News Bulletin Number #15
Hello!
The news is true. You’ve probably read about it in the Daily Mail or confidential section of Daily Telegraph but I’M MOVING to a new newsletter platform!
This will be the last newsletter on Mailchimp. Enjoy it while it lasts.
I’m moving to something called Substack.
I’m not sure it will be better. I only used Mailchimp because I listened to the Dirty John podcast and it was the main sponsor. I’m switching to Substack because I read a blog from a lady on Twitter and that blog just happened to be sponsored by Substack.
Advertising REALLY works on me.
Normally in these newsletters I do the headlines from my dumb life or some unfunny take on a news story. All that’s going on in my life at the moment is I'm working on a new stand up show.
It's boring.
It occurred to me the other day that no matter how good my show is (and you should come by the way, tickets are on-sale now), or how many laughs I get, no one will remember me in 100 years time. Isn’t that depressing?
And that’s not just me, that’s all of us. Unless you do something crazy and they make a biopic about you (I watched the Eddie The Eagle movie last night lol), life sort of just trundles along.
There’s probably only 3-5 people that are remembered properly after they die, and the majority of them are kind of evil.
Hitler, Julius Caesar, Karl Stefanovic etc.
Also, the way memory works is that you only remember your last memory. So if you think back to an event or something that happened to you, you’re only remembering the last time you thought about that thing. Does that make sense?
That’s why memories fade; they change, they become something different over time.
The most famous person in the world is probably Donald Trump (I mean, it’s debatable, but in terms of name recognition, you’d think almost everyone knows him?) and even one day he will just be a name in a history book/The Metaverse.
According to New Idea, and I trust New Idea more than any publication on the goddamn planet, the most famous person in the world is Dwayne The ‘Rock’ Johnson.
I agree The Rock has the most muscles of any famous person in the world, but surely he’s not the most famous? And those muscles will fade! One day he’ll be a skinny/fat man with a bald head that used to be in The WWE and play tough guy characters that were also incredibly sweet in Hollywood movies.
Then one day even further in the future people will be like "oh there was this famous muscle dude in movies called 'THE ROCK', people loved him for some reason..."
And people will be like "hmm, cool".
I don’t know what my point is, but I’ve heard people talk about wanting to be remembered in a certain way and sometimes that all seems a bit pointless to me.
My Uncle died this week. I wasn’t that close to him. No one in our family was.
In fact you couldn’t be. My Uncle - Uncle Darryl, was so heavily medicated for a raft of different mental health issues that he had become a shell of a human by the end of his life.
He passed away in his sleep earlier this week. It was sad. I felt sadness for my Mum and for my grandmother. My Nan doesn't have long left in her life and it seems terribly unfair that she has to experience her son dying deep into the Back 9 (sorry, a golf term lol) of her own life.
I was chatting to my mum about potential plans for the funeral yesterday. Darryl spent the majority of his life so medicated that he couldn’t exist in the same world we all do. He spent the last 5 years of his life in a disability support home. There’s no one else but close family to attend the funeral.
So we’ll all attend, send him off, then have to get back on with our lives.
I don’t have a lot of stories about Darryl. His brain caused him so much torment over the years that he had no choice but to exist on his own path. Mum tells stories of when he was younger being more full of life and having more of a personality, but it’s all a sad story.
I remember being a little kid and going to his 40th birthday party at my Aunty’s house. I was probably only 5 years old, but I remember him wearing a leather jacket, blue jeans and my uncle telling him ‘life begins at 40, Darryl!’
Once when he was off his meds and battling the demons in his head, he got up in the middle of the night and walked from the Psych Ward in Wollongong all the way back to my Nan’s house in Nowra. That’s 70km. That’s like walking from Melbourne to Geelong.
I had to pick him a few years ago on Christmas morning and take him to the family lunch on the South Coast. The only joy Darryl had was smoking. He would have smoked 10 packs a day if he was allowed.
He had terrible emphysema towards the end of his life, but he still pushed through. The man loved a dart.
My Mum asked me to buy him a packet of cigarettes so he could smoke in the backyard on Christmas day.
We pulled over at 7/11 in Albion Park and grabbed a packet of smokes. We got back in the car and he looked more anxious than usual. I said “let’s wind the window down” so he could smoke in the car. I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to join in. (Don’t tell my mum. In her head I’ve never smoked a cigarette or done a drug in my life!)
We sat on 110km driving down the highway smoking a ciggie at 9:30am in the morning. We didn’t speak much.
He asked me if I was married or had a girlfriend. I laughed and said “not married Darryl, I have a lovely girlfriend though!”
He didn’t respond for about 2 minutes before saying with not much expression “keep at it, it’s all hard work Sam”.
It was all hard work for Darryl.
I hope I don’t lose him from my memory. He was dealt such an unfair hand in life that I guess it’s easier at times to put stuff like this to the side and think about the nice things you have to look forward to.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, or why I’ve written any of this. It’s a rare moment of introspection and lack of cynicism for me. I guess you can feel like you're accomplishing things in your life, but after it's all over it just depends on how people choose to remember you.
My Mum and Nan got to see Darryl earlier this week. It turned out to be the day before he died. The patient transport people brought him over to my Nan’s house for a visit. He sat out the back and drank a coffee and smoked a ciggie.
He said goodbye and they took him back to the support home. He died in his sleep that night.
The half drunk coffee mug is still on the coffee table out the back. Mum told me she hasn’t built up the courage to go and move it yet.
I guess she’s trying to keep a memory of something for as long as possible. Something we're all trying to do in our own little way.
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