I want to start by asking you something about pop music. Is it just me or is everything really shit? I mean Lady Gaga what the fuck is that? I used to think that it couldn't have got any worse when the whole boy band craze happened. Ever noticed how the names of those boy bands always had something to do with their relationship with their managers? The backdoor boys. Take that up your arse. New skids on the cock. Yeah you know if you substitute the word love for drugs in a lot of pop songs they start to make a lot more sense. I give more drugs to you. Everlasting drugs. All you need is drugs.

Yeah but I'm not really here to talk about pop culture am I? What's standup if not a reflection of the fucked up life of the person standing in front of the audience. Or the fucked up audience standing in front of the comic. So for 17 years I've been teaching English to foreign students. You have your good days and your bad days, then you have your reminder days. Like the time when someone in the elevator says "how can you stand teaching them all day long, they're so dopey." I think she might have been on a bit of a racist thing. I mean the building our school occupied was anzac house after all. Most of our students look like the people diggers had been sent overseas to kill. I think most of them survived.

It's not good to stereotype is it? This cliche that asians are all nerdy and studious and smart. Not true at all. I wish some of mine were. At least one of the above anyway. Well some of them are a bit nerdy I suppose. Some of them do have a sense of humour I guess. Like there was one who was telling me he was in a bar, Korean fella he was. He sees this Polish girl he thinks is hot, wants to hit on her but won't make the first move. Later he says "She was very nice, but she doesn't like me because I am fucking asian. Why am I fucking asian."

But at least they give you a bit of respect. Unlike here teachers actually have social standing in asia, as do old people and heterosexual males. Fuck what am I doing in australia? Well you know I got a job, a kid, a one bedroom rented flat. Livin the aussie dream mate. My kid is half thai anyway....and her half sisters on thailand are half chinese/malay. Gets kinda complicated doesn't it? life...

But no point worrying about the complications. Got to focus on the good stuff right? What's the best party you've ever been to eh? Mine was my 30th. I had it in Poland, in Warsaw. Yeah I lived there for a few years anyway...invited all the teachers, all the students. Huge bunch turned up at this big old place that was just so, wreckable. Proper party house. My boss gave me a good present. He gave me a little bag of his favourite home grown buds. How many people can say they have a boss who would do that for you eh? Yeah I bumped into one of my students a few days later in the street. I said "jakub, why didnt you come to my party?" he says I did, I gave you a bottle of champagne and everything." One of my friends was heading home and he was with some girls and one says "if there's stars in the sky how can it be raining". course it wasn't raining, someone was just standing on the balcony giving them a shower. Was quite a chunky shower I heard. I ended up going home with some Russian girl. My girlfriend was really impressed with that I can tell ya. When I got home the next day I tried to sneak in quietly, thinking she'd be asleep. Of course she's wide awake and she says "where the FUCK were you last night". I made up some bullshit excuse and she kinda dropped it after telling me she didn't believe me anyway. Then my mates called much later in the day and asked the same question about my disappearance and I told the same bullcrap story and they said "really?? we thought u were fucking that russian slapper!!"

These days it's so common to meet people online. But I remember...I remember when cyberdating belonged to the realms of the internet badlands. And I was a badlands rider if ever there was one. Yeah hustling, sex addiction, I mean why does get all the attention from the newspapers? I'm sure they'd love to write a piece on me sometime wouldn't they? Just don't know where to look for a good story. Something along the lines of "unknown english teacher goes online looking for sex". Well it's a start.

My story is perhaps typical, perhaps not. From the little I've read of other gamblers' stories it seems that many of them don't really have a life, have never had a life. I was a bit over forty before I really came to gambling, so I had opportunities to do other thing before it became an all consuming obsession. As I was walking home today I was thinking of all the things I have done. Things most other gamblers might envy. I've travelled overseas repeatedly and far and wide, from Asia to Europe and up and down the east coast of Australia. Become a competent skier and skied in four different countries. Begun to raise a child. Had a professional career, been well educated. Rooted gawd knows how many females. But like all gamblers I've had my problems and they never get better. Those machines are animals with endless and insatiable appetite. Fierce and predatory animals with no conscience. Once they've been set free in the wild as they are in Sydney, who knows how they will evolve? One thing is for sure, once you're in their maw they will take everything. All your cash and everything you have available on credit. It wouldn't be such a problem if you never won. If that happened you would never play pokies. But they let you have a win occasionally, give you the sweetest winning streaks that convince you that you can just keep winning and then they make their move, taking back all your winnings plus the same again in interest until you can't chase your losses any more.

It's no longer so easy to divide the world into the industrialised world and others. Every single corner of the world has been touched by industrialisation.

It's no longer so easy to divide the world into the industrialised world and others. Every single corner of the world has been touched by industrialisation.

41 years old, an unemployed writer as I've just recently realised. Not unemployed in the strict legal sense of course. I have a job. I teach English to a bunch of overseas students who for the most part will never ever share my interest in language, English or any other. I mean unemployed in the spiritual sense. Unemployed in the sense that I do far too little for my inner working life. Yes for sure some of you might well be thinking "what is this old wanker on about?" and you'd be write to think that. But that's not the point. My inner life is a trashed life, wastrel life, shit life. I wouldn't wish it upon anyone. But most people probably don't even have one to trash, or realise that they might have such a thing. Otherwise why would so many people be content to be bank clerks, tram drivers, industrial engineers, systems analysts. Note the absence of a question mark.

Europe

The weather in Brisbane was cool, fresh and autumnal. It was early May. Emigration seemed like a strange dreamworld, the forms, the bodies of the other travellers in motion.

The plane was near empty. A cheap Garuda flight to Bali. Just me and half a dozen other Australians, two of whom were noisily getting drunk at the back of the flight. "Whey! Bali!" As we lined up at immigration they staggered about in front of the line. "I think I've lost my paaassport mate. Think I left it on the plane," one of them said. "Fuckin shut up," his mate said. At the airport we were accosted by hotel touts who were waved away by the more experienced travellers. I took their pamphlets at least, greenhorn that I was.

In the pool I overheard another Aussie traveller say "These Australians they come here and they get drunk on the plane, spend a week here drunk, get drunk on the plane home and then say they've seen Bali."

On the plane out of Bali we were held up for about 2 hours on the tarmac by a single first class passenger who kicked up a massive stink about being shunted into economy because of overbooking. Two hours of sitting in a massively full 747 on a tropical tarmac and finally we were off. 20 hours and three landings later we were in London, where my mum was there to meet me. London seemed thoroughly sedate and twee compared to the frenetic chaos on the streets of Kuta.

London was hateful to me, first impression. No value for money whatsoever. I quickly realised what people had meant when they said London was "inhuman." But it wasn't the kind of inhumanity I quite expected. The weather was amenable, warm and springlike. The buildings were clean and the the roads immaculately maintained.

Paris was just as mean as London but more expensive still. Preposterous prices. We paid eight Australian dollars for a cup of tea under the Eiffel Tower. And this was 1993. My impression of the French was that they hated foreigners, particularly those who spoke English. It seemed a harsh and user-unfriendly place.

I slipped out of Paris from the Gare du Nord station. Rolled out of there in the early evening, an overnight train to Prague. At the time Prague was still a touch exotic, something of an unknown quantity. Certainly it seemed like a whole unknown world to the folks back home in Australia. I managed to fall asleep for a few hours on the train as we tracked through Germany, waking up at 5 in the morning in East Germany. I put on my headset and listened to the Stone Roses "I wanna be adored" as we rolled out through the East German countryside, all dreamily covered in early summer fog that slowly lifted to reveal the kind of half-wooded hills topped with castles and hunting lodges you expect from the storybooks. It's been said that East Germany was more the "real" Germany than the West, which had been Americanised.

As we entered the Czech Republic time seemed to slip back a few decades. People seemed to go about their business more slowly and dressed more simply. I saw a body swinging from a rope on a tree branch, a woman.

I liked it in Prague, enough to stay.