately three hundred too many) and brings me joy and ridicule. (see: My Tie Collection)
  
  
• Do everything in my power to shop around the album. I approach every label and management I can think of over several months. No-one is terribly interested.
  
  
• Begin appearing regularly on my friend Alicia Sometimes’ show Aural Text on Melbourne’s Triple R radio. Community radio is huge in Melbourne and I am keen to be involved.
  
• Apply for the BBC’s ‘College of Comedy.’ Despite a glowing reference from Jigsaw, the producers of Ronnie Johns, I don’t get in.
  
  
• Finally release Wow Wow’s Song (La La La) to radio and book a single launch tour.
  
  
• Almost pick up the support spot for the Adam Green tour. His management contacts me from New York (to my amazement) but the promoter goes with someone else.
  
  
• While on the tram Andy and I come up with the concept for Songs From The 86 Tram.
  
  
• With the help of Melbourne comedy booker Janet McLeod, I score an $8000 grant from the Melbourne City Council for my Melbourne Comedy Festival Show pitch Songs From The 86 Tram. It is my first grant success and a super-nova of gold amidst the shit-storm.
  
  
• After a long struggle to finish the Wow Wow’s Song clip I locate the brilliant Leigh Ryan who works on the animation sequences. We spend many hours working on it, but it soon becomes evident that everything will come together.
  
  
• Debut Wow Wow’s Song (La La La) on Triple J. ‘Friend’ Sam Simmons interviews me. He encourages me to do the monster voice, although once I start he bags me saying it’s “the Cookie Monsters retarded cousin.” Off-air he reports back that “half at the station love it, half hate it.” It’s a decent approximation of public sentiment for the track. Clem Bastow of Inpress writes: “Complete genius or utterly terrifying… I’m leaning towards the former.”
  
  
• Embark on Wow Wow’s Song tour, spread out over a couple of months. Crowd numbers are down, although I have a somewhat better time than the previous sojourn. During a side-comedy gig in Sydney I randomly meet the head of Australian YouTube. (see: Wow Wow’s Song Single Launch Tour Diary)
  
  
• After Kelly the guitar starts creaking I take her to a guitar tech. He is horrified to find most of her internal framework coming unglued. The years of onstage battery have taken their toll. He performs $450 worth of repairs.
  
  
• While in Adelaide I tee up an interview with the inventor of the Golden Gaytime, John Milton. I go to his house and sit by his poolside deck while he chain smokes and drinks Pepsi Max. He is an eloquent larrikin who speaks matter of factly about ice-cream production in the late 60s. He says the Golden Gaytime wasn’t a big deal at the time. “It was just another ice-cream on another stick.” (see: Golden Gaytime Interview)
  
  
• Anna and I can’t leave each other alone, taking an enormous toll on us both. I am a part-time mind changer acting on corruptible impulses.
  
  
• After growing unrest with the lack of sound proofing of my tiny room, I decide to move house again. Fortunately, I find a place straight away, coincidentally the same share house that Tammy lived in for two years. By this stage I am able to do nothing but laugh at how dramatic the year is turning out.
  
  
• Have some powerful music epiphanies: The Kinks Village Green Preservation Society, J.J. Cale Troubadour and Boards Of Canada. The latter’s album The Campfire Headphase is the most welcoming frequency I can find. This coincides with the third somehow disappointing release from Beck in a row, placing our relationship at a low.
  
  
• After nine months the Wow Wow’s Song video is completed. I upload it to YouTube and let the Australian ‘head’ guy know about it. Overnight he makes it the featured Australian video. Over a week it scores 20, 000 views. As radio have failed to pick it up, this is priceless exposure. I am bemused by the general public’s reaction to the song. What was mainly meant to be funny (and was lapped up by audiences at the Hobart Comedy Festival) is described either as “frightening”, “not my favourite song” and “my four year old loves you.”
  
  
• After a successful single launch, I pitch the idea of a December residency to my favourite Melbourne venue, The Northcote Social Club. They go for it. The residency is a hit with happy crowds and solid sets. It’s a magnificent way to finish the year.
  
  
• Am asked to present as the ‘summer fill for Aural Text on Triple R. I am encouraged to create my own comedy program, banding together a crew of co-horts in cahoots Damien Lawlor, Josh Earl, Matt Kelly and Eva Johansen.
  
  
• Decide I’ll be too busy to go home for Christmas and plan to have my first orphans Christmas in Melbourne with friends. It feels like a right of passage.
  
  
• Nan experiences heart failure and is flown to Royal Hobart Hospital to have a pace-maker put in. I hope it is not related to my Christmas decision. She makes a full recovery.
  
  
• Anna and I make our break-up final. I am incredulous and deeply upset.
  
  
• MGM offer to release Brown & Orange in February. This time they offer to press up copies of the record. It’s my first ‘legit’ record deal.
  
  
• Vow to absorb all that has happened and learn something from it. Have never looked forward to a new year so much. I’ve totalled this one.
  
  
• Need holiday.
  
  
• Don’t have one.
  
  
• Pick up guitar.

2009

• Work hard on Triple R summer-fill. I conceive a show called Lime Champions, a combination of live sketches and music. During the first ten minutes the station manager sticks his head in the studio and says we are the most organised summer fill he’s seen.
  
  
• Begin a new relationship with an artist called Lillian which feels fresh and healing. The universe appears to have answered my calls to make things a bit more positive around here.
  
  
• Spend the sordidly hot Melbourne summer by writing Songs From The 86 Tram. It’s the first time I’ve sat down at my desk for five hours a day, guitar in hand, trying to write new material. It feels good.
  
  
• Write Northcote (So Hungover). It’s based on a sketch I wrote for Ronnie Johns Half Hour called Underground. I try and keep the double handed conversation, before rolling the two voices into one character talking on the phone.
  
  
• Brown & Orange is released through MGM.
  
  
• Perform a gig at the Thin Green Line Festival. The five-piece Awkwardstra are gelling well. After the set, heaps of people come up to buy the new album, which is inspiring.
  
  
• Purchase a new bed for the first time. Mum helps out with the money dished out by Kevin Rudd’s package. After years of mattresses on the floor, it’s a big fluffy dream.
  
  
• Lime Champions are given their own regular spot, Monday nights at 7pm. The previously two hour show is streamlined into an hour with the intention of filling up most of that time with our own material. I make a difficult decision and ask Matt to leave the team – as I don’t think everyone is gelling. It pretty much finishes off our friendship.
  
  
• From the Songs From The 86 Tram grant money, I am able to work with a publicist for the first time. I’m impressed to find that they don’t just send out press release but help you work on your ‘narrative’ as well. Natalie secures me a full page feature in the The Age.
  
  
• Launch Brown & Orange at the Corner Hotel with Tripod and The Suitcase Royale. I bust my gut setting up the stage to look like a 70’s lounge room. The show is long and a little scattered, but a triumph nonetheless. By the time I come off stage the supports have drunk the rider. 
  
  
• Perform Songs From The 86 Tram at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. It’s a resounding success, gathering critical acclaim and full houses.
  
  
• Mum visits me in Melbourne for the first time. She’s in good spirits and away from the history of home we have some of our most quality time.
  
  
• On the eve of the sixteenth show I am riding home with a backpack full of groceries, with no lights, when I slam my bike into a car door. This occurs near the 86 tram line. I break my humerus. The people in the car are off duty policeman and very helpful. I am forced to cancel the rest of the season. It is devastating but also relieving, I have been pushing myself like crazy for the past two months. The news creates a groundswell of support for myself and the show, as well as a tastily ironic press release. (see: Storytime)
  
  
• Win the Director’s Choice award for outstanding show. It’s a welcome piece of industry recognition.
  
  
• My summer relationship ends, leaving me once again alone and bewildered by love.
  
  
• Begin the glum life of a share house cripple. I get by as much as I can – writing and editing sketches with one hand. The downtime allows me to eat a lot of drumsticks (the ice-cream) and watch a lot of Gossip Girl (my new secret shame.) I also revisit my favourite childhood show The Mysterious Cities Of Gold which has dated rather well.
  
  
• Become acquainted with one of my comedy heroes Tony Martin, after he writes to tell me how much he liked Songs From The 86 Tram. I begin contributing to his online publication Scrivener’s Fancy.
  
  
• To my delight Brown & Orange receives mostly positive reviews. I am especially pleased with the musical comparisons. I can’t help but get the impression Wow Wow doesn’t have a lot of friends.
  
  
• Interview Bob Evans in a rare musical interview for Frankie magazine. I ask him “do you ever sit down to write a song and think ‘love, what can I bring to the table?'” which makes him laugh. 
  
  
• Participate in Melbourne Comedy Festival roadshow. I almost cancel due to my arm, but decide to stick it out and enlist friend Oliver Clark to play guitar on certain songs. It’s a difficult transition, not knowing what to do with my hands and battling country crowds, but I hold my own. After developing mild food poisoning my mood degenerates and I find the tour grueling. (see: Roadshow Tour Diary)
  
  
• Move house for the third time in twelve months. Living with five others has not proven to be the most peaceful experience. Decide to live with a friend and one other housemate in Westgarth, with intent to chill out and recalibrate my artistic mainframe.
  
  
• My room is directly next to a train passenger crossing with a piercing alarm that goes off every ten minutes from six in the morning until twelve at night.
  
  
• Continue physio for my arm. It’s healing well but is sore much of the time.
  
  
• My moods and sleep cycles are still swinging all about the place. I maintain counselling which I find to be excellent.
  
  
• Become more and more health conscious. I find I am eating more vegetarian food and leaning away from alcohol. What used to be laughed off as hangovers now leaves me depressed (see: Alcohol Is Pure Sex). I also discover yoga and start enjoying lattes.
  
  
• Become Melbourne cliché.
  
  
• Lime Champions goes from strength to strength. We have a medium following and Tony Martin makes a splash by coming on our subscriber week show and dropping Gary Sizzle.
  
  
• Tim Minchin is the first rage guest programmer to select one of my tunes. He programs The Happiest Boy. A few weeks later Lawrence Leung selects Wow Wow’s Song in his ‘crazy songs’ bracket.
  
  
• Short story about my experience performing in the University play Skin is published in Your Mother Would Be Proud – a collection of horror stories from the entertainment industry.
  
  
• Land the role of John Safran’s re-enactment in his new series Race Relations. John claims I got the role because in my audition I said I knew a Jewish prayer from a sample in a Beck song. For two weeks I live the dream of being a full-time actor. It’s glorious. I have to dye my hair blonde which convinces me I could play Andy Warhol. Among my scenes I have to pash two girls and pretend to blow my brains out. It’s refreshing to draw on my old acting days.
  
  
• Roll out the Brown & Orange National Tour with The Awkwardstra and Josh Earl coming along for the ride. It’s a lot of work but mostly fun. The sets with the band are among my best ever and I relish the support.
  
  
• Finish up tour playing solo in Adelaide and Perth. Get the biggest crowds of the tour and a sense of being back on track and putting a difficult second album behind me.
  
  
• Write article on my meeting with the Golden Gaytime inventor. I pitch it to Frankie who are happy to publish it until the editor contacts Streets for a photo. They deny all knowledge of the man I’ve interviewed. I then check on Wikipedia to see someone else is credited for inventing the ice-cream. I am baffled. I intend to investigate the story further. (see: Storytime)
  
  
• Begin work on the Songs From The 86 Tram album with Chris Scallan, who helped me finish Brown & Orange. This album will be a tighter, sharper affair with click tracks, pre-production and a fully rehearsed band ready to roll.
  
  
• While driving me to the airport my flatmate tells me he’s started seeing Anna.
  
  
• Play my first gigs in Alice Springs and Darwin. Perform my worst gig of all time at a restaurant bar in Darwin. The crowd aren’t into it and twenty minutes in I am gonged off stage by the owner, wielding an actual dinner gong. Later, the venue owner tells Darwin’s NT News that I made fun of “bums and blackfellas.”
  
  
• Am best man for Josh Earl’s wedding. My speech goes down a treat, though I’m reminded what a lame state my love life is in. (see: Love)
  
  
• Perform a reprise of Songs From The 86 Tram at Melbourne Fringe Festival. For a completely independent venture with little publicity I make seven and a half thousand dollars – enough money to fund my album.
  
  
• At the after party I meet Sabrina D’Angelo, a plucky, pun-popping dreamster whom I fall in love with. It feels like good timing and life becomes a lot more fun.
  
  
• Finish up the Songs From The 86 Tram album. What began as a side project to have something to sell at Fringe has turned into my best work to date by far. It’s sent to New York to be mastered by Greg Calbi of Sterling Studios who has worked with everyone from David Bowie to MGMT.
  
  
• Perform for two weeks at Sydney’s Comedy Store. I use it as a challenge to my comedy chops, which I haven’t tested in a while. It’s a tricky learning curve, but towards the end I’m riffing on subjects sans guitar and making up rants on the spot. It reignites my passion and confidence for stand-up, though one night I nearly get my head kicked off by a punter. (see: The Bedroom Philosopher @ The Sydney Comedy Store)
  
  
• John Safran’s Race Relations goes to air. While the show receives mixed reviews, people seem happy with my work. My Nan tunes in for the first time to see me blowing my brains out in a fantasy sequence.
  
  
• Begin to sense that I’m doing too much. On one day in November I go straight from working on the album to doing Lime Champions, then performing a gig at night. I find it increasingly difficult to keep my comedic ball in the air.
  
  
• My living situation deteriorates. There is a train crossing alarm which makes me anxious every eight minutes, a new-age dominatrix practicing loud vocal calisthenics each morning and of course my flatmate, still going out with Anna. It’s official – I know how to pick sharehouses.
  
  
• Perform a Tuesday residency at the Toff In Town, mirroring the Northcote Social Club residency of the previous year. This time round isn’t as cruisy, with lesser crowds and more temperamental performances from me. I’m burnt out. Full-time self managing has maxed my mojo. The final show is the best, with Harry Angus supporting as we perform to a crowd of 200.
  
  
• After an utterly magical, whirlwind month, Sabrina goes to New York to do shows for three months. I’m keen to go with her but can’t afford it. We decide to stay together and I swim with joy.
  
  
• Dash off to Burnie to spend the quietest Christmas and New Year’s in history – playing Yahtzee with friends. I’m deliriously proud of the year and feeling quietly content. (For me.)

2010
My Year

• After staying home for a bit too long, I become oversensitive and defensive. Continuing my love/hate relationship with Facebook and recent feelings of overexposure, I cull my Facebook friends from 480 to 80. (see: Family Ain’t A Holiday, Straight version & Funny version)
  
  
• The Tram Inspector single gets good reviews but not much airplay. It is single of the week in Inpress.
  
  
• Move house (my fifth sharehouse in two years) to live with friends, including a great couple from the band Go-Go Sapien and their incontinent cat White Man.
  
  
• After burning out late last year, I decide to make wholesale changes. I announce that I won’t be doing Lime Champions any longer, nor my columns for The Big Issue or BMA. At the same time I get in touch with a music acquaintance Anthea and she begins managing me.
  
  
• Win Best Cabaret Production for Songs From The 86 Tram at the Melbourne Green Room awards. I miss the awards ceremony due to a bout of bronchitis and a 39 degree temperature.
  
  
• Dye hair back to brown. This coincides with friends telling me the blonde “looked pretty shit.”
  
  
• Reprise Songs From The 86 Tram at Melbourne Comedy Festival. I’m unable to secure a season in Adelaide Fringe, despite it being an award winning show. I am told the bookers are still hesitant as they “don’t know which Justin they’re going to get.” Industry bitterness festers.
  
  
• Yarra Trams sponsor my reprise of Songs From The 86 Tram in the Melbourne Comedy Festival. They provide $24, 000 worth of posers, I mean posters on trams.
  
  
• Triple J start playing Northcote (So Hungover). During April it is the most requested song on Super Requests on five occasions.
  
  
• Am approached by a record label for the first time. Shock Records don’t front any cash, but release the album in April.
  
  
• Songs From The 86 Tram encore season is a raging success. I sell all but 30 tickets in my venue and put on two extra shows in a 200 seater. Crowd vibe is excellent. One night, after getting into a taxi after the show someone yells out “hypocrite.”
  
  
• My house situation hits an awkward mark after White Man wees on my Mum. He attacks during the night while she’s sleeping on a mattress on the floor. After a series of bad sharehouse experiences, I am developing a resentment for Other People’s Cats.
  
  
• Northcote (So Hungover) reaches #12 in the independent singles chart and is on high rotation on JJJ. For the first time in my life I have the sense of career success and things working out.
  
  
• It’s terrifying. I march straight to my counsellor. He says “you speak of this success as if you’re embarrassed.” He suggests my life is racing ahead and I am experiencing speed wobbles.
  
  
• Frankie offer me a free full page ad. I book myself a single tour in four hours. A week after Comedy Festival I set off with Josh Earl in tow. It’s a fair success with Hobart’s Alley Cat gig proving the best. I sell out the Vanguard in Sydney but find the Sydney Comedy Festival crowd a bit cold. Josh spends much of the trip tweeting about the fact I eat tuna on public transport and fly into rages at the airport. Sabrina surprises me in Hobart my catching a flight for just one night. It’s an incredibly romantic gesture, slightly dampened when she locks me out of my hostel room at 6am while leaving for the airport.
  
  
• Clear about $20k from the Comedy Festival run. I am horrified at how quickly this is dispersed – between paying for my album and pending film clip. I get the impression that the bigger you are the more is costs to keep yourself there.
  
  
• Melbourne public transport body Metlink approach me to make a viral video as my Northcote character. I write a parody of Northcote called Hurstbridge (So Sober). I film it two days before the real Northcote clip.
  
  
• Work with Craig Melville on the Northcote (So Hungover) video. It’s an ambitious project with eight different locations. We work from 7am until midnight for two full days. Sadly, Hitz Rodriguez and Mad Dog Rabinovici are absent but Josh Earl steps in on bass. I’m amazed to get Tim Rogers and Kram to be special guests, just by asking them. It’s the most professional production I’ve undertaken, with a full staff donating their time. The results are sublime.
  
  
• Turn 30. I hold a One Colour party (where everyone dresses in one colour.) The night features me giving out my second group mix CD, games of Twister and a sozzled speech at 12pm. I kind of get a sense a lot of people don’t like me. (Melbourne filmmaker Keiren Seymour writes: “I came to your 30th, I was dating a girl you sort of knew? Alice Swing. I enjoyed the brilliant speech you gave and the mediocre response you received, I thought it deserved more.”)
  
  
• John Safran makes an appearance and tells me the news about Collectors host Andy Muirhead which I can’t believe he’s not making up. 
  
  
• The Metlink parody video Hurstbridge (So Sober) is released before the Northcote video, which baffles many (and angers a few on mess + noise). Northcote is finally released and starts to go viral.
  
  
• Break up with Sabrina after hitting various emotional roadblocks. Spend a week performing in Hobart Comedy Festival. It’s a dark time.
  
  
• Decide against Edinburgh Fringe (the holy grail which comics have been convincing me to do for years.) Decide to build on the momentum of Northcote and launch an album tour. We work with a booking agent for the first time. He cooks up a mammoth 21 date tour taking in many regional towns with the express purpose of scoring a ‘Triple J Presents.’
  
  
• We don’t.
  
  
• One of my fave bands, The Boat People, are special guests on many of the dates.
  
  
• Spend August and September on the national tour. It’s ginormous, a lot of hard work and a fair bit of fun. We sell out Hobart, Brisbane and Melbourne but there are a lot of duds in between. I cut out sugar, smoking and drinking and enjoy the power of natural energy on stage. Band morale is good, but Hitz Rodriguez has a hard time. He is due to be married and moving to Byron in a month so the tour is poor timing. Despite selling out our hometown gig, the Saturday night Northcote Social Club show is incredibly rowdy, and I learn to detest the music venue system of playing at 11pm to drunk, distracted audiences. 
  
  
• Sabrina takes me back. I vow to personal gods not to fuck it up again.
  
  
• Kelly the guitar takes ill while on tour. I take her to a guitar tech who suggests getting a new guitar. He performs $400 worth of repairs, barely keeping her active in service.
  
  
• Northcote (So Hungover) becomes a bona fide hit, scoring 150, 000 views on YouTube and high rotation on Channel V. It’s nice to be known for something other than I’m So Post Modern. For a song that was supposed to be making fun of the music industry, people become obsessed with hipsters and want to know if I am one.
  
  
• As part of a new initiative called Melbourne Music, I am booked to perform on the 86 tram. They also put me on the cover of Beat, dressed as a tram inspector. I make two attempts to get through the entire album. The second time I have a surreal encounter with the living embodiment of the bloke from the Trishine song, Buddy. (see: Buddy & Me)
  
  
• After five previous attempts, I score a Vic Rocks grant to makeover my website and produce another music video. I’m truly on a roll. This news is balanced with financial concerns about the National Tour. It looks like we’ve lost about $10k on it. Despite having heavy airplay and a band like The Boat People, we didn’t get the numbers we needed across the board. (Screw you Ballarat.) It’s a hard pill to swallow.
  
  
• ABC’s Collectors interview me about my 70s tie collection.
  
  
• Perform some comedy dates in Adelaide. I’m starting to think about next year’s Comedy Festival show and want to feature more of my stand-up. The gigs are a challenge but give me some heart. After one show two girls ask matter of factly if I want to have a threesome. (I decline.)
  
  
• Quit smoking, more or less, once and for all. (Pretty much).
  
  
• Realise I have become something of a workaholic. Now that I have an iphone I seem to check my email twenty times a day. Decide I really need a holiday.
  
  
• Leave Australia for the first time, spending three weeks in New York with Sabrina who has puppeteer work there. It’s pretty damn good. I see shows by Jonathon Richman (Josh’s hero), Ariel Pink and DJ Shadow.
  
  
• Upon returning, I farewell Awkwardstra member Hitz Rodriguez, who is moving onto wedded bliss in Byron Bay. I will lose a friend, band mate and yoga teacher.
  
  
• Shoot an episode of Spicks & Specks. A show I’ve waited years to appear on. Marcia Hines and I – together at last! I try to appear relaxed while telling everyone how I lost my virginity. I get a few gags in there and answer one question about Warewolves of London.
  
  
• The Northcote (So Hungover) video wins a heap of awards including The Australian Director’s Guild and The Australian Cinematographers Society.
  
  
• Shock Records announce that they’ve gone broke. They have subsequently lost all royalties for Songs From The 86 Tram and the Northcote (So Hungover) single of which 3000 units were sold.
  
  
• Conclude that the music industry is very shit.
  
  
• Rehearse for the annual December residency at the Northcote Social Club. The theme is ‘End Of Financial Year in December’ – a cryptic reversal of Christmas in July where we dress as summer accountants. (Post-it note lay’s and cocktail fruits on receipt spikes.) It’s a brilliant run. New band songs start to sizzle including Leaving My Hairdresser and Handshake Hug.
  
  
• Support Dan Kelly at Federation Square. He says he thought Northcote might have been aimed at him.
  
  
• Collectors ask me to write and present a segment about modern day op shops.
  
  
• Am on a tram when John Safran sends me a text saying “check out the Goth girl across from you.” I’m puzzled when I can’t find John on the tram anywhere. The girl sitting next to the goth girl is a friend of John’s who’d texted him to say she’d spied me on the tram.
  
  
• Spend Christmas with Sabrina’s family in Sydney in at attempt to get to know them better. We’ve had an uber-rocky, on-again off-again year, mainly thanks to me – but thankfully love has the last laugh.
  
  
• Head to Woodford Folk Festival for the first time, in a whirlwind run of summer festivals including both legs of Falls and Southbound in Perth. Woodford rains for three days straight, making camping a trial. The shows themselves are positive. It’s a ridiculous schedule, in which I must get up at 4am to make a 7am flight for a 2pm performance at Lorne. (see: Summer Festivals Diary)
  
  
• Enjoy a brilliant set at Marion Bay Falls in which the whole crowd sing along with “Riding around on the 86.” Each day I’m coming to terms with what a blinding success this year has been. I have to keep reminding myself to enjoy it. On New Years Eve I am completely exhausted and asleep by 12:15am. A fitting end to a huge year.

2011

• Find myself on a charter jet at 9am sitting next to Washington. Fly to Perth for Soundwave Festival. After my ride from the airport leaves without me I bunk with members of Middle East. I’m despondent that I’m not even on the poster despite having more JJJ play than half the acts. Encounter UK oddity Beardyman who digs my stuff.
  
  
• My Summer Festivals diary is published on mess + noise. It wins over the usually acid-tongued bloggers – one saying I’m the “Gen-Y commentator it’s okay to like.” I pitch a music column called Treble Treble. I’m enjoying writing more.
  
  
• Begin pole dancing rehearsals for the upcoming Tram Inspector video. It’s a great challenge and exercise, but I have trouble with my recently broken shoulder.
  
  
• Play a flood benefit gig at the Hi-Fi bar. I am heckled into oblivion by 360’s underage fans. At a charity gig I’m donating my time for, it’s the worst crowd response I’ve ever received. I punish the crowd by playing new song Mattress Protector.
  
  
• Write a piece about Mental Illness for Frankie. It attracts many heartwarming comments. (see: Thank God For Mental Illness)
  
  
• After yet more insecurity anxiety attacks, I break up with Sabrina.
  
  
• Amanda Palmer emails to say she loves Northcote and tweets that I am her “new hero.” She will come to my Adelaide Fringe show. It’s my first international celebrity fan.
  
  
• Perform new show Wit-Bix at Adelaide Fringe. I am in a ramshackle, dusty building and do not have much fun. Sabrina is also performing in the same venue, making matters much worse. My show goes above-averagely. I experiment with more stand-up and less songs. I also include some challenging stand-up about Aboriginals and middle-class guilt. It divides the crowd. The closest thing I have to a groupie is a man chatting me up.
  
  
• Meet Amanda Palmer. She’s a strong, spirited presence. I watch in awe as goth girls pop out of the bushes wherever she goes.
  
  
• On the final night of a morose Fringe, Sabrina and I get back together. Our comets collide and fuse. We decide the best thing for our relationship will be to move in together.
  
  
• Perform on Melbourne Comedy Festival Gala for the first time. I want to play Trishine but the idea is rejected. I perform Musical Clearance Sale. My set on the night is solid but sleep deprived. When it goes to air, I’m dismayed to find four jokes have been surgically removed from it.
  
  
• Perform on Adam Hills Gordon St Tonight. I am asked to choose a classic Australian song to cover from a list. After opting out of They Took The Children Away I go with Calypso by Spiderbait.
  
  
• Begin using my $13K of Vic Rocks funding to develop a new website and make a music video for Tram Inspector. I budget for pyrotechnics.
  
  
• After reading a dismissive review of Wit-Bix, I have a dream where I am flying along while people throw eggs up at me. Eventually I land on a house and try to throw eggs back but no-one is there. The backlash I’ve secretly waited years for seems to have arrived.
  
  
• Perform Wit-Bix at Trades Hall in Melbourne. I enlist the Awkwardstra, despite them only performing two songs. Numbers are great but reactions are mixed. My song satirising stand-up seems to tank every night and comes across more mean spirited than intended, but everyone loves my cat in the litter tray. There are a lot of new fans coming to on the back of Northcote. I totally should play it, but don’t. (see: Wit-Bix Psychological Analysis)
  
  
• After many delays, we shoot the Tram Inspector video on a Sunday, three quarters through the Wit-Bix season. The timing is terrible. After sleeping in a hotel in the city I only manage four hours sleep. The video has been logistically more challenging than Northcote with a set featuring a working strippers pole built from scratch. We shoot for eight hours until 7pm and I then dash off to perform my sixth show in a row.
  
  
• My Spicks & Specks episode goes to air. It’s a good comedy box to tick. I don’t get many comments from friends, who I assume have given up on me.
  
  
• Frankie publish a piece about my relationship with Indigenous Australians. I wrote the piece over a year ago, but it has been on the back burner for some time. Consensus is it’s better than my stand-up attempt (thanks Giles Field). The letters of response are highly mixed. White people from Alice Springs are offended by it while Indigenous folks seem chuffed. (see: black/white)
  
  
• Sabrina and I survive living together. She starts singing with me on my serious songs. We go under the name Catboy.
  
  
• Read Freedom by Jonothan Franzen. He’s my favourite writer since Dave Eggers.
  
  
• Josh Earl has his first son, Oliver. The thirties hit home.
  
  
• Get the figures back from Melbourne Comedy Festival. I sold an impressive 2500 tickets and grossed $33K, but am dismazed (amazed and dismayed) to see most of it go towards paying people/things back, including last years tour. In combination with the royalties I lost through Shock, it leaves a rather bad taste.
  
  
• Record and release Leaving My Hairdresser. It’s the first song under the name ‘The Bedroom Philosopher & His Awkwardstra.’ Despite being a live favourite it does little. Most critics point out it’s not as funny as Northcote. (And that $50 is still a lot to spend on a haircut). Start to become paranoid that no-one will dig my songs unless they’re “comedy.”
  
  
• Record another segment for Collectors about Online Shopping. Continue to await for my TV career to begin. 
  
  
• Start planning a new album. It will be called Man with a loose theme of modern masculinity.
  
  
• Stage a fundraiser gig at Thornbury Theatre. What begins as a vague theme of a High School Assembly soon turns into a super show. After working on it for two months, I curate a variety night in which I play several characters joined by a rock eisteddfod routine from Bron Batten and a school band in Sex On Toast. Tripod, John Safran and the DC3 are all special guests. Sabrina and I recreate Lionel Ritchie’s Hello video, with me playing the blind girl and Sabrina playing the creepy teacher.
  
  
• Guest host with John Safran on Triple J Breakfast.
  
  
• Stage The Bedroom Philosopher’s High School Assembly. It’s a whopping success, aided by a publicity trifecta in an Age article, Triple R Breakfast and Triple J breakfast. There’s an amazing sense of spirit, nostalgia and community in the room. Towards the end the crowd are throwing paper planes at the band. Afterwards, someone leaves a box for me containing nothing but a pair of mens underpants with a lipstick mark and a phone number.
  
  
• Take part in the Freeza mentoring program. I am paired up with a young musician to impart my advice. I find I have rather a lot to impart.
  
  
• Find first hate group on Facebook. “Bedroom Philosopher. What a dick” has 20 members. After some investigating I find it is by the mentally unstable ex-girlfriend of one of my mates (thanks Leigh Rigozzi.)
  
  
• Become increasingly anxious about social networking and the invisible eyes of the Internet community judging me. Success continues to be much harder to grasp than failure.
  
  
• After watching an SBS Insight episode on Suicide, I pen the poem Welcome To Depression.
  
  
• Amanda Palmer & Neil Gaiman include Northcote and I’m So Post Modern in their rage guest programming (the night before my birthday.) 
  
  
• Buy a new guitar. Kelly is ten years old and officially ‘a bit fucked.’ After guitar shopping I fall in love with a 2011 Martin DCPA1. I name it Elvis. I use the money from the Thornbury Theatre fundraiser. It was meant to fund the next album, but this goal feels further and further away.
  
  
• Embark on a single tour. I decide to be my own support act, performing my serious songs under the name Catboy. I go in a disguise of no glasses and a moustache. It’s (probably) incredibly confusing for the audience. The BP set is mostly older stuff, including In Bed With My Doona numbers such as a revised Folkstar with a Gaga-esque doona mu-mu and pillow papal hat. My Melbourne show comes after little sleep and has me at my craziest for years. Across the shows there are many wild outbursts, made up rants and removal of clothing. The tour isn’t a pleasant one and soon burns me out.
  
  
• Perform at the Republic Bar in Hobart on a cold Friday with hardly any payers. I hit the stage at 11pm with a drunk woman heckling. I meltdown, at one point letting the mic smack to the ground in a complete absence of care for the audience. I make security kick the woman out. Her son walks over and ‘bottles’ me. In this instance he places a bottle on the stage with a note in it. On the back of a ticket for (much more successful comedy troupe) The Beards is written: YOURE A SELF-ABSORBENT POST-MODERN CUNT.
  
  
• A part of The Bedroom Philosopher dies.
  
  
• While in Brisbane I give an interview to the Conversation Hour with Richard Fidler. He’s a swell man who knows musical comedy and really digs my stuff.
  
  
• Someone on YouTube writes: “WHY CAN’T YOU BE MORE POPULAR so I can find illegal youtube videos of your songs… Not that I don’t wish you to succeed.”
  
  
• Support DC3 at the Corner. It’s one of my better sets, despite the new guitar’s complex sound system angering the sound guy. I am bewildered. How can a $4000 guitar still sound shit?
  
  
• Quit alcohol once and for all. Hangovers pollute my stream of consciousness to a level I can no longer afford.
  
  
• Plans for the new album crumble after my Australia Council Grant is rejected. My heart is set on recording at Sing Sing with Chris Scallan at the helm, but the realities are far too expensive. The single tour hasn’t pulled in enough money, so I opt to delay plans until after next year’s Comedy Festival. It’s the second time the album has been placed on hold and I worry about losing momentum. Nature Boy Hazel becomes particularly restless.
  
  
• Take a holiday! Sabrina has more work in New York, so I gad over for three weeks. On a whim, it turns out Amanda Palmer won’t be staying in her penthouse apartment in Park Slope during that time and we crash there. For a boy from Burnie it is surreal and sublime. Highlights include witnessing Occupy Wall St first hand and seeing Iron & Wine with a 20 piece band (the band are onstage, not with me.) The holiday soon turns into a working one as (for some reason) I decide to make a video for a 12 Days Of Christmas parody single I’ve had kicking around. Emails ensue.
  
  
• Become a full blown workaholic. Checking email first thing in the morning, fifteen times during the day and last thing at night. My life slips into its highest gear and accelerates beyond measure. I am a remorseless achievement machine, relentlessly transferring from one project to another.
  
  
• Record 12 Days Of Christmas parody with Chris Scallan. I decide to add some other songs and make it an EP. It feels good to be recording something again.
  
  
• Shoot video for 12 Days Of Christmas with Carlo Zeccola. The brief is Late Show’s Pissweak World meets David Lynch. The ambitious clip contains hundreds of props, handled by a professional props maker from ABC3. Amusingly, Bonds bring out an artsy version of the song sung by Jack Ladder.
  
  
• Unlike my previous two videos, rage don’t make it Indie Of The Week due to its PG rating. (Caused by a scene of me dressed as Santa pointing a gun at women.) It receives little coverage. The first Facebook comment is: “you have too much time on your hands.” It seems a fitting statement in a year of post-Northcote decline and Bedroom Philosopher fatigue.
  
  
• Start work on my first book. It will be a collation of tour diaries. The idea comes after writing 12, 000 words for the Songs From The 86 Tram tour diary and concluding I am a frustrated writer. I team up with local designer / publisher Stuart Geddes who owns a Risograph. I have a great time crafting it and wonder if I shouldn’t concentrate on writing full-time.
  
  
• Perform Tuesday residency at the Northcote Social Club. It’s a fantastic run, with Oliver Clark jumping on board as Jazz Santa and Sabrina wooing the ladies as Ethnic Elf. I line up a string of local choirs as the support acts.
  
  
• After 150 hours of debate, in the dark of night, I come crawling to Twitter.
  
  
• Spend Christmas at home in Tassie. Check out the Wynyard Christmas Parade which features a woman dressed as a golliwog. Sabrina joins me and we cap off a victorious year.
  
  
• Perform at Amanda Palmer & Neil Gaiman’s Trash Masquerade Ball. After a colossal schedule, I have little in the tank. It’s a wild night and my set goes fine. Sabrina and I are dressed as white trash clowns and perform a rousing rendition of Seal’s Crazy.
  
  Meeting Neil Gaiman is a thrill and he says he enjoyed my book. While he is performing, two American dudes behind me are talking loudly about which Neil Gaiman book is their favourite. I turn around and snap at them “you’re talking over the real Neil Gaiman!” They say they “don’t appreciate the attitude.” I want to go home.

2012

• Support The Dresden Dolls on a five date national tour. After a year of playing to fifty nervous people, it’s outstanding to play to 1000 boisterous goths and steampunks in sold out theatres. The Sydney show at the Enmore is filmed by Moshcam and streamed around the globe. I manage to do a good show. In Melbourne I play with the band at a packed out Forum Theatre. I rise to occasion and get a rise out of the audience. Gordo is ill with nerves. Adelaide are very drunk and rowdy and Amanda is presented with two creepy dolls of herself.
  
  My goth material does not go down well in Perth. I’m reminded how much I dislike hawking merch after the show. The tour is a key booster shot of confidence. It’s invigorating to bask in Amanda Palmer’s insatiable energy and self-belief. She is a generous rockstar, introducing me each night and providing backing vocals. Meanwhile, I hear that on the Arctic Monkeys tour, they haven’t said hello to their supports.
  
  
• Release The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries. It’s a hands on affair, literally. We collate it by hand. I consider it a ‘training book’ and post it out to all publishers and local bookstores, keen to build my profile as an author. Neil Gaiman, who read Amanda Palmer’s copy, offers me a quote. Even Megan Washington says “that dude is funny.” A Tasmanian comedian describes it as “sad” and a fan says she enjoyed it but wishes I was “happy more often.” The book is well received, although Marieke Hardy finds the blue ink hard to read.
  
  
• Launch book at Trades Hall. I’m keen to subvert the usual book launch fare and do everything other than just read from my book. I put together a bumper program, with interpretive erotic dancing, a choir reciting poetry and a half hour conversation with myself while eerily painted as the Ultimate Warrior, (my favourite WWF wrestler.) The night goes well and I sell 35 books. Martin from Affirm Press says I should have sold more and suggests it’s because I put on “too much of a show.”
  
  
• Remind self to never try.
  
  
• Beck announces that he is releasing his next album entirely on sheet music. This was a joke that I had been doing since 2005. (‘My album is so underground you’ll have to learn guitar and play the songs yourself’.) It’s one of the strangest hybrids of an honour and a disappointment – all while contemplating the actions of my spiritual cousin.
  
  
• Continue to prepare for a ten show run of The Bedroom Philosopher’s High School Assembly at the Forum Theatre for Melbourne Comedy Festival.
  
  
• Write new song Recycling – a cheesy 80’s educational rap song which will be performed in the High School Assembly. I spend hours on the net researching correct recycling techniques so I can make the rap as accurate and educational as possible.
  
  
• Record Recycling with SPOD in Sydney. I’ve wanted to work with him for a long time, admiring his work producing Richard In Your Mind’s last album.
  
  
• Choreograph my own dance sequence to Recycling, enlisting a cast of ten dancers. We screenprint Tshirts, refashion a recycling bin into a talking character (puppeteered by Sabrina) and design a Lady GaGaesque toilet roll dress for the recycling ‘queen.’
  
  
• Perform ten shows of The Bedroom Philosopher’s High School Assembly at the Forum Theatre in Melbourne Comedy Festival. Having had such a successful test run last year, I’m betting everything on this being a Keating!-esque hit. I’ve spent six months pouring hours and dollars into this unwieldy mammoth of a production.
  
  There is a cast of twenty and I have to hire a stage manager. I am producing my own independent musical, without insurance. Surely nothing can go wrong. The jewel of my artistic indulgence is recording an EP for one of the characters, Luke Warm (me doing my best Nick Drake impression), who appears in the show once. I print up 100 copies of his EP Dad Come Back.
  
  
• Despite a publicist, the show receives virtually no press. The cruel irony is the one-off show in 2011 picked up an Age feature, JJJ and RRR breakfast spots, and so this year all three decline, stating they’ve just had me on. I am left to sell 4000 seats on the back of a music blog interview.
  
  
• While I’m chuffed to make the super-show I wanted, onstage things are not as fun as they could be. Unlike the Thornbury Theatre version from the previous year, which played to a warm music crowd, the suburban comedy audience feel cold in the big space. It’s a completely different feeling which takes several shows to get the hang of. Ben Pobjie does a terrific job as the surly Principal. The Age gives it four stars while the Herald Sun give it two.
  
  I am dismayed when the audience are let out the side doors of the Forum, meaning they don’t walk past the merch stand. I have spent $2000 having signature hoodies made up. Over ten shows I sell $1000 worth of merch only to find we are being charged $1000 by the venue to sell merch. I feel unsupported by the venue and disheartened by comedy audiences and the scene in general. Each night the Recycling song feels like an anti-climax. One reviewer describes it as “patronising.”
  
  
• Mum travels over from Tassie to see the show. She loves it. It’s great to hear her laughing away, even though she is sick at the time. 
  
  
• An opportunity comes up to record with SPOD. He is house sitting for two weeks in a space with a studio. I drop everything, throw some songs together and record a forthcoming album. It’s a complete joy. SPOD is a bigger Beck fan than me and has a specific knowledge of the sound I’m going for. Our mission statement is to make the Australian Odelay.
  
  It’s the first time I’ve collaborated with a producer on songwriting. For some tracks, I have only lyrics and a melody, leaving SPOD to play his Moog and whip up a percussive frenzy. Having been obsessed with synths my whole life, I am like a kid in a toy shop, allowed to play with the authentic article. It’s too expensive to fly The Awkwardstra up, so I enlist my pals from Richard In Your Mind as the session musicians. We leave the album as twelve rough mixes, with intention to finish it off after I am paid out by Comedy Festival.
  
  
• Receive financial (nervous) breakdown from Comedy Festival. We sold 1200 tickets, (1100 less than last year) and considering the astronomical venue hire ($17000 for ten shows), it turns out I’ve lost several thousand dollars.
  
  
• Reconsider my decision to pass up performing in the Hi-Fi Bar which would have been way cheaper than the Forum, but didn’t have the same ‘assembly’ vibe.
  
  
• To my horror, I realise I can’t pay the cast, nor do I have enough money to finish my album.
  
  
• Remind self to never try.
  
  
• Experience Personal Financial Crisis. I have two maxed credit cards, two outstanding loans from friends, an outstanding Tour Diary balance and no income. 
  
  
• Lose hope.
  
  
• Part ways with my manager Anthea. It is an amicable decision. Despite excellent and good-hearted efforts, The Bedroom Philosopher has become too stressful an operation for both of us.
  
  
• Assessing my money woes, I throw a bunch of gigs together, fully aware that I haven’t been enjoying playing live lately. I book a residency at the Wesley Anne in May and an Ebook tour of the East Coast in September.
  
  
• Meet with Affirm Press who are keen to put out the Ebook of The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries. Martin asks me if I have any ideas for another book. On the spot, I decide someone should write about what it’s like to be an artist in Australia. He agrees.
  
  
• Put wheels in motion to secure my first book deal. I have the sense that I’ve been trying to steer the ship of my life away from live performing and towards writing for some time. I must prove to Affirm that I have what it takes to complete a whole book. This involves a lot of trial and error.
  
  
• After two months of back and forth, I put together a chapter outline and three test chapters that Affirm are satisfied with.
  
  
• Sign first ever book deal. It will be a self-help meets a confessional. My own story interspersed with interviews with other artists.
  
  
• Perform a residency at the Wesley Anne in Melbourne. As Nature Boy Hazel is overseas, I strip the band back so that new member Julius ‘Donny Maracas’ Millar is on bass, with Mad Dog Rabinovici on drums. The three piece feels much more manageable and suits the tougher sound of the new album.
  
  
• The first show is a dour affair, with my vulnerable state sinking under pressure.  A fan messages me to say she came away from the gig feeling sad. I really shouldn’t be outside the house. The next two shows warm up and rock out. 
  
  
• Go on mission to find a manager. I want someone experienced who can focus on the overall direction of my career. After testing my ‘br**d’ with the few agencies who will meet me, I conclude that I’m not worth that much. “Have you tried the UK?” is one response. “You sound really down. I just want to give you a hug,” is another.
  
  
• A music manager explains publishing to me. He says it’s not uncommon to approach Mushroom, who may offer $20, 000 for your publishing rights. I have a meeting with Mushroom who like the new album. This feels like the golden ticket out of my financial woes.
  
  
• Pour myself into my book. Embark on an epic mission to interview over fifty artists. It’s a good exercise to reach out to other artists and find out what’s been happening with them. It’s cathartic to remind myself that everyone is struggling in their own way (while assuming I’m kicking arse.) I have the feeling of rising from the wreckage of The Bedroom Philosopher and piecing myself together through writing – an emotional audit, if you will.
  
  
• After being completely overwhelmed by interviews, I put a call out for volunteers to help transcribe them. To my amazement, over twenty people offer their services, some typing up two or three. It’s a touching moment and a reminder of the wonderful fans I have.
  
  
• Embark on East Coast tour of Australia. Forced to be my own manager, I do all the publicity for it, scoring the cover of MX in Sydney and a Courier Mail feature in Brisbane. It’s a good feeling to know I can still take care of business. The beauty of the three piece Awkwardstra is that we all fit in one car.
  
  The tour is hit and miss, with some unnecessary stopovers in Gold Coat and Wollongong (who’s booking this thing!) Canberra and Katoomba are highlights and I’m reminded that Brisbane is my biggest following outside Melbourne. Sydney is a pain in the arse as usual – expensive venue, indifferent audience who claim they can’t hear the lyrics over the band. I have the distinct sense of pushing shit up a hill. After doing the sums it’s no surprise that the tour doesn’t quite break even. The main point of it was to make money.
  
  
• Spend the months from October through December writing the first draft of my book. After a ten year round trip, for the first time in my life I am a full-time writer. It feels right.
  
  
• Synthesise a set routine where I do exactly the same thing everyday. Write, yoga, lunch, write, run, dinner, worry about my unfinished album.
  
  
• See two of my musical heroes, Beck and Radiohead, within a week in November. This is the first time I’ve seen either of them live. For Beck, I am front and centre at Harvest. I’m so nervous I get Sabrina to make sure my hair is okay. Beck performs a perfunctory set and I love the sound. Radiohead blow everything out of the park.
  
  
• The forthcoming album is put on hold, indefinitely. I don’t have the money to finish it. I consider a Pozible campaign, but am wary of taking on too much. The Bedroom Philosopher has been going flat out since 2009 and it seems like the right time to disappear for a while.
  
  
• Spend Christmas Day home alone, writing. After a crisis year, I feel like I’m living on the edge of my new self. It’s exciting. I stare out at the fireworks in the distance from my window, sensing a glimmer of hope.

2013

• Get the notes back from the 82, 000 words of my first draft. They aren’t great. The bottom line is that while there’s some great material, there isn’t enough narrative or purpose to hang it on. I am dismayed, but determined.
  
  
• Perform at Port Fairy Folk Festival. It’s a very well organised festival with curious middle-aged audiences who insist on sitting in camping chairs and discouraging any dancing “in front of the stage.” These are my first gigs without my glasses and I’m a little nervous. Highlights include getting a witches hat and putting it on a teenage boys head and declaring him the “prince funk wizard of dance.” The band performs a cover of Beck’s Loser with Rusty from Scared Weird Little Guys.
  
  
• Dare Sabrina into doing a Melbourne Comedy Festival Show. It is my first time directing, and I work intensely with her on the show Body Poet. An excellent working relationship develops, though it is a challenge for me to dedicate myself to two projects.
  
  
• Spend January – April working on the second draft. It’s just me, the computer and the F$#%ng buzzsaw guy next door.
  
  
• The manuscript is handballed to a new editor. This means I will receive more intense, one on one treatment. For someone who has always been their own boss, this is an entirely new process.
  
  
• The new editor delivers 17 pages of notes for my second draft. I read them on a Saturday night, by myself, in a beanbag while our awful neighbour plays a Black Sabbath DVD incredibly loudly. My book, in which I’ve poured my soul into, has been effectively ripped to shreds. It hurts.
  
  
• Receive the Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship. It means I can go into their office space to write my third draft. I am excited about having a sense of going to work each day and leaving the deadshits of my Thornbury apartment.
  
  
• Grow increasingly despondent with social media. I develop a syndrome of thinking of a gag, stewing over it, posting it, imagining people judging it, feeling anxious, checking the likes, assuming it’s bombed and deleting it.
  
  
• Am contacted by the programmer of Woodford Folk Festival. She saw me at Port Fairy and is a big fan. I am elated to know that I’ve still got some pull. While I’m not intending to perform at Woodford until I finish my album, I’m able to use the contact to get Sabrina a gig. I realise from my years of self-managing I have become a decent manager.
  
  
• Embark on the third draft. My editor’s notes act as a handbook on how to finish the book, which I find very comforting. 
  
  
• In my spare time, I continue to tear myself in half about the direction of my next album. I am unsure whether to release it as BP or under my own name – or whether to remove some of the ‘less comedy’ songs as per a recent manager’s advice. After emailing her again it seems as though the window is closed. She wanted to work with me purely as a comedy act, so it felt like the right manager at the wrong time.  
  
  
• In June, I am commissioned to make two station ID’s for ABC2. The idea is that they give me a budget and I go off and make two music videos independently with my own crew. I elect to work with SPOD. The timing isn’t ideal, but I can’t really say no. 
  
  
• Perform at the Students of Sustainability conference in a freezing tent in Launceston. I work up a parody of Gangsta’s Paradise called Hipsters Paradise. It is 16 years since I entered my high school talent contest with a parody of the same song called Parklands Paradise.
  
  
• Appear on Adam Hills Tonight. Initially, I try to pitch my band and two new songs from the album, but they are both rejected for not being funny enough. I roll with new song Nothing I Do Is Right which was half-written as far back as 2005 and resurrected to play at school gigs. The TV spot goes very well.
  
  
• The ABC2 station ID shoot goes well. We knock both videos over in a day, and are allowed to shoot in the ABC green screen studios, which is a huge help. Keeping with tradition, I manage only three hours sleep the night before, while staying in a hotel. (The exact same thing happened for the Tram Inspector shoot). I figure this will suit my withdrawn sad vibe on Difficult Second Channel and unhinged weirdo mode on ABC2 Rap.
  
  
• August is an incredibly busy month (for someone finishing the third draft of their book). I’m commissioned by Radio National to be write and perform political songs for their live broadcasts from the Wesley Anne. I attend the Byron Bay Writers Festival, perform at the Melbourne Writers Festival as well as ZICS zine conference in Brisbane.
  
  
• It’s a bit much. 
  
  
• Experience first inklings of wanting to write my childhood memoir. On August 30 I write a note to myself: Next project – memoir. The story of my childhood. Built from memory, cassettes and interviews with my family. Start interviewing at the end of the year? Or make special flight for it. Look at Australia council grants. Start applying.
  
  
• Attend my first writers festival in Byron Bay. I’d heard that writers are treated much better than musicians and comedians and the story checks out. I am put up in a lovely beach vista apartment with my own Brookfarm muesli rider. I appear on a couple of panels, doing battle for airtime with battle-feminists and playing to an audience of middle aged women. To the strains of Dave Graney, I improvise my own pole dance routine. I enjoy the taste of being a writer.
  
  
• ‘Assist’ the Greens party at their arts policy launch in Melbourne. I perform I Don’t Know What I’m Doing With My Life along with interpretive dance and reveal of Go Art painted on my chest. I am touched when Christine Milne quotes the lyrics about Nan saying ‘you’ve chosen a hard path in life’ in her speech.  It appears on the ABC news, though they pair my interpretive dance with footage of a banner falling on Christine during her speech, which isn’t spectacular. 
  
  
• Perform a bit way too much for someone trying to finish the third draft of a book. 
  
  
• Fill in for Charlie Pickering at ‘Write Around The Murray Festival’ in Albury. I am on the bill with Poh Ling Yeow (Poh’s Kitchen). We hit it off. 
  
  
• September marks a multi-car pile up of stress. I am writing my third draft, while directing Sabrina in a Melbourne Fringe run of her new show and doing school gigs and comedy gigs in Tasmania. I need the money so can’t say no to any gig offers.  The flashpoint is a 10 year birthday headline show at Wesley Anne on September 22. It’s a rowdy festival-like crowd and I’m so not in the mood. My ‘mock-rockstar’ antics come-off poorly and the sound guy ends up cutting my mike. After riding the line between onstage madness and all-out oblivion for years, I finally meltdown. I am effectively asked to leave the gig I am headlining. On Facebook I receive the comment “I did not appreciate the violence of your performance.”
  
  
• I declare the end of The Bedroom Philosopher.
  
   
• The next day I am walking along and experience mysterious shooting pains in my stomach. 
  
  
• Hand in the third draft in October. It gets the royal thumbs up. It seems I’ve finally nailed it. After toying with Don’t Give Up Your Dream Job we settle on the title Funemployed.
  
  
• Become despondent in my apartment. From the neighbour next door with his loud gaming speakers and penchant for Evanescence, to the new girls downstairs who have decided to start practicing for their minimalist rock band, to the street noise from the pizza place next door to the metal ambiance of the industrial cut-zone outside my window, I feel the disquieting absence of inner peace. 
  
  
• I am required to go Centrelink weekly (weakly) and pretend to look for work. I emotionally survive by taking along my digital recorder and secretly recording my ordeal. 
  
  
• Frustrated by poverty, Sabrina and I opt to move to Sydney to live in her Dad’s granny flat, rent free. I am ready for a break from super-cool grid-locked Melbourne.
  
  
• Have a send off at Trades Hall. Sabrina and I rock up early and dance to Beck’s Mutations on vinyl. It’s my highlight of the night and probably the year. For a man who has becomes increasingly neurotic about whether he is liked or not, it’s heartening to see a loving brigade turn out.
  
  
• Pack up our things, say g’bye to mates and move to Sydney. 
  
  
• Spend the first two weeks renovating the unit. We are allowed to choose the paint colours, and opt for yellow, turquoise, pink and sky blue. I’ve never house-painted before and it’s an excellent antidote to staring at words all year.
  
  
• Realise how expensive Sydney is. Most organic foods are $5 more, for no apparent reason. Even the local swimming pool is $6.70 with no concession, and 40 cents for the shower (don’t sweat the small stuff –  Fitzroy pools are $2.50 concession with complimentary hot water.)
  
  
• MC Canberra’s battle of the bands at the Royal Theatre. I play to 200 bemused teenagers in a venue built for 20, 000. After doing my mouth-over-mic gag in Nothing I Do Is Right I’m chastised by the sound dinosaur for violating the venue’s hygiene policy. “I’m a comedian!” I bark at him. He sprays Glen 20 in my direction and walks off.
  
  
• Enter into a perpetual state of fine tuning Funemployed, as I realise that finishing a book means handing it in about ten times.  My endless rabbit hole of interview subjects continues. Sam Simmons marks my final interview in late November (roughly the 120^th since I began.) I enjoy the editing process immensely, and the book continues to be the one thing my heart is in.
  
  
• Realise the bad thing about moving is I’ve lost my hairdresser and counsellor. Become neurotic about my hair. 
  
  
• Put in an application for ABC’s Fresh Blood initiative. I will team up with friend Nikos Andronicos, who I wrote with on Ronnie Johns Half Hour. I adapt a sketch from Lime Champions called Crazy Bastards. It’s a parody of Mad Men set in mid 80s Australia. It’s a frenetic period, as I write the application and make ‘final, Final (final)’ book updates right up until Dec 20, when I’m due to go home to Tassie.
  
  
• Fly home for Christmas. I am in a fragile, agitated state. It’s not the best time to visit a fragile, agitated state. Nor hang out with two fragile, agitated Heazlewood women.
  
  
• Return home to Sydney on New Years Eve at 8pm. Conrad from Richard In Your Mind invites me to a house party at Joe from Belles Will Ring’s house. I haven’t been to one in years, (a party that is, not a party at Joe’s house) and am glad for the escape. Despite having almost quit drinking, I slam down some beers and Frangelico and have a damn good time. Sydney kids feel welcoming and less cliquey than Melbourne. It has been a tough year. I have a feeling next year will be better. Lighter. More fun?

2014
Saturn Returns

• Sabrina and I break up. I continue living with her for two more months. One morning after waking very early from a dream, I write possibly my best ever serious song called Cherry Soda.
  
  
• Do my first bit of ‘real work’ in a long while, manning the enrollments desk at Sydney Uni. 
  
  
• Continue to experience digestion issues and dramatically lose weight. At least it suit my character of Nigel Nailer, a 1985 advertising executive in Crazy Bastards, for which I win an ABC Fresh Blood grant for. 
  
  
• Josh Earl becomes the host of the new Spicks and Specks. 
  
  
• Perform two shows with The Awkwardstra. First at the Kelvin Club in Melbourne and then at the Paradiso Spiegaltent in Adelaide Fringe. It’s a big honour being asked to play and I’ve been secretly wanting to make the Spiegaltent scene for ages. It’s an anticlimax on a Monday night with power outages and a despondent sound tech. I finish the show with a controversial parody of Daft Punk’s Lose Yourself To Dance. (Lose Yourself To Cats) while wearing a figure hugging vinyl cat suit.  
  
  
• Get the sense that I am definitely a bit over the whole Bedroom Philosopher thing. Some reviewers are to, noting that I struggled to remember all the words to Golden Gaytime. 
  
  
• Pitch Funemployed as a radio series to Radio National. They commission a series of 8 fifteen-minute episodes with me writing one original song per episode. I’ll be paid well and get to go into ABC Melbourne to conduct interviews and edit the series myself. It’s my first real job in a while. 
  
  
• Longtime friend Peter Bayliss agrees to start managing me. It’s a huge relief after a couple of years DIY. 
  
  
• Film three episodes of Crazy Bastards in two days. It’s a hectic schedule to say the least (a real change for me.) We’re out shopping for our costumes the day before the first shoot. I am completely exhausted, but it gets done. 
  
  
• Move back to Melbourne in April. Crash for three months at the arty warehouse HQ of The Suitcase Royale. 
  
  
• Spend April and May madly conducting interviews for the Funemployed Radio National series while gearing up for a June release of the book. 
  
  
• Funemployed is released in June. I launch it with my own Art Day! where I read the whole book in its entirety. It takes thirteen hours. Over thirty guest artists quoted in the book are on call to read their parts live. The others are read out by Sabrina, Oliver Clarke & Michael Nolan. The Awkwardstra provide musical accompaniment including a terrifying rendition of Army Of Me by Ben Pobjie. 
  
  
• The Funemployed EP is released. It features the single I Don’t Know What I’m Doing With My Life which is taken from my sessions with SPOD two years earlier. The other tracks are made up of ultra-bleak recordings taken from my Centrelink appointments paired with found-sound band rehearsals. The EP is offered as a free download with the book. In a fitting statement of my mindset, I experience great anxiety about what name to release it under, opting finally for ‘Justin Heazlewood.’ It feels like an opportunity to move away from the Bedroom Philosopher mantle for a while. (I end up changing my mind two further times,)
  
  
• Promote Funemployed by appearing at my own Advice Booth at Readings, Carlton. 
  
  
• Move into a sharehouse in Reservoir with six other people. There is smoking inside and a very agitated dog (Buddy) next door. Uncle Ken helps me haul my stuff from Sydney to Melbourne by driving the removalist van. On the way we pick up a very cool blue velvet two-seater lounge at Albury Vinnies for $30. I take this as a positive sign from the universe. My arrival at my new house is marked with Ken crashing the uninsured truck through the front fence.
  
  
• The universe sends mixed-messages. 
  
  
• Find myself front and centre being grilled by Jon Faine on ABC radio. It doesn’t go ideally. After playing I Don’t Know What I’m Doing With My Life he remarks “I’m not sure if I should feel sorry for you or not.” The conversation turns accusatory, leading to his conclusion “the world doesn’t owe you a living, you know.”
  
  I try to defend myself while refusing to apologise for being supported by Centrelink. Afterwards, the producer says there are fifty talkback callers, most of whom think I’m a ‘cry-baby.’ I’m utterly disappointed that my book is reduced to the stereotype of artists being whingers who don’t deserve extra favours. When I check my email a long-time fan writes to tell me how disappointed he is in me, as a working class musician.  
  
  
• Sabrina and I participate in People of Letters. We write an intensely honest series of letters to each other about our relationship. It stuns the room and brings some to tears. I finish it off with a song I’d written for her called Beautiful Present. “Didn’t have a future / Didn’t live in the past / The best time with my dream-girl / How on earth could it last / We had the most beautiful present.”
  
  
• Celebrate my birthday by showing the three episodes of Crazy Bastards to a bunch of friends. They laugh! 
  
  
• Spend a profoundly unhappy month in my dim new room. My only solace is listening to Mac DeMarco’s Salad Days. It’s the most excited I’ve been about an album since Boards Of Canada.
  
  
• Tour Funemployed on the East Coast through July. The shows are a mostly enjoyable and well received hybrid of readings from the book and new songs written for the radio series. It’s my first time touring under my own name.
  
  
• Perform at the comedy stage at Splendour In The Grass. Spend most of the time hiding in my hotel. I wake at 4am and start writing the first chapter of my childhood memoir. 
  
  
• Dr Len Oakes, the psychologist I’ve been seeing since 2008, retires. 
  
  
• Decide to leave the worst sharehouse since Megan The Vegan. Sabrina suggests I live by myself. Against the odds, I move into my first solo apartment in Thornbury. Being gainfully employed by the ABC is good timing. 
  
  
• Begin seeing a new psychologist, Nicole, in the city. I find the weekly visits extremely helpful and necessary. On my first visit she turns my entire childhood on its head. 
  
  
• Begin the editing process of the Funemployed radio series. The original deadline is August but this stretches out to October.
  
  
• Perform at the Queensland Poetry Festival. I enjoy the company of fellow poets who are gallantly broken and open to talking about mental illness. Spoken word versions of Party In My Head and Irish Girl are well received. During my set an old man perches down the front row and eats a packet of Werther’s Originals.
  
  
• After finding little solace in western medicine, a naturopath diagnoses me with an overload of cortisol (stress hormone) in my system. I get friendly with coconut products and gluten-free muffins. 
  
  
• Am torn between writing my childhood memoir for Affirm or pursuing a YA self-help book with a major publisher. My friend Caroline is working for a major publisher and helps me pitch the book over several visits to Sydney.  
  
  
• Support SPOD for two shows as Justin Heazlewood. The Sydney gig is at a very rowdy Lansdowne Bar. I end up standing up on a table and screaming at people. The Melbourne gig at Old Bar is poorly attended (for my set) and rather self-conscious. I don’t talk between songs at all. I find the experience virtually joyless.
  
  
• Write and perform a comedy piece about Melbourne in response to John Bracks’ painting Collins St. 5pm.
  
  
• The Funemployed deadline stretches on. It doesn’t appear that it will be finished this year. Meanwhile the ABC is experiencing dark days with job cuts and redundancies going on all around me. This creates a tense atmosphere (or is it me?)
  
  
• Launch Funemployed at Melbourne Writers Festival. I interview several guests onstage including John Safran. The bloke from Everything But The Girl is there and is definitely the black sheep. He is less than amused by my shaky deadpan stylings and at one point quips “you’ve got a whole ‘low self-esteem thing going on here.”
  
  
• Funemployed is featured in the Melbourne Writers Festival’s Top 10 Books for 2014.
  
  
• Am heartened by the bunch of positive emails I receive from fellow artists who have dug the book. The most common theme is “I thought I was the only one who was fucking up.” I even get positive messages from Josh Pyke and Sam from Ball Park Music. 
  
  
• Nan takes ill. She is flown to Royal Melbourne hospital to have bypass surgery. It’s weird timing seeing my family as I’m in such a lowly state. They don’t seem to care. Nan makes it through. 
  
  
• Catch Rodriguez perform a solid show at the Palais. He’s dressed head to toe in leather. The old lady next to me claps out of time with every song. 
  
  
• Represent Art in an Art VS Sport debate for the Ian Potter museum.
  
  
• Am offered the gig of writing and recording a song promoting sun safety for the Queensland government. I write a rap song called Check Yr Moles. (“Fire in the hole / check yr moles!”) Everything looks set for my $30k payday until the client pulls out at the last minute. They decide to go with a local artist instead. 
  
  
• Present Funemployed at BIGSOUND Festival in Brisbane. Host a panel featuring Megan Washington, Evelyn Morris & Russell Morris (no relation). It goes down rather well.  
  
  
• Marieke Hardy gives Funemployed a huge plug on the ABC Book Club. 
  
  
• Write a letter to the book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for Woman of Letters. I perform alongside long-time hero Shaun Micallef. He says he dug The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries. 
  
  
• Am struck by the sudden death of Stella Young. I had come to know her in the previous year and she revealed herself to be a fan. I interviewed her for my series and instantly wished I’d hung out with her more. 
  
  
• Spend Christmas day alone in a five million dollar converted surfboard factory in Fremantle belonging to a stem-cell scientist which is being house-sat by friends of friends of mine. It’s a long story in a crazy year.  

2015

• Spend January in a romantic entanglement, which is nice. 
  
  
• Funemployed is given a February air date. I fly to Sydney to record overdubs with Richard from Richard In Your Mind. While I’m there I record a couple of songs for Sabrina’s new kids show Zen the Pigeon Girl.
  
  
• With the help of my friend Caroline I hustle with a big publisher about my YA book. They seem set to make me an offer. 
  
  
• My summer fling soon flames out. Dating with anxiety is tricky. 
  
  
• Perform at Amanda Palmer’s book launch at Thornbury Theatre. I set up my Advice Booth in the foyer. I play a new song from the Funemployed album One In A Million which goes down a treat. Nail Gaiman says he’s been dipping into chapters of Funemployed. 
  
  
• Catch Mac DeMarco at the HiFi bar. Am struck by him playing Enter Sandman as an encore. While I grew up with the song, it occurs to me that Metallica are to this generation what Led Zeppelin were to mine. Have odd sensation of moving into the next generation bracket.
  
  
• Feel old. 
  
  
• The first episode of Funemployed airs in February. They play my intro which is a cut up of Jon Faine reading out the mean texts he received during my interview last year. I’m interviewed by Myf Warhurst on Double J and the intro to my book appears as an article on the RN homepage. An ex posts on Facebook: “Don’t read the comments!” 
  
  
• The major publisher offers me a small advance for my YA book. After meeting with Martin from Affirm, who is still very keen on my memoir, I decide to sign with them and dive in once and for all. 
  
  
• Funemployed sells out its first print run. Affirm agree to a second pressing. The book has sold close to 3000 copies which is considered ‘good.’
  
  
• Begin working on my childhood memoir full-time. This is a book I’ve been thinking about for ten years. After six months at sea it feels good to have a working routine again. I write by day and go for long walks at night. Intense dreams and emotions start pouring out.
  
   
• Begin Star Trek: Voyager. There are seven seasons. It’s the first time I’ve seen a Star Trek all the way through. 
  
  
• The Funemployed series continues to air weekly. The host describes it as ‘controversial.’ I forget that I live in a bubble where artists talking about their problems isn’t automatically a threat.
  
  
• Work with Sabrina on Zen the Pigeon Girl. We have struck a reasonably constructive friendship but it’s still hard seeing her. 
  
  
• Upgrade my glasses for the first time in ages. I am concerned to find my vision has deteriorated. I investigate surgery options. 
  
  
• Release Funemployed LP in March. I’m impressed that I’ve managed to record and master an album at the ABC without it costing anything. Am keen to make a music video for One In A Million using a deaf AUSLAN interpreter. Somehow manage to offend ABC management by issuing a press release that says “Beddy Phil’s taxpayer funded meltdown album.” They are adamant they didn’t commission it. Come to the conclusion that I really am ‘reckless and unpredictable’ when it comes to the ABC. I don’t even try. 
  
  
• Perform several songs at the launch of The School of Life in Melbourne. They are a cafe / bookshop based on Alain de Botton’s books. They seem like my dream club, especially as I attend their workshops How To Make Love Last and How To Stay Calm.
  
  
• After twenty appointments and a wildly fluctuating script, I finally get my new glasses. They are outrageously thick. The only surgery available is ‘cataract’ style surgery where they would replace the lenses in my eyes. I opt to go back into hiding behind my glasses.
  
  
• Present Funemployed at a Fitzroy Library event. Probably fall in love with the library assistant, but that’s fine. 
  
  
• Ask out the girl who works at my local organic fruit and veg shop after spying her on my tram. (It’s the first time I’ve ever done this.) Her name is Fox. I decide to take her to see the Japanese Spider Crab at the Melbourne Aquarium. When people ask what I’ve been up to I tell them: “I took fox to see a crab.”
  
  
• Miss Sabrina. 
  
  
• Attend the Margaret River Writers Festival. I am responsible for being the ‘Billy Crystal’ of the opening night and present a comedy monologue and several songs. I get to chat to John Marsden who I once interviewed in grade 12, pretending to write for a fictional school magazine. Meet up with old Parklands High School friend Kynan Mole who I haven’t seen in 20 years. Also eat the best ice cream of my life from Millers. 
  
  
• Contribute the essay Justin Heazlewood’s Bouncing Reality Check to the anthology Copyfight. It’s a Funemployed encore of hyper-honest meanderings on losing money as an artist. A friend reads the back and declares “your name should be higher up the list.”
  
  
• Perform at an anti-bullying gig in various schools around Wynyard, Tasmania. It’s a major challenge and involves performing to a primary school audience for the first time. I’m also having space from my family and am unsure whether to contact them or not.
  
  
• Fly to Burnie with the mission of visiting Montello Primary and Parklands High School to help research the book. I stay with school friend Dion. It’s the first time I’ve ever come to Tasmania independently of my family. The timing is uncanny. Mum is in hospital due to have a hip replacement operation. It’s an intense time. 
  
  
• Start filming myself doing mad improvised ‘performance art’ on my phone. I call the series Spook Bag after a childhood box I find in a cupboard full of rubber spiders and tricks called ‘Justin’s Spook Bag.’
  
  
• Meet with my favourite grade six teacher Mr Burgess. When I ask him for insights into my as a kid he replies “Oh, you were a nerd!” 
  
  
• Spend time at the Burnie Library scrolling through newspapers from 1992 on microfilm. I feel like a memory detective. 
  
  
• Travel to Darwin to speak at the Music NT Intune conference.  I really like Darwin. It has a relaxed, fragrant vibe. My panels go okay, but I find at night I am barely able to socialise with anyone. Manage to fit in a photoshoot at 6am with a friendly photographer. 
  
  
• Am booked to be a guest speaker at HERDSA academic conference. End my talk with a screening of I Don’t Know What I’m Doing With My Life. A German woman meets me at the merch stand outside to tell me how the video seemed to be “whinging.” The academic woman who booked me for the HERDSA gig says she read my life story online and describes it as “harrowing.” 
  
  
• Perform at the national architecture congress in Melbourne. I like the world of high paying academic gigs, even if I only average two a lifetime.
  
   
• Josh and I are featured in The Age’s Two Of Us. The timing isn’t great. I am deep in my book and the last thing I feel like is more exposure, even though it feels impossible to say no to such things. Josh texts to say our photo isn’t very good. I still haven’t read it.
  
  
• Am invited back to BIGSOUND to present Funemployed: the sequel. This time round Jen Cloher and Ben Salter are in the mix and at their candid best. I don’t do as well this year and find the whole experience exhausting. I am found backstage drinking a Vital Greens tonic from a marmalade jar.  
  
  
• Crazy Bastards is nominated for best comedy script at the AWGIES. It receives two nominations in the Australian Online Video Awards for best show and best performance. The Katering Show takes everything. 
  
  
• Pull out my spine by writing two grant application for the book (while also writing the book.) It’s approximately the hardest thing I’ve ever done (short of being a child caring for my Mum.) 
  
  
• Miss Conrad from Richard In Your Mind’s wedding in Sydney and spend the AFL grand final day watching Walkabout. I’m about to bail out of a catch-up with Damien Lawlor of Lime Champions who lives a minute away when he texts: “Or you could just fucken man up, down a couple of panadol, chase it with a fucken cold beer and come and watch the fucken footy….ya p**fta.”
  
  
• Negotiate a ‘relaxed deadline’ with Affirm. I realise I have no idea when the first draft will be finished. The whole operation feels so delicate that any pressure whatsoever could knock the whole thing over. To my relief, Martin is accommodating. 
  
  
• An appalling pseudo junkie couple moves into the unit above mine. There is aggressive Aussie hip-hop and hard heeled boots traipsing around at two in the morning. It’s not good. 
  
  
• Contribute guest vocals on Damian Cowell’s track I Wanna Be Loved (by me).
  
  
• Stop using social media. Deactivate my personal Facebook and vow to go a year without posting to The Bedroom Philosopher’s Facebook page. Whittle my friendship group down to a few key dudes, all blokes and musicians. Try to embrace the solitude of my newfound life and go full self-isolation five years before it’s a thing.
  
  
• Junkie neighbours go on a terrifying ice-fuelled sex bender. I abandon ship and stay at a friends house for a couple of days. 
  
  
• My life seems to be hurtling out of control. Make the decision to leave Melbourne and move back to Tassie for a while. I need nature. I need to recover. 
  
  
• Find myself back in my original childhood bedroom with Mum in her room next door. Mum has gotten sick again the minute so I directly recreate the very thing I’ve been writing about all year. I appreciate the grim irony. 
  
  
• Am briefly Burnie Museum’s first ever Writer In Residence. The plan is to set myself up in their upstairs storage area and write my book. It lasts for a day. I realise I can’t be in Tasmania and write about it as well. The magnetic gloom is powerful. I travel down to Hobart and try staying with my mate Matt in his Fern Tree bungalow. That doesn’t work either. I need my own space, as troubled as it is. I return to Melbourne within the week. 
  
  
• Funemployed is nominated for the Most Underrated Book. Only I could win something that would make my career go backwards. It’s a relief to lose.
  
  
• Start keeping a regular diary for the first time since grade ten. 
  
  
• To my delight I score both grants! $40K of ridiculously well-timed relief is coming my way. The first thing I do is get the hell out of my place. I quickly find a two bedroom apartment on the other side of Thornbury.
  
  
• The second thing I do is purchase noise cancelling headphones. Together with my Chill playlist on Spotify, resplendent with downtempo electronica – they are my new favourite things in the world.
  
  
• Spend Christmas with my painter friend Yvette Coppersmith. Being Jewish, she’s never had Christmas lunch before.
  
  
• Mum emails me the bon-bon joke:  ” why do cows lie down in the rain”??? to keep each udder dry. !!!” I have entered a phase where we no longer speak on the phone, only email. It’s the most space we’ve ever had before and she is able to respect it. 
  
  
• Move into my new place on December 30. Find my dream couch set on Gumtree. Three piece brown and orange velvet chairs for $170! At least the dream velvet couches keep coming when I need them.
  
  
• Spend New Years Eve by myself. Classic. I need the breather as I negotiate myself even further outside the stratosphere. 

2016

• Continue working on Get Up Mum. I note down a lot of events and gigs I plan on going to, but avoid all of them. 
  
  
• Find comfort in rage’s retro month. They program full episodes of Countdown from the 80s which I’m able to record and watch back with my smart TV. I find the rambling, technicolour aesthetic warm and refreshing. 
  
  
• Stay healthy. Flaxseed oil and Neurocalm is involved. (It’s basically herbal Xanax.)
  
  
• Get in a very heavy space watching the film Youth. Soon after it finishes my best friend Will texts “RIP David Bowie” and I burst into tears. 
  
  
• Attend a planting day in Thornbury with pals Jen Cloher and Courtney Barnett. 
  
  
• Sign up to Ok Cupid. I accidentally stand up my first date. 
  
  
• Go to a model exhibition on my 36th birthday (as in ships, not girls) with Will. He has been an absolute champion during this phase. Our coffee hangouts and jaunts to Nova are usually the highlight of my week.
  
  
• Part ways with my manager Peter amicably
  
  
• The parklands high school 20 year reunion takes place in Burnie. I simply cannot fathom the idea your life who have been wandering the corridors of my head for the past year. It will be the second reunion in a row that I miss.
  
  
• Stranger Things begins. The 80s childhood nostalgia is exceptionally good timing for my headspace. 
  
  
• Coburg Carnivale offer me ‘get out of bed’ money and commission me to do my first show as The Bedroom Philosopher in years. To alleviate indecision about what songs to perform, I cook up a cat theme. It turns out I have at least ten songs where cats are mentioned. 
  
  
• Perform two performances of Cat Show at Coburg Carnivale. The concept is ‘songs about cats while dressed as a cat.’ It is well received. It’s an opportunity to write some new stuff as well as retooling old favourites such as I Think My Cat Has Got Depression and the 8 minute mega-ballad Mattress Protector.
  
  
• Perform for a small teachers conference at Melbourne Polytechnic. It’s a tough gig. I perform a parody called Teachers Just Wanna Have Fun. I’m starting to think I might be too old for this shit.
  
  
• Reluctantly make my first Facebook post in over a year.
  
  
• Contribute a piece in the book Letter To My Teenage Self published by Affirm. It’s been collated by a 13 year old Melbourne schoolgirl to confront bullying.
  
  
• Become a bit of a hermit. Attend a house party at Emma Heeney’s house. At one point a guy is googling me right in front of me on his phone as we have a conversation.
  
  
• Am booked my Canberra Comedy Festival to perform at their Christmas Gala. I feel like a mild charlatan as I haven’t exactly done a gig in a while. When I reveal this casually to the host his manner goes from overly-friendly to mildly-hostile. This sets the tone for the rest of the weekend which involves icy fellow-comedians and nonplussed audiences. Mattress Protector starts well but loses them with the menstruation reference.  
  
  
• Use opportunity to rehash set for comedy gig at Local Laughs. The hardest part of the whole thing is being around other comedians. I swear to god they don’t like me en masse since I performed my ‘anti-stand-up’ song at Wit-Bix in 2011. 
  
  
• Return home for Christmas. It’s not okay. Have a huge falling out with Nan. It will be the last time I ever see Nan & Pop’s house again. It’s as if I’ve written away my reality and stored it inside a storybox. 

2017

• Go all out and book in a national tour of Cat Show. It’s a way of seeing if my heart is still in The Bedroom Philosopher. Perform at Perth Fringe where the show is nominated for Best Comedy. I enjoy my run there and even meet a girl for my first fling in years. 
  
  
• Am booked by Noosa’s Creative Alliance to speak about Funemployed at their arts breakfast. It’s a lovely little mini-trip to the sunshine coast to tell some grey nomads how poor I am. 
  
  
• Produce eight promo videos with my best friend Will, fraternising with his cats White Man and Minnie. I am thrilled that Boards Of Canada music doesn’t get flagged on YouTube.
  
  
• Start getting very effected by the full moon. It’s not just me getting into character – but an intense emotional reaction to my increasingly isolated position within the spiritual universe.  
  
  
• Perform Cat Show at Adelaide Fringe. It is not a good time there and I cancel the six show run midway. 
  
  
• Perform Cat Show at Melbourne Comedy Festival. While it’s good performing at the Malthouse theatre, I find the run somewhat exhausting. I am forced to cancel my final show. It’s all a bit hit and miss. 
  
  
• Perform two shows of Cat Show at Canberra Comedy Festival. It’s rather average. I run into Josh backstage and realise how distant we are. 
  
  
• Perform Cat Show at Sydney Comedy Festival. It’s the best show of the run and I’m chuffed to have Paul McDermott and Paul Livingston (Flacco) in the crowd. 
  
  
• Assess Cat Show. It didn’t really make any money and I only enjoyed myself half the time. It isn’t exactly a ‘pass.’ I secretly hope that I won’t have to do this anymore. 
  
  
• Commissioned for Writing This Place by Darebin Writers. I am assigned Northcote Town Hall and must write a piece about it. I’m inspired to include Stella Young and indigenous dreamtime story entities. As I’m still in book mode I also make sure to weave in my twelve year old self as a character. (See: Stella & The Elders)
  
  
• Glow begins on Netflix. The 80s wrestling nostalgia is about the best thing I could have possibly ordered, not to mention how attracted I am to Judy from Mad Men. 
  
  
• Following the success of ABCs War On Waste I pitch my Recycling song to them. Even though I researched extensively (and its a comedy song) I’m told it wouldn’t be suitable as different states have different rules. 
  
  
• Conduct my first ever workshop for Writers Victoria. I go with a self-help theme and talk about the emotional side of being a writer. It goes well and takes a lot less out of me than performing.
  
  
• Perform final Cat Show at Queensland Poetry Festival. It’s pretty good. Festival organiser David Stavanger’s only report of the gig is how he had to empty out my wee bucket backstage. 
  
  
• After months of heavy suggestion from Centrelink, I begin working as a part-time receptionist for a non-for-profit in Collingwood. It’s my first real job in about ten years. It’s not so bad and has actually come at a time when I was craving interaction to offset my working-hermit lifestyle. The main trick is coming up with things to do on the computer. I catch up on articles in Pitchfork and Product Reviews of chocolate bars. 
  
  
• Continue to struggle with my weight (but not in the usual way). A dietitian has me drinking some ‘protein custard’ business in an attempt to bulk up. 
  
  
• Perform an afternoon of my own writing and songs under Justin Heazlewood at Bella Union. I’m joined by new only-child pal Elizabeth Flux and it’s an enjoyably quiet jaunt out. A clown-girl delivers me a large package full of glittery things. Sabrina and her new boyfriend attend. She is bemused by my medical drink. 
  
  
• Four of my pieces are included in the Frankie magazine anthology Something To Say. 
  
  
• Am commissioned to write a piece about phone boxes for Good Weekend. It’s the first time I’ve had my writing published in a major newspaper. 
  
  
• Develop a severely blocked right ear. I have ‘surfers ear’ which is narrow ear canals from anyone who swam in cold water as a kid. My seven years of surf club in Tasmanian ocean is back to haunt me. 
  
  
• Have an operation to have my right ear canal widened, as you do. 
  
  
• Pull some serious ‘hardship’ moves to get out of debt. Work out an arrangement with Commonwealth so I pay off my credit cards without interest and manage to waive a $5000 tax debt hanging over me since the Get Up Mum grants. 
  
  
• Bunker down for my first Christmas home alone. Scoot round to the local IGA on my bike to pick up a chook. Rig up an old-school carols playlist on Spotify. It’s notably more peaceful and enjoyable than previous years. The whole year feels like a kind of victory. Things are getting better…slowly.  

2018

• Decide not to return to my job as a sexy receptionist. The novelty has officially worn off.
  
• Welcome the new year with a distinct feeling that The Bedroom Philosopher is over. I get an email from YouTube telling me they are taking away my monetisation right. “As of today, your channel, The Bedroom Philosopher will no longer have access to monetization tools associated with YPP because it doesn’t meet the new threshold of 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. If you meet the new threshold at some point in the future, you’ll be automatically re-evaluated for YPP.”
  
  It feels a bit like The Simpsons episode where they have an elephant and charge for rides for it. When the costs of keeping the elephant rise Homer has to go around the neighbourhood and ask for more money under the ‘new pricing structure.’
  
  
• Hand in final version of Get Up Mum in March. There are some frantic last minute edits as I try to make it as perfect as it can be. I’m thrilled to get endorsement quotes from Judith Lucy and Tim Rogers.
  
  
• Conduct first ever media training with my publishers publicist. In fifteen years of being an artist I’ve never actually considered practicing for an interview. It’s a good time to start. 
  
  
• Work with an animator to bring my schoolwork and childhood cartoons to life in the first Get Up Mum promo video. The soundtrack is one of the first songs I ever wrote – an eerily appropriate song called Time.
  
  
• Get Up Mum is released May 21. The date is brought forward to coincide with Schizophrenia Awareness Week. While it feels like a good sign to have their endorsement, it doesn’t lead to much extra media. I do find myself in a Sky News studio at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, which is surreal. It’s my first national TV appearance since Adam Hills Tonight in 2013. 
  
  
• Creep my way back onto social media, which comes with the usual level of anxiety. Give a particularly candid interview for Kill Your Darlings but am shy about promoting it. 
  
  
• Conduct an epic three month stint of promotion for the book. It’s very confronting at first. I feel as though I’m ‘coming out’ as a child carer. I’m relieved when a landmark social media post receives an epic amount of goodwill. There is a groundswell of support from the media and my friend Liz interviews me for The Guardian. Myf Warhurst conducts a particularly warm-hearted interview which is in stark contrast to the grilling I got for Funemployed.
  
  
• Launch Get Up Mum with a church service in honour of my child self at Northcote Uniting Church. I’m delighted by the turnout and genuine sense of warmth and positivity in the room. Three years of very hard work feels worth it. Afterwards I am approached by Satellite – an organisation dedicated to working with children caring for parents with a mental illness. 
  
  
• Appear at Williamstown Writers Festival alongside fellow Affirm writer Paula Keogh. Amazingly, she has experienced schizophrenia and has a daughter my age, making us a yin and yang of the lived experience of mental illness. 
  
  
• Relaunch Get Up Mum with a reprise of my church service at Melbourne Writers Festival. It’s excellent having Tripod on board performing my favourite 80s soft rock ballads. 
  
  
• Appear at Brisbane Writers Festival. Get to stay in a very fancy hotel with an infinity pool.
  
  
• Get Up Mum goes into a second printing.  
  
  
• Perform at Woodleigh College in Melbourne. I’m not sure my wavering health allows me the luxuries of the tanker of confidence and energy that performing in a gymnasium to 200 students requires. Also Golden Gaytinme is starting to date poorly as kids are so comfortable with being gay.
  
  
• Present Get Up Mum at the Melton City Library. I’m put off how many people are asking me what Mum thinks of the book. I’m more interested in what I think of the book. 
  
  
• Meet with ABCs Life Matters who are interested in turning Get Up Mum into a radio series. It’s rather confronting rocking up to a meeting and having people I’ve never met asking me intimate questions about Mum. “So, did they find out what happened in Norway?”
  
  
• Asked to write the introduction for University of Canberra’s creative writing anthology Analecta. It’s quite the honour. I head up to Canberra to present the book. Manage to do a joke about ‘looking like Harry Potter with PTSD’ and offend a large proportion of the audience who are returned serviceman who were attending a poetry night to help them recover from PTSD.
  
  
• Still have it.  
  
  
• Enjoy another patented Christmas by myself. I know it’s time to catch up with Mum though. I fear I am falling into a post-book chasm and wonder how to fill it and where to move next.  
  
  
• Did I mention Slowdive’s album Slowdive? I really enjoyed that. It’s my first entry point into shoegaze, you might say.

2019

• Visit Mum for the first time in two years. She is physically disabled and can hardly walk. She hasn’t exactly communicated her illness to me. It’s all rather shattering. This is made more intense by the fact that Nan has sold her house and moved in with Mum. She now lives in my childhood bedroom. 
  
  
• Take Mum to emergency. She has rheumatoid arthritis. I get the impression that this is what happens when I go away for two years. I stay in Burnie an extra two weeks getting her the care she needs. 
  
  
• Listen to a lot of JJ Cale’s album Okie.
  
  
• Find a wedge tailed eagle feather on a bushwalk in Heybridge. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. 
  
  
• Hurry back to Melbourne to record ten episodes of the Get Up Mum radio series for RNs Life Matters. They have enlisted someone to professionally abridge the book into 10 fifteen minute episodes. It’s nice to record authentic audio from Burnie Park and Table Cape Lookout. Spend an intense few months editing and mixing.
  
  
• Spend most of the year applying for the NDIS for Mum. Their bureaucratic madness makes Centrelink look like Disneyland. 
  
  
• Am interviewed for a podcast for Readings bookshop. 
  
  
• Blow off steam by recording a series of funny little videos using hand-puppets. Some of them are from my childhood and some I found in hard rubbish around Thornbury. I dub the series PUP!
  
  
• My best mate Will gets married in March. I’m honoured to be his signatory, a role nabbed while his team of best men are off shot-gunning beers and beating up pensioners.  
  
  
• Present Get Up Mum at the Fitzroy Writers Festival. Afterwards I meet a girl who is also an only child with a Mum with schizophrenia. It’s exciting. 
  
  
• The Bedroom Philosopher is commissioned to write and perform new material for Monash University’s Smokestack event. I am enamoured that someone < — CERTAIN DETAILS INVOLVING BPs LOW SELF ESTEEM OMITTED — >
  
  
• Perform rare (what are you, a cassette on eBay?) ten minute spot with a couple of new songs bragging about how small my carbon footprint is. It all goes pretty well. It’s good to chat to Rod Quantock backstage. 
  
  
• The Get Up Mum radio series airs for two weeks beginning in late May. It was an epic amount of work, but unlike Funemployed, most of the final creative control falls outside my hands. I’m pretty chuffed with the result. I record each episode on my cassette deck to add to my collection. 
  
  
• Conclude that I can’t keep living in Thornbury. Pack up my apartment and put all my things in storage.
  
  
• Have to keep rushing back to my empty house each morning at 10:30 because it gets better AM radio reception than where I’m crashing. This reaches a crescendo when the real estate agent rocks up to do a final inspection while I lurk in the kitchen with my ghetto blaster.
  
  
• Begin a fascinating adventure in housesitting / couch surfing. Begin cashing in brownie points and credits with friends with spare rooms. 
  
  
• Decide to move to Burnie. It’s psychedelic but tough.
  
  
• Visit Melbourne and present Get Up Mum at Frankston Library in July. It’s exciting to see my name on the LED scrolling board out front.
  
  
• Begin appointments to prepare for a major eye operation. My new glasses are outrageously thick. It seems the only logical conclusion will be to have lenses implanted in my eyes. It’s a confronting offer. I am attached to the fuzzy world I see without them.
  
  
• A theatre producer from Adelaide contacts me about wanting to turn Get Up Mum into a one man show. It just so happens that I was thinking about doing the same thing. We begin well-timed working relationship that will carry me through the next couple of years. That said, I’m cautious about whether I have the time and energy for such a campaign. 
  
  
• Decide I can’t stay in Burnie. Put a call out on social media asking for any kind of accommodation options. A lovely girl and former publicist for Damian Cowell offers me her Airbnb properties in Echuca.
  
  
• Go to Echuca. It’s quite nice. I’m driven out there by the bass player from Custard, who is the girls partner.
  
  
• The arrangement falls through within a week. I continue to swap between two Airbnb properties – one in Mathoura. The neighbours there work in an abattoir and have a life-size cut-out of Pauline Hanson in the window.  
  
  
• Present Get Up Mum at a mental health conference in Hobart. It feels like a victory to launch the book on home soil. It’s extremely well received. A number of people encourage me to move to Hobart and say they’d hire me in a second. As what I’m not sure – a sad clown?
  
  
• Perform as The Bedroom Philosopher for the mental health comedy roadshow at The Hobart Brewing Company. I’m introduced as ‘Justin Heazlewood’ which feels like an appropriate symptom of long-time (home) brand confusion.
  
  
• Participate in the inaugural Weekend of Reading festival in Hobart. My session is MC’d by good friend Elizabeth Flux.
  
  
• After being rejected twice, Mum is accepted for the NDIS. In the end it was an impassioned three page carers statement that appeared to do the trick.
  
  
• Spend far too much time on Redline Coaches. Ask a jittery tattooed chap if he can turn his music down – he says in as many words that when I buy his bus ticket for him then I’ll be allowed to ask such a thing. Yada yada yada – something ’bout caving my skull in.
  
  
• Decide to move to Hobart. It’s tough. There are good people there but I’m not entirely convinced by the gloomy mountainous vibes. Manage to spend a Christmas not only by myself but also in someone else’s house. If it’s not kind of badass living on the edge of the edge then at least it’s quite peaceful. No Nan guilt tripping me for making coffee and eggs instead of corrupting my innards on the traditional Heazlewood breakfast of ham, pineapple and champagne.

2020

• Continue house sitting in Hobart. Film the second season of my odd lil’ web series PUP! Spend time working on a new book and going on disastrous dates. 
  
  
• Start trawling through my huge collection of music demos and video performance art recordings. Realise that I desperately want to release some of my serious songs and share my ‘video art’ with the world. (This won’t happen.) 
  
  
• Prepare to turn 40. Kind of figured I was going to be young forever. 
  
  
• Return to Burnie to keep doing battle with Mum and the NDIS. To quote my biological father in the one letter he wrote me “the past cannot be changed but who knows what the future holds.” (Well, the older one gets the ‘who knows’ construct is bleeding oomph.)
  
  
• After growing increasingly anxious about the giant backlog of self-shit (I mean self-shot) video material I’ve accumulated, I dare myself into publishing the web series PUP! each Tuesday at 2:22. 
  
  
• Self-isolate – but that was nothing new. For the first time ever Burnie feels like the best place to be. (Remember COVID? So retro, right?) 
  
  
• Decide that I’ll only start writing the Get Up Mum theatre script if I receive funding to do so. My theatre producer in Adelaide (Lee-Anne from Far & Away Productions) and I start hustling for arts grants. 
  
  
• Am approached by the Royal Commission into Mental Health Services in Victoria to provide a witness statement about my own experiences growing up with Mum. I go to town on it. 
  
  
• Feel compelled to celebrate the ten year anniversary of Northcote (So Hungover). Triple J are featuring their Hottest 100 of the decade and Northcote is shortlisted. It’s an opportunity to cut sick on a 4000 word essay on the cultural significance of the song and my (extremely important) feelings about it being hijacked by the hipster bashing movement. (I like to move it, move it // you can’t have a movement without a moment.) 
  
  
• Score an arts grant to write the first draft of the Get Up Mum theatre script. 
  
  
• Continue my favourite ritual of recording and watching the rage guest programmer. Weyes Blood provides one of the best hosting sessions (programming all / sundry Jean Michel Jarre to John Denver) I’ve ever seen and I proceed to fall in digital love. (Sharing part-time crush custody with Alison Brie, Cristin Milioti and Mia Wasikowska). 
  
  
• Remain in Burnie. 2 legit 2 quit. It’s positively psychedelic. A heady mix of haunting, stressful, bemusing, surreal and kind of okay? Nature helps. I enjoy beach walks and collecting cool rocks with geometric stripes through them. (Something to do with basalt.) Near Romaine Park there are gangs of ducks roaming free and untamed. At some point Burnie goes into Stage Four Lockdown (not to be confused with the cultural lockdown which is a permanent fixture there) and am able to go for illegal bushwalks to Fern Glade. I witness a duck family with ten little ducklings. Something I haven’t seen since the Burnie Show.
  
  
• After uploading thirteen episodes of my web series PUP! I end up deleting three quarters of them and going back to hiding under blankets and bemoaning the romantic mockery of Ok Cupid.  
  
  
• Turn 40, quietly. Well, celebrations are very low key. Inside I’m screaming.
  
  
• My best mate Dion throws me a little shindig which involves a surprisingly heart-warming midnight slow dance and table tennis on a makeshift table with a net made out of kids books. Consider myself lucky as Burnie had been in lockdown only weeks before. 
  
  
• Actually it’s one of the better birthdays in recent years. Other best mate Will sends some Terminator 2 trading cards, fresh in the pack, one of the best things ever. Mum and I have a quality lunch at the Hellyer Distillery. A fitting testament to the hearty swathe of quality time we’ve been stoic in accumulating through the most trying of circumstances. Seriously, go Mum and I!
  
  
• Go around showing tough blokes at the pub how good I am at chewing on the 25 year old Terminator 2 gum. Am privately devastated when I realise that the mail-in-card offer of an exclusive T2 pen and pencil set expired in grade five.
  
  
• Spend most of my spare time going as hard as I’ve ever gone in my online life to source the coolest props and costumes for my show. Manage to browse every retro boombox cassette deck in the known universe. Observe that Super Soaker 50s are rather sought after and that Plucka Duck doll entry points are an eye-watering $40. 
  
  
• Conclude that if my purchases weren’t tax deductions for my art practice then my predicament could be more accurately processed as a mid-life crisis. 
  
  
• Experience the ” strange year ” everyone keeps talks about – in a dangerously semi-detached, partially-comfortable manner house-sitting a retired Indian doctor’s three bedroom place in Brooklyn, pondering what the apt narrative is if your whole life has been ” nuclear weird .” 
  
  
• Finish the first draft of the Get Up Mum script. It seems I have a show. 
  
  
• Leave my ten month housesit and hang down in Hobart for a bit. I enjoy the opportunity to play the video game Untitled Goose Game where you play the character of a naughty goose. 
  
  
• Manage to go out on New Years Eve for the first time in five years. I go to the Burnie New Years eve sports with Dion. There is a huge bike crash and a streaker during the running (who we both went to primary school with.) I watch the 9:30pm fireworks with Dion’s seven year old daughter Evie doing live commentary in my ear. It’s pretty good. It’s life. It’s what is happening. 
  
  
• Spotify’s algorithm bot enter my top five friend list. They have me at ‘your year in music.’ A human would be like ‘what’s with all this classical music and haven’t you had enough of your JJ Cale dad music? To which I’d reply – “My breakfast playlist skews the results. Go away LOUISE.”

2021
Saturn Returns

• Score a second arts grant to produce and launch Get Up Mum.
  
  
• Move into a furnished rental with sea views, ducted heating and reclining executive massage chairs. It’s the first time I’ve ever lived somewhere with a dishwasher. It feels positive, but expensive.
  
  
• Discover a big dog that won’t stop barking next door.
  
  
• Saddened that Daft Punk are retiring. Consider posting news of The Bedroom Philosopher’s retirement mirroring their robot explosion video. (Mine would be me in pyjamas wrestling myself off a cliff.)
  
  
• Listen to Air’s Moon Safari for the 90000th time. If it isn’t le broken then why le fix it?
  
  
• The guy who delivers the groceries enters my top five friends list.
  
  
• After reproducing my own one man version of Wake In Fright I decide I need to leave Burnie. Melbourne is out of lockdown and it seems like a good time to reconnect.
  
  
• Melbourne goes into lockdown.
  
  
• Live with Awkwardstra band member Gordo and his partner for like, four weeks. Get to have a birthday party somewhere along the way.
  
  
• Become obsessed with Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk.
  
  
• Meet a millennial girl at an ‘iso-bubble’ gathering and get into a heated political argument about media ownership and gender politics. Realise that I’ve moved from the far-right to the far-left in a single plane ride. Also, I’m 41 and not to be trusted.
  
  
• Move to Coburg and share a place for the first time in seven years. It’s not smooth. Experience high levels of anxiety.
  
  
• Continue working on the Get Up Mum live show, which is slated to premiere in 2022. My housemate moves out in August, leaving me pulling magic tricks to stay on by myself. I’m relieved to be able to convert the second bedroom into an office.
  
  
• Experience my first ever Christmas in Burnie with Mum (we used to go over to Nan & Pop’s each year). Reclaim my childhood bedroom. Experience the surreal, comforting sensation of peering up at the glow in the dark sticker stars I first put up in grade seven. In a time of u n p r e c e d e n t e d c h a n g e their soft green glow is exactly the same as the outer universe. ‘Relax,’ I think, ‘there’s plenty of light to go round.’

2022

• Go hard or go home on my play.
  
  
• Go to Adelaide for several weeks to experience an intensive, exhaustive rehearsal phase. It’s quite good, for what it is.
  
  
• Develop an ache in my right knee, an aggravation of an injury I did on the dancefloor at the Melbourne Fringe awards party in 2019 where I dropped dramatically to my knees, James Brown style. It further distills the narrative that ageing is a true marvel of wonder and glory.
  
  
• Enter a freestanding, freestyling pressure zone of work ethic, expectation and emotional processing not seen since I was, well, twelve.
  
  
• Watch the movie The Kindergarten Teacher a lot. It is often on World Movies. Luckily, I really like Maggie Gyllenhaal and arthouse films about child poets.
  
  
• Being 41, it occurs to me that I can rewatch most films from my twenties and early thirties and give them my own ‘fresh’ rating. There are advantages to being a vastly different version of yourself.
  
  
• Get a bowl cut and shave for the first time in ten years. It actually looks pretty good. My hairdresser informs me that since the Beatles documentary, people have come in requesting bowl cuts.
  
  
• Perform Get Up Mum at the Theatre Royal in Hobart. Score a couple of decent pieces of press in The Mercury and ABC Radio.
  
  
• Can’t help but wonder if my biological father, who lives in Hobart, will see it or care.
  
  
• It feels pretty _fucking amazing to be onstage not only acting again, but sharing my most basic, personal truth. I perform three shows of Get Up Mum. I have my ‘people’ in on the last night including best mate Dion (who is now the principal of Montello Primary) and my grade six teacher Mr Burgess!
  
  
• Experience the breath-giving lightness of being released from the two year mood-cocoon of Get Up Mum prep. Celebrate with a single beer (Hobart Brewing Company Cream Ale) collapsed in front of SBS Chill (Santa Barbara, 1979 – Roger Neill) in my Sandy Bay airbnb (View Street).
  
  
• Thoroughly enjoy the new Winning Time series on HBO (bear in mind I barrack for the Lakers and collected about 750 of their basketball cards throughout high school) – mirroring the nostalgic bombast of The Last Dance which was arguably my highlight of 2020. The Beatles Get Back documentary has been another intimately familiar beauty. It’s like a fever dream where I’m hanging out with best friends I’ve never met. I tear up as Paul figures out Get Back in real time (the song, not the documentary).
  
  
• Continue life in Coburg, single, time-rich and lightly injured.
  
  
• Go to town writing several long-form, mental health themed columns on my website. It’s as if “grown up Justin” has been in stasis for so long that the moment I (he) finished Get Up Mum he (we ) had to get a bunch of home truths off (our) his / my chest. From the creative production team who brought you Get Up Mum come a startling series of salacious and salubrious artful essays about loneliness, depression and my long-term disquiet at the mass addiction to smartphones.
  
  
• Hold my first ever Depress Conference.
  
  
• Become somewhat, respectfully, disenchanted with Melbourne. In 2005 it made a lot of sense to move there. I had acquaintances, employment and infrastructure that supported a bohemian big-smoke lifestyle. As it happens, I detect a slight wheeze from a mid-career, mid-life asthma. Similar feelings were had in 2015 and 2019, so, you know – this is some serious lifestyle nicotine to kick.
  
  
• For the second time in two years I pack up my things and put them in storage.
  
  
• Celebrate the twenty year anniversary of The Bedroom Philosopher. It was 2002 when I won Heywire and snagged myself a regular songwriting segment on Triple J’s Morning Show. Enjoy taking the opportunity to release a hot air balloon of positivity including the BP origin story and even a historic music video for Generation ABC.
  
  
• Rerelease my first album as The Bedroom Philosopher, Living On The Edge…Of My Bed. I dig up out the early cassette recordings of my appearances on Triple J and weave the back announcements from Francis Leach and Vicki Kerrigan into the tracks. It’s an extremely satisfying way to mark the occasion, both of celebrating the anniversary of my first artistic triumph and and bringing the ‘mainland’ chapter of my life to a close.
  
  
• Have a lot of fun ‘reimagining’ another early album Birthmark, recorded under the name Phonze! when I was eighteen. This includes digging up tape demos from the era and fast-tracking them into the running order.
  
  
• Relocate to Burnie. They have fresh air and it really is an ideal way to keep an eye on Mum. I consider it a detox camp from pretension and politicisation.
  
  
• Horrified to find that The Saturday Age costs $1.60 more to buy in Burnie than it does in Melbourne. Figure it’s some kind of ‘leftie’ tax.
  
  
• Have surgery on my right arm, which has been diagnosed with Ulnar Nerve Syndrome. I haven’t touched the guitar in eighteen months – the longest hiatus since I was fourteen. I figure I’m taking ‘long service leave’ as an artist.
  
  
• Pick up two speaking gigs in a week. I’m the last speaker at Conflux Bendigo and Our Reform hosted by Mental Health Victoria. I seem to be garnering a reputation as a closer. I’ll assume it’s because I’m a hard act to follow and not that my sentiments tend to send folks packing.
  
  
• Find myself solo in Bendigo as the Queen passes. Witness a rainbow over the town centre. Can’t help but assume Elizabeth’s bequeathed a crown of colours to this loyal subject. 🌈
  
  
• Pick up a housesitting gig in Launceston. Turn it into my own arts residency, getting plenty of work done towards a new book. I am also very keen to pursue my serious songs again under the name Windsor Flare.
  
  
• Hit the sweet spot with my December ezine Fuzzy Logic.
  
  
• Conclude that I would like to move back to Melbourne.

OVERVIEW (12/22): I get a lot of robocalls and chew Spry organic gum. When emphasising sentences I choose to use Stabilo Boss highlighters.

I have a Bedroom Philosopher album still in the can, three books on the go, several friendships on ice and all my own dimples. I don’t like dogs, tattoos, podcasts, memes or LED lighting. I had surgery on my right hand and am in better spirits than I have been in a long time (eight days). My favourite thing to collect is cassettes and my favourite number is 7. Carlton were unlucky. I miss Stella Young.

• To be continued. Thanks for reading. You can go to the toilet now.

> > k e e p u p t h e g o o d w e i r d < <