You’ve come a long way, baby

December 3, 2014 was the greatest day of my life. No, I didn’t get a blowjob, and I didn’t find out that Josh Thomas had been run over by a cement truck. That morning I found out that my workplace wanted to pay me a large chunk of money to fuck off and never come back. It was like winning the lottery, except I didn’t have a sexy TV presenter fondling my balls beforehand.

My job was not one likely to fill a person with a sense of grand achievement. I worked for a porn mag (or gentleman’s wristing pamphlet, as it was sometimes known), and spent five days a week calling up strippers and asking whether they took it up the bunghole and if they’d ever rooted a dog (in eight years, only one admitted to getting kinky with a canine). And, of course, there was the odd time when I had to dress up like this:

I also ran the risk of being physically assaulted by any stray porn stars who wandered into the office. I spent three weeks in hospital after Jesse Jane hit me with a baseball bat, and another six weeks with the clap:

It’s the sort of job that earned me high-fives when I was 23, and pitying looks when I was 31. I would’ve done better telling women I cleaned toilets for a living or worked for the Australian Labor Party.
The company I worked for were a pack of Nazis. And when I say Nazis, I don’t mean they treated me like shit, as in, “My boss told me to put pants on today – he’s such a fucking Nazi!” I mean that Bauer Media published magazines like this:

But spending five years at university so that I could write 100-word stories on prostitutes and Chinese cows with slightly more legs than they should have, and having to cut back on anything that could be considered funny or intelligent (and any word that had more than two syllables) was a bucket of shit. So when I was called into the office on that warm December morning and handed a piece of paper with a dollar figure on it, I was so happy a bit of wee came out. Sure, now that I’m short of a job I might have to suck a few cocks to pay the bills in the future, but at least I’ll be sucking cocks to the beat of my own drum.

And so, there I was, single and unemployed. I didn’t know what to do with myself the first morning after being handed my redundancy. Usually the first couple of hours of the day were occupied with fighting back the urge to blow my fucking brains out, so I had to find other stuff to get up to. Stuff like drinking on public transport, playing video games while wearing a wrestling mask, and masturbating while dressed as a Mexican.

Oh, and I also learnt how to paraglide. The week and a half I spent running off the cliffs of Laurieton, NSW, remains one of the best times of my life, and I somehow managed to avoid splatting myself against the side of a mountain or spontaneously falling to the ground from 1000m. I’ve already bought myself a glider (correction: Bauer bought me a glider. Thanks, guys! I’ll try not to piss on youse next time I fly over) and look forward to spend my days not-so-gracefully floating through the air.

But once that was out of the way, I decided to get out of the country for a while. Y’know, sit on beaches, soak in different cultures, and work out what the hell I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I just wanted to get away from Australia and Australians and go somewhere exotic and different and off the tourist trail. So, naturally, I bought a ticket to Bali. Alright, come on, hear me out, I’m also going to Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Mt Druitt. Alright, maybe not the last one – I’m not that fucking brave.

On past trips I’ve been attacked by a rabies-infected gibbon in Cambodia, chased by farmers in the middle of the night in the south of France and gone close to being raped by a 140kg Tongan in a Nuku’alofa pub, so unless I’ve grown up and become responsible, there’ll be more of that. And seeing as I’ve spent the last week building a fort in my living room, there’s little chance of that.

So sit back, loosen your pants, crack open a beer and join me on the ride that is the Drunk and Jobless World Tour – proudly funded by Bauer Media! I’ve just landed in Denpasar. It’s hot and I’m thirsty – let the adventure begin!