He Who Makes A Beast Of Himself Gets Rid Of The Pain Of Being A Man.

There Are Worse Things Out There Than Heroin.

Three years ago today I severed myself from all my friends, locked myself in my flat and went cold turkey. I was advised that doing so was both dangerous and stupid. So that was exactly what I did, because nobody tells me what to do.

For the last two decades, I have lived my life like a Charlie Sheen tribute act. Emersed in a symphony of inglorious chemicals, powders, pills and potions. All subsidised with a perpetual monsoon of mutually toxic relationships, where I ended more marriages than cancer and made life decisions that even Katie Price would find distasteful.

Hedonism has it's limitations – these escapades weren't about pleasure. They were about the ruthless pursuit of oblivion paying no mind to consequences. I had already died twice in my early twenties and I was swinging for a late-game hat-trick. Now I was wading into my thirties like an acid bath. stagnant and atrophied. My pitiful lifestyle enabled and encouraged by an ever shrinking band of failing sycophants.

Festering in ruin and lacking the constitution for suicide I removed myself to a flat in the armpit of Yorkshire and surrendered to a blissful and hopeless, eye rolling abandon on a sofa where I would sleep for five years.

In all my self loathing I still had the capacity to understand what I was wasting. I had talents, family and a university education. I have sporadically practiced the self destructive art of stand up comedy since I was thirteen. Some years ago I'd taken it up properly and felt the first pure sunshine on my face that I can remember.

Comedy proved the perfect medium to siren the rampant, twisted decadence of my turmoil. A place to put all that jaded tomfoolery. I found purpose in repurposing the unadulterated horror. I absolutely loved comedy. I will extend on this later with the attention it deserves.

I don't want to fool you dear reader into thinking this industry is an artistic Shangri-La. Far from it. Comedy is a den of virtue-signalling, Machievellian, narcissistic bastards who would gladly stone their own grandmother if it kept them gigging every week to ten strangers in a microbrewery.

The comedy grassroots circuit has long been monopolised by woke organisers and promoters. Each of which masturbate by night to fantasies of spots on BBC panel shows. A fate for me, worse than a heroin overdose. Needless to say these puddles of platitudes didn't approve of me or my act and so I was seldom ever booked. Those spots were reserved for the disabled, autistic, albino, transexuals of colour. Sooner or later I knew I would have to go around this cronyistic circle jerk but in that moment drugs stood in the way.

So I decided that in lockdown to get clean.

For the first week I lived in a hot bath crying and listening to world music. Film and television has never conveyed the ordeal of a cold turkey experience. The closest replication has to be Martin Sheen's legitimate alcoholic meltdown captured during the hotel room scene from Apocalypse Now. The Horror! The Horror! Exterminate all the brutes. Flailing around in mangled hysteria, muscles screaming hell-hound pain. Talking in tongues like a Pentecostal minister. Living out time and time again, everything that has ever bothered my feeble, chimpanzee brain. Wrestling with the very fabric of your existence, crowing to the moon and digging your fingers into the desperate need for sanity, sense and stability.

As the chemical yolk dissipated I looked out at the world with fresh eyes. Ready to meet it with a smile. At long last I was clean and sober! What a fucking mistake that was.

The society that met me on the other end made heroin look like a sensible option. The philistines were hard at work rewriting history, erasing language and usurping art like spastic luddites. Panda-fucking crusties fabricating climate emergencies. Emotionally retarded pronoun mutants dragging their censorious, shitty arses across the carpet of time leaving a long rainbow skid-mark that led all the way up to their new infallible god the gender-bending, child mutilating deity Pharmacopeia. Woe betide you to use it's name in vain. Worst still was to be a woman and to deny it your spaces. Society was prolapsing. It felt like I'd seen the Statue of Liberty on The Planet of the Apes. They blew it all up. God damn them all to Hell.

I was not coping. I could neither digest food nor the world around me. The sound of the void was growing deafening. The quickening drum beat of yesterday's oblivion echoing still. Memories of yesteryear awful to contemplate and beautiful to behold. I had no motivation. No mojo. At this rate I would relapse before ever returning to a stage.

There was only one thing for it. Intensive, challenging, Clockwork Orange style therapy. Punk therapists are hard to find but they are worth their weight in gold. I found a therapist with enough faith in his own unholy talents to treat my affliction. Peeling back the layers of my trauma onion, fusing peace and rage like Robert Oppenheimer.

My Zen Master patiently and masterfully taught me to hone my talent for anger. To utilize my horror and pathological intolerance into weapons grade artistic terrorism. Good therapy is like sorcery for the masochistic. It's part psychology and part voodoo exorcism. My Zen Master, dancing around in a feathered skirt, helicoptering his cock, sacrificing goats and spitting on chickens in an effort to rid me the unclean spirits in my mind.

Purpose is everything. Comedy is medication. The alchemical process of turning lead into gold and the only antidote to a mind like a nuclear reactor. Unprocessed, unfiltered self expression was the only remedy and it had to start with immediate effect. At all costs, without fear of consequence.

But I was still trapped in Chickentown. Gigging in destitute pockets of the country. It was there in February that I sat in frustration. Considering quitting comedy entirely and retiring to California where I would possibly work milking fentanyl cows. And then - right then – at the beginning of a performance I was punched on stage.

Something snapped. Care of consequence imploded taking with it any regard for self preservation. My Zen exposed itself like a late night pisshead in a kebab shop. The fun machine had taken a shit and died. From here on out I was in the bridge burning business.

My new material caught the attention of Comedy Unleashed. Home of free thinking comedy. I'd watched their channel since their founding and had always wanted to play their gigs. Anything short of that level of incendiary comedy feels like radioactive sickness to me. So needless to say I was elated.

But lesser mortals were quick to get in my way.

I inherited an Ed Kemper style stalker. In court security had to wrestle his Mother's severed head from him to keep him from fucking it. He'd later wank himself into a catatonic stupor but much of the damage was done. The untimely demise of my Father who had himself succumb to his addictive tendencies three days before my Comedy Unleashed London debut. He'd stolen time from my relationship with my ailing Nan who died recently who didn't even leave me any of her medication.

After this absolute shit-stain of a summer I have made a concentrated effort to regroup. In order to properly industrialise my brand of lyrical necromancy and consider just what the Hell I am going to do with my skill set.

I'm a recovering addict with a neck tattoo and a voice like a tramps pocket. I'm only good for two jobs. As a comedian or as a cannibal warlord fighting a coup in a mineral rich Central African Republic. Presently the state keeps me as a pet like some kind of dangerous dog breed, surviving only out of spite. But to what end? What comes next? To apply my talents like a Tomahawk missile that's who!

I woke up this morning in Egypt. I took a swim, ate a quail and committed a hate crime against a mojito. I'm now entirely divorced from who I was. A guy who no longer facilitates your lines of coke or cares to be fetishised as an exciting break from your marriage. I've already lived fast and died young. I've lived like a hobo and gone mad like a dancing bear.

This goes where it goes. Fusing my skills to whatever end fate might have in store. The chips will fall where they may. I've run out of fucks and the wankers will come to kick the door down but I will be waiting on the other side of it with a shotgun.