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I got a DNA test done just
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
to check, you know,
and it was one of these 23
and me ancestry.com things, you know, these things that
white people tend to do when they want
to feel more interesting.
And it's also a very good way to find out
where your grandfather went on his gap year.
And
I got it done mostly because I was curious, you know,
because Sri Lanka we're quite an isolated little island,
but we have had quite a few
visitors over the years.
And not just Europeans, not everything is about you.
We've had the Chinese, we've had the Persians,
we've had the Indians a few too many times,
and Sri Lanka in the age of conquest was much like
Britney Spears in the nineties
where everyone liked us a bit too much for our own good.
And Sri Lanka now is also much like
Britney Spears now
in that we are not in the news quite as often,
but when we are, it is rarely for a good reason.
And so I got this thing done
and the results were quite terribly boring.
It turns out that I am
99.95% Sri Lankan.
So wondered what a pure Sri looks like. This is, this is it.
I guess apparently the remaining 0.05%
is Congolese,
and I'm not sure how that got there.
I am not entirely sure which, which part of me that is,
but it is certainly not where I might prefer it to be.
I apologize. I'm not, I'm not
usually a dick joke kind of guy.
But you, you do have to whip one out every now
and again, I like
to consider myself a relatively, I,
I'd say progressive person,
but sometimes the vocabulary of being
as such frustrates me somewhat, especially as it pertains
to groups that I am a part of.
I say there used to be this term
for poorer countries like Sri Lanka,
they're called third world countries.
And it always felt a bit mean, but I never minded it
because it also felt honest about how the rest
of the world feels about us.
Whereas now there seems to be some attempt to replace it
with a nicer sounding term.
You might have heard the the global south
because they want to make it sound like it's the
geography that fucked us.
What I don't like about it is
that it doesn't really make much sense.
Say India, for example, is in the Northern Hemisphere,
but is a part of the global south, whereas
Australia is about as far south as you can go
and is not a part of the global south.
So to remedy this inconsistency, I propose
an alternative classification method,
non eurovision countries
and, and Eurovision countries.
So as to say, countries with dignity
and
those with enough money to no longer need it.
Congratulations. Done very well for yourselves.
And the other one I don't like very much
is in many ways the big one.
It's the, it is the phrase people of color
where I understand it's it's utility to say,
describe the shared experience
of everyone in the world that isn't white.
I get that, but what rubs me the wrong way about it.
It's just the phrasing. People of color seems to suggest
that there are people
and then there's us,
and technically there are more
of us,
so maybe we should be people.
And y'all can be people without color
or so it doesn't feel very nice.
It's a big condescending,
of course.
I, I I would not truly wish that upon you.
I I would like to live in a world
where we're all just people, white people too.
Hey, listen, white people are people too.
Someone had to say, I would die on this here.
Far too many of you have begun paying money to see me.
For some reason, I did some shows back home in
Sri Lanka earlier last year,
and they went all right, I did not get arrested.
And that was the main goal. And
after one of them, this man came up to me
and he was being very sweet.
He said, oh, it's so nice of you to come back home
to Sri Lanka and do, do shows here
and give back to your country in this way.
And I had to reassure him
that I was very much being paid to be there.
And it also made me think about what he said of giving back
to my country where that seems to imply
that my country has given something to me to begin with.
I thought about what, what growing up in Sri Lanka really
has given me as a person.
And really the strongest,
most prominent thing it has given me is
an intense will to leave and never come back.
And that's worked out all right.
But also I, I don't wanna shit talk my
own home country that much.
I think that's more of a me problem than a Sri Lanka
problem, if that makes sense.
I think me, the person
that I am wherever I I was born would've wanted
to leave that place.
You know, if I were to separate people in the world,
into two separate groups, always a great idea.
I would, I would separate them
into people that leave and people that stay.
And I am of course very biased in this opinion,
but I do believe that people that leave
are objectively better in almost every way.
If you were here and you like my stuff, you,
you're very likely a person that left.
And I want you to know That you are right to do so.
And if you are a person that stayed
that somehow ended up here very likely
because you're much cooler friend invited you along,
I want you to know that it's not all bad being you,
you know, because even though,
even though we are so much more interesting than you,
we all are generally far happier than we will ever be.
So it balances out, you know,
and when I say leave, I do mean like a big leave.
I, I, I think it grow as a person in a very specific way
to be out in the world by yourself outside of the context
that you grew up with.
And in a way
that doesn't necessarily happen when you say move from the
small town in your country to the big city in your country
or you move to the country next door.
Even like I was around a group of people in London,
I didn't know that well, and there was a woman from Italy
there who had just recently moved from Rome to London
and she was saying about like, yeah, it's really,
it's really hard to be an immigrant to the uk.
And then she found my eyes in the circle
and said, like us,
I said, listen Ben, now I'm sorry
but have you moved from one Eurovision country
to another Eurovision you are
technically an immigrant and perfectly within your rights
to refer to yourself as such.
But please understand there is no us
if you ever use the machine to go
through passport control at the airport.
No us unless you know
a passport control officer by name, face and finger know us.
People say this thing, right, that
everyone has a moment growing up when you realize
that your parents are just people too.
I think that's very true. I think
what people don't say quite enough is
that if you are extra lucky, you might have a second moment
where you realize that your parents
are particularly shitty people.
And I feel that way about mine
and when I, when I express this sentiment to certain people,
usually people that are closer to their families,
they'll say, they'll be get upset at me.
They'll say like, oh, how could you say that
they're your parents, they made you who you are.
And that is my problem. Exactly.
I have spent the bulk
of my adult life undoing their fine work
and I would get into it with them a lot and
and their main defense for their behavior was that they,
that they tried their best.
Which I understand, you know, sometimes you try your best
and you fall short and that happens, that's life.
But I do feel that with certain things,
if you try your best
and you still fuck up, you are a fuck up.
No, it's fine. It's
anything where lives are on the line,
especially you parenting definitely lives are on the line At
any profession where lives are on the line,
surgeons don't get to try their best submarine.
Designers, pilots are a very easy example.
Pilots that tried their best fly for R now
and those planes are no one's first choice,
not yours and not theirs.
And people will all often use all sorts of excuses
to justify staying in a bad family situation.
Usually along the lines of logic, that family's family,
no matter what my favorite out of all of them is this,
Fraser blood is thicker than water and it is true.
Blood is thicker than water, but so is shit.
You wouldn't catch me fucking my plumber anytime soon.
So I haven't spoken to either of my parents in
a little more than two years now
and someone just, oh, please don't, you know.
'cause when I tell people this in life,
they'll often react like I just told them a sad thing.
And that is only because y'all do not know my parents.
And to be fair, I did not do it in the best way necessarily.
I just sort of slowly faded out of the i
I ghosted my parents is what I'm trying to say.
And I think
because of that though, both my dad especially act like
weird exes that haven't quite gotten the message
where it used to be that every three,
four months I'd get a message from my dad at 4:00 AM on a
Saturday, just hi,
45 minutes later thinking about you.
And so I would try to match his energy
and replied, what are you wearing?
And that stopped the message is that you can use that.
That's for all of this.
I've been doing this now for almost 10 years
and it's only been in the last two years
or so that people have begun
willingly paying to see me.
Prior to that it was mostly trickery
and coercion and it's been very nice.
It's been nice that people come see, see the show.
And it's also been fun to see who comes, you know,
and it's sort of like, look at the crowd.
You're like, oh, I talk about this
or these people or this sort of thing.
And I'm mostly happy.
There are a few demographics that do wor worry me somewhat.
And this is in two parts.
The second is a more written joke
and the first is just, there's something I need
to get off my chest that for whatever reason,
there seemed to be a very prominent
contingent of yoga instructors
that connect with my work.
And
I'm not sure what you think it is.
I do exactly. I I don't know.
I've never spoken about yoga.
I don't know what I've done to incur the
wrath of your people.
I'm aware, but I, what I look like.
But even so, you know, even so, no,
it does not justify this behavior at any given show.
There will be more yoga instructors
than there are Sri Lankans.
And that is odd. It's
odd and it keeps me up.
Other thing I've noticed, there's very few, I say
relatively, at least most of the immigrants that come
and see me is a lot of immigrants that come and see me.
Most of y'all are not to be mean to the latter group,
but real immigrants, you know, you got yourselves here.
There's very few, let's say children of immigrants.
You came over with your parents
and dated all the work for you.
And I think most of the reasons,
'cause I say shit like that, but I get it.
You know, like if you, if you are say like a Sri Laan in my
ca like grew up out here,
I get why I'd be a weird thing for,
'cause I sort of like have the same worldview as you,
but there's an anger behind my eyes
that reminds you of your dad.
And something in my words that suggests that
I do not respect your struggle.
And you're right, I do not. And I don't think I should.
It's also funny for me that when I meet,
say like Sri Lai grew out here generally,
even South Asians, I grew up out here.
You all are often far more conservative
than we are back home.
And the only thing I can think of as a reason for that is
that say your parents moved over here in the seventies
or the eighties, they kept that version of the culture,
you know, and, and raised you with that.
Like I have a friend out here in, not Sri Lankan, he's,
he's a, grew up in London
but in very tight knit Indian Rahi community.
And he is my age 30 years old and,
and celibate by mostly his own choice.
And I was speaking to him like,
well this is a very intense decision you're
making about your life.
Goes, I don't you want to live
with a little bit more freedom?
And he said, no, you know, I want to be true to my culture
and do things the way my family would've done
them back home.
And his family is from Mumbai
and that is a city that makes London look
small and provincial.
And I tried to explain to him, if you,
if you grew up in Mumbai, you would've likely lost your
virgin at 16 to your A level French teacher
while her husband washed or something.
And he said, that is an awfully specific example.
And I said, this ain't about me. I'm just a
very creative person.
Don't, don't read too much into the stories
I got called a packy in public recently.
It was strange. It was strange.
'cause I know intellectually that this is a bad word,
but I did not grow up here.
So it doesn't really like, have that emotional power
to upset me necessarily.
I mean, how I'm Sri Lankan.
I, I look down on Pakistani people too, you know, as well.
Almost as much as I do Indians almost.
And Indians, I know you are in the room
because I'd laugh about the Pakistani bit was just a little
bit too much, you know, racist pieces of shit.
I swear I'm happy you're here.
There's Indian, you are, you are the most methodically
racist people I've met in my entire life.
It's amazing. I'm, I'm impressed.
It is only from the mouth of an Indian person.
I've heard the words. I can't be Islamophobic.
I've read the Quran, which is very counterintuitive to me.
'cause usually if someone is racist you can
at least use ignorance as an explanation as
to why they might feel that way.
Whereas this person went
and did homework to be more
effectively racist.
The only thing worse than being a bigot is being a
bigot and a nerd.
Isn't it embarrassing
but finding that a lot of the white guys I hang out with
are having a little bit of trouble adjusting
to changes in society.
One guy, and many say the same thing
with some version of the words.
It's really hard to be a white guy right now.
And whenever I hear these words, I always reply,
please do go on
some version of like, oh yeah, you know, I feel like,
I feel like there's people out there that,
that don't like me just for the demographic
that I was born into.
And sometimes, sometimes I even feel like I miss out on
opportunities
because of it.
And I'm listening like, damn man, I cannot imagine
what that must be like for you.
No, but there, there is a very specific demographic
of white guy that I have a true empathy for.
It is if you are a young-ish, let's say under 40
liberal white guy,
'cause that's a, I don't know, uniquely difficult position
because you are politically inclined to hate yourself.
And you were born just in time
to miss the glory days of your people.
You all were doing so well for 500 years.
And right before you pop out, everyone hates you
and you can't even be mad about it.
You need to take it on the chin. It is rough.
You were invited to the house parties just in time
for the neighbors to call the police.
One of my closest friends in the UK is a, is a white man,
a white man if you will.
And he's such a lovely, wonderful person.
He's a very empathetic sort of guy.
He will very much walk around carrying the shame
of his race.
He'll, he'll introduce himself like, hi, I'm Joe, I'm a part
of the problem, nice to meet you.
And I, I was complaining to him,
he'll be upset like get sad about stuff
that isn't even his phone.
You know, I was complaining to him about visa stuff one time
and he, he got very upset on my behalf
and he was like, oh, I'm so sorry
that you have to deal with all that man.
And I said, Joe, relax.
You, you are from Essex.
If the British government could have found a way
to deport you and your people,
they most definitely would have.
Unfortunately applying
for visas is still quite a large part of my life.
It's a lot of what I think about. I need a visa to be here.
If I'm living in any country
and if I even visit a country, almost every country I visit,
I need to apply for a visa
because you can look this up,
Sri Lanka's passport is in the top 10 worst passports in the
world, especially Europe.
It's a little bit an extra annoying.
You show all, all these documents usually at the very least
your incoming flight, your return flight,
your accommodation while you were there,
six months bank statements, a letter from your employer.
All this stuff where you're basically trying to prove
to this other country that you're not going
to run away when you show up.
And I was more okay with it when I was younger, I think.
'cause I don't know, I was young, I hadn't done much in the
world and quite frankly, I would've
very gladly run away in most countries that led me into,
but as I get older, it all feels a, a little demeaning.
You know, where I was applying for a visa
to Austria recently
and I was getting all of my documents together
and I had the thought of, you know,
Austria wishes
that I would run away in their irrelevant as country.
I would be their biggest cultural export in two years.
Thomas, who else do they have?
The last guy was the guy that played the Terminator.
And before
that it was, was the Terminator.
It was the real, it was a T 6 million number one.
I do this,
but I do also have a,
a normal job, a day job.
I, I work as a,
a programmer for a tech company.
'cause what else am I gonna do?
And I, I've, I've generally made peace with
that part of my life.
You know, it's, it's keeps my income more stable.
It is and has always been the source of my visa.
And I don't mind the day-to-day work.
What, but sometimes I say when,
when someone ask like, oh, the company you work
for, what do they do?
The only honest answer I can really ever give is
that it doesn't matter.
I mean, of course not to me,
but more strikingly not to anyone.
And it is this violent meaninglessness that has begun
to weigh on me as I get older.
And the best way I can put it, like working
for a tech company is, is that I say, you
say you when you were a kid or you talk to a kid now
and you ask them, what do you want to be when you grow up?
I cannot fathom that any child ever looked up
and said, when I grow up, I want to be
a senior product manager for a cloud-based
AI driven sex toy delivery platform.
It's like Uber, but for d it's like, fuck shut up.
And they're all, they're all like this.
And more children
would rather become a firefighter than
work for a tech company.
And that is because children are smart
and they know at some level, even if not practically
spiritually at least, it is sometimes better
to run into a burning building.
Then to hear that slack notification one,
the the program
and thing wasn't always plan a,
my first attempt at successfully getting outta Sri Lanka
was, I, I went to medical school.
I I finished medical school even mostly
'cause I didn't have another choice.
I never practiced as a doctor though,
thankfully for the public.
I knew halfway through
that I was far too selfish for that profession.
And since I've found my way to show business
where my client belong.
But, but all my oldest
and closest friends are from that part of my life.
And they're all working doctors
and have been for the last decade.
It's been interesting
'cause we've all, you know, been working the same amount
of time and they have always worked
so much harder than I have.
And for the majority of our careers been paid so much less.
And it's just felt a bit fucked, you know, just, just
because by some trick of capitalism,
my meaningless tech company creates more value
for shareholders than a hospital might.
Now I feel two ways about capitalism in general.
On one hand I think it's, as it exists now,
is definitely hurting far more people than it's
likely ever helped.
But at the same time,
listen, I'm trying to get rich, alright.
And it is finally beginning to seem
like I just might pull it off.
So I need capitalism for like five more years. All right?
And then we can do the revolution.
We can use my palace as a headquarters.
But, but I need my palace.
And by palace I mean like a nice two bedroom.
You know,
I don't think I'm asking for a lot.
Me and that gang. We, we've lived quite far apart,
but in the same country since we've been in the uk
and every year, at least once a year,
we will try all get together
and the six of us go on a, a big trip.
And we went on one sort of late summer last year
and it felt like a milestone for all of us.
It it was a trip that made us all feel like, oh,
we're slowly moving up in life
because it was the first trip that we had gone on as a group
or even individually where the,
where the holiday itself was less comfortable
than our normal lives.
And that is some rich people shit.
Because, because when you don't have money, you,
you save up whatever money you do have so
that you can go somewhere kind of nice
and pretend to have money for three to five days.
And then for some reason when you have some money,
you somehow spend even more money
to often go out into nature
and recreate the lives
that your grandparents worked so hard to escape.
I've always take talked such a great deal
of shit about people that like doing all this nature
stuff, you know?
But this, this time me and a gang, we went to Iceland
and we did a bunch of nature stuff
and it was quite delightful.
It was, I things came out
of my mouth in Iceland.
I never thought I would say I looked out a window at a big
rock and I was like, fuck him.
That, that's a good rock, right?
I've never been, I've never been
geologically aroused before.
I'm saving this image for later.
I think about that rock every day.
It's quite an eventful summer. It is.
A little while
before that I went to this, have you all heard
of this American hippie sort of festival Burning Man?
I went something very much like that.
It wasn't Burning Man itself, it was in Spain.
So I spent seven days camping in the Spanish desert.
And it was fun.
I don't think it was really my scene though, you know, just
to give you an idea of the, the demographics, right?
I'm just going to put a statistic out there for you.
Let's just say there were
exponentially more dreadlocks
than there were black people, all right?
You do with that information, what you will, no judgment,
a little bit of judgment, mostly no judgment.
You do what your body, what you will.
But you know, they were, they were
perfectly nice people.
I don't, I just don't know if they were my people, you know?
And so, and like many festivals, of course there were,
there were copious amounts of drugs being taken
by myself included.
But people there didn't take drugs the way I was used
to taking, like say if I'm going out with my friends
and we're taking some stuff, we'll find a dark corner
outside the venue and take our stuff
and get on with that night.
Whereas here, they like to do what
I remember them referring to as an intention circle.
I see some of you're familiar
and for the rest of you, if you have not had the privilege
of being exposed to such a geometric formation
before, please allow me to assure you
that it is indeed just as stupid as it sounds.
So what an intention circle is, right?
Is that okay to give you a lay of the land?
The way it's set up is, so it's in the desert, so there,
there is a lot of dirt as far as that.
I can see dirt, but that's fine. It's a desert.
That's what they do. They have dirt,
but there's a big, there's a festival set up
around this big patch of dirt in the middle,
but they don't call it a patch of dirt,
they call it the player.
And around the perimeter of the patch of dirt,
there are camps,
but they don't call them camps, they call them barrios.
And I'm always
somewhat suspicious when any group of people begins
to develop their own lingo, their own little language,
because that is cult adjacent behavior.
And I was not trying to become the star of midsummer
to Desert Storm.
So I was keeping my eyes peeled.
And so on the first night
before we all went out for the evening, everyone in the,
in the camp, in the, in the barrio got
got together in the common area, got in a circle,
and everyone got out the stuff
that they were taking for that evening.
And so the thing of it was that
before you take your stuff, you tell, you go one by one
and you tell the rest of the group
what your intentions for the evening are.
And I swear, right?
I I have never in my life heard
adults sounds so sincere,
but be so completely full of shit.
I, the first person went
and said something like, oh, I just want to, I just want
to connect more with all of you and with the PLI
and to feel the warmth
of the stars and the stars aren't warm.
That is, if anything, their main appeal.
And then the next person went
and said something like, oh, I I just want
to feel more alive than I ever have before.
And then, so I went like this one by one
and eventually it, it got to me
and I made some shit up.
So I wanted to take my drugs and get on with my evening.
But 'cause I knew, you know, I I,
I couldn't have been honest about
what my real intentions for the evening were.
'cause it wouldn't have gone well with my, you know,
to be hippie friends.
Because if I was being honest,
I would've said something along the lines of like, Hey,
listen guys, I I've been working a lot and I'm tired.
And quite frankly, I'm just trying to get high right now.
I feel, feel more alive. No, no, thank you.
I I would like to forget
that I was ever alive at all.
That's where I,
one of the most interesting people,
I met him my whole life is the, the mother of an ex of mine.
I remember when we first met Ex at the time, introduced us
and then went to the other room
and then her mom, she looked me up and down
and the first thing she asked was, were you hit as a child?
And I was like, strong start. All right, cool.
I just nodded. And she followed up with hit
or hit hit and I said, hit hit.
And she looked me up and down again
and said, I thought so and walked away.
And I do not have closure to this day,
but I immediately understood what she meant, you know,
and also before I go into it, I don't think any
of this is anyway, anyone should treat a kid ever.
But at least the normal hit, you know,
the the hit the wrong hit when it happened to me,
it didn't fuck with me that much.
Like, to me that is when you're a kid
and you do some dumb kid shit, you know, you
break something or you steal something
or you pee on something
and then you're punished physically for it,
which unnecessary shouldn't happen.
But at least when it happened to me, it,
it didn't fuck with my head that much.
It made sense, you know, I did something bad,
something bad happened to me, done.
Well it, it's akin to, it's somewhat akin to when you,
when you hear that, when you hear
that a skydiver died,
listen, I'm not trying to say Skydivers deserve to die,
I'm just saying that if you go skydiving
and you happen to die, It is very difficult for me
to find sympathy for your situation.
It's like when hear that your friend
with an art history degree is still unemployed, it's,
it's sad and it should not be that way,
but they kind of had it come, you know,
and then hit, hit to me is something entirely different.
I think that's what I have quite a lot
of intimate ex experience with.
It's most of my beef with my dad, right?
And to me that's when there's very
little to do with the kid at all.
It's usually the adult has some adult stuff going on
that they don't know how to deal with.
So they take it out on the kid.
And when you're a kid
and that happens to you,
you start thinking you are the problem
and you get this little hole inside
and then as you get older, the hole gets bigger
and eventually you're going to want to start
filling the hole with some stuff.
And that is why drugs
and alcohol were invented in hindsight.
Fortunately at the time I was too broke to invest.
So I think I filled my whole by, I don't know, just trying
to achieve stuff and get validation through that and, and,
and fill it that way.
And sometimes I'll like take it way too far
and completely burn myself out.
And I've been quite a bad state.
And when that happens, I will always find solace in telling
myself that hey, could have been heroin,
However bad this is.
You know what would've been worse? Heroin.
No, it's all, when I had this realization about myself,
it was strangely the only time in my life I've had even the
slightest shred of empathy for this incredible weirdo
of a man Elon Musk.
Hear me out here. Because in some interview way,
way back, right?
I read that he also had quite an abusive dad.
And when I connected those two things, his whole shit
at the very least made sense.
You know, because I thought I had it bad.
This man is trying to go all the way to Mars
to see if there's a dad there that'll love him.
That's tragic. That's a tragic life.
I sorta have this realization about myself.
It was a lot, it was a lot to process, you know.
And I, I was turning 30 in a few months
and I sort of set that as a arbitrary deadline of sorts
to have it mostly squared away in my head.
Of course this stuff takes forever,
but mostly worked out, you know?
'cause I do feel like, you know, like there's no need
to set a deadline, but I do feel like a lot of this,
you know, working out your stuff and finding yourself
and all that is, is real cute when you're in your twenties.
But when you are a 30 something year old man,
people don't have time for that shit.
Of course, I, I still have a few years,
but I wanted to get ahead of me, you know, I didn't want
to leave it alone, forget about it.
And then end up at the 70-year-old at Ayahuasca ceremony
going around telling people how I'm trying to meet God
and have a shaman tell me that it's like, wait five
to 10 years you'll meet God.
He's waiting for, you didn't have to come to Peru
for this.
Around that time I started seeing my therapist much more
regularly as well.
I go every now like for like six weeks at a time.
Like, like a two tuneup every six weeks.
But I started going every week for a while
and it was very helpful.
My only qualms earlier on in the process
was that at these prices
I thought he'd fix me
like a mechanic, you know, like I'm the car
and he's the mechanic and I go in and he fixes me.
And at least for me, I found it very useful
to figure out it exactly in which ways
I am fucked and maybe gain some insight into
just how I got so fucked.
But apparently I am supposed to do all the unfucking myself
is much less a mechanic and more Ikea for your emotion
or you're given the tools and some materials
or you have to put your shitty table of a personality
together all by yourself.
I started around that time trying
to generally get my life together.
You know, I was quite a sedentary person
and I started trying to exercise more.
I, I remember I signed up for boxing classes
and yoga classes at the same time
because I wanted the full spectrum.
And I remember being so much more nervous
for the boxing classes
and in high, I, I really didn't need to be.
I I, I remember I went
and it was such a nice welcoming vibe.
Everyone was very eager to help a new person.
It was a real community sort of feeling.
And then I went to the yoga class
and I tell you, I have never been
so afraid in my entire life.
Everyone was like, like namaste to each other,
but it's just a lot of sociopaths
and spandex, you know, just,
just psychos in Lycra, all of them.
And I wondered why this was,
and the only thing think from the people I met,
at least the, the people in the boxing
classes were pretty chill.
They were just there to blow off some steam
and get some exercise and maybe get better at boxing.
Whereas the people at the yoga classes, not all of them,
but enough seem to be under some assumption
that doing yoga would also make you a better person.
And I'm not sure that how it works.
Say if you are an asshole
and you go do yoga, you're not any less of an asshole.
You are just a, a bendy asshole.
I also started looking to like general, I don't know,
like there's a lot of this personal development self-help
stuff on the internet lately.
And some of it I found genuinely helpful.
I did draw the line
however, at cold showers us
because I remember when I saw it, I was surprised that
it was as popular as it was
or seemed to be where
no one else finds this disrespectful to poor people.
That stuff was mostly all right at home growing up.
But there was a period of my childhood
where we didn't have hot water in the house.
And the idea
of recreating that feeling
for the sake of optimizing my morning
felt a bit grotesque.
You know, it felt like, like financial appropriation
and I, I just didn't want any party.
I I, I'm also not sure if anyone is aware,
Sri Lanka is a mostly Buddhist country
and I grew up vaguely Buddhist
and I sort of got away from it
and I thought, let me, let me look back there,
see if there's anything for me, anything helpful.
And I went looking for resources and such
and was very disconcerted to find just
how many monks
with podcasts there seem
to be in the world at this moment.
It's not that they shouldn't have access
to technology, right?
But it does feel wrong.
I remember growing up in Sri Lanka, it's a Buddhist country,
there's monks just like around and every now
and then you see one carrying a cell phone.
I remember when I saw that, I just, I was like,
what, what's going on there?
Like there's, there's dissonance in that image, you know,
it is like, like when you see a supermodel
with a book, you have the intrusive thought of like, oh,
do they, do they know how to use that thing?
It is very interesting to me that out of the entire show,
it is only at this part where I'm mean about supermodels,
that a good chunk of you pull back real hard
as if, as if I had just
disparaged a marginalized group of some sort
and not hot rich people.
And the reason I keep it in is because there's a bit right
after this related to it that is going to work, watch.
And also that I have
had the immense displeasure of working
with these people in the past.
And however dumb you might imagine, they are
dumber and,
and and they're pretty looking.
So no one tells them, you know, especially male models,
male models in particular, I,
because right male models modeling is one
of the few professions where
men are generally paid less than women.
Which is to say that if you are a male model, you are
so useless to society,
so intellectually devoid of value
that even the patriarchy could not help you get paid.
How am I supposed to respect you as a man?
Well, one of the, the nicest things
that's happened over the past years, I've recently become
godfather to a small Filipino child.
I'm just gonna leave that there with no context.
No, I mean it's easy to figure, I have two close friends
who are both Filipino and they had a kid
and then made me the godfather on, on my birthday
in this room actually.
And it was interesting, they're my first friends
to have had a kid because I generally have quite smart
friends and, and no,
and I had prior always thought of people that have kids
as disorder people I don't want to hang out with.
And they really changed my mind on the whole thing.
You know, I, I remember the first weekend
after the baby came out, right?
And, and Aaron, the daddy messaged me saying,
Hey man, you wanna, you wanna take mushrooms
and hang out in the park with the baby?
And, and I said, I think I want to be a father this time.
Wonderful. And I remember, I remember
that day there was this like, just about newborn baby.
I was holding her and the trees were beginning
to breathe at me and I thought, man,
I I might be a family man after all who,
I've lived in the UK now for about four years
and I've contemplated leaving the
UK For about four years.
Not all parts of it, of course. I, I I enjoy London enough.
But like say I went on tour at some point last year
around the UK and this year I only went back
to one place, Glasgow.
I find my favorite parts
of the UK are all the not English parts.
And of course like in Scotland there's Edinburgh.
But I do find that
Edinburgh is to Scotland.
What Majorca is to Spain,
where they are, they're countries technically,
but spiritually the British have taken
their soul long ago.
I don't know, living here all this time, I I I've come
to find that what it truly means to be British is
to apologize.
To apologize for everything
except what you should be sorry for.
And even that only in the daytime at night,
you are different creatures entirely.
You're like gremlins, you know that eighties movie with the,
the little furry things
and you can't give them water past midnight.
Where with a British person, if you give them even a drop
of alcohol after the sun goes down,
you better get out the fucking way.
Well I remember when I moved here, I was so confused.
I looked around at all these meek, meek people
and I was like, this, these, these are the people
that took two thirds of the world for themselves.
And, and then I saw a Newcastle high street past
sun and thought, there they are.
I see, I see the vision, I see the,
it's such a odd, odd, odd country.
Last year there was these like big anti-immigration race
riot things here.
And it hit me when all that kicked off that it,
it was the first time in a good long while
where this strong anti-immigration sentiment had been
such a top of mind issue in a place that I was living.
And quite honestly, I had missed the attention.
It also really made me feel
and realize that as an immigrant, I owe, not an apology,
but a statement of thanks at least to the trans community
for keeping the bigots at bay for so many years
because they have been so worried.
But where you are going to the
- Bathroom - That we have been crossing borders
willy-nilly, I'm quite literally running out
of pages in my passport.
Numbers are up. It's been a good few years for us.
So I just want you to know that,
that your sacrifice does not go unnoticed.
Your service is appreciated.
Thank you for, for being the boogeyman instead
of us for a few years.
Boogie person, my bad boogie person.
I lived in Germany before I moved here
and I don't know, I'm thinking about, so in a year from now,
have my permanent residency and a year
after that I'll have my British passport
and I'll be British on paper, never in spirit.
And it's a strange feeling.
Even like I, I don't know, I,
I don't know if I'm gonna leave or stay,
but it will be the first time I say I moved away from
Sri Lanka just
because of lack of opportunities for
what I want to do with my life.
And then I moved to Germany, I'm from Germany to here
to make standup happen a little bit more.
And now it's happened enough where I don't necessarily need
to be here anymore.
So in two years when I make that decision to leave
or to stay, it'll be the first time I'm doing it
for an emotional reason and not a practical one.
And that's a weird place for me, you know, to know that I'll
at that point no longer be an economic migrant.
I'll be, dare I say that
an expat, that
it feels strange to know that through my efforts I've become
what I have hated most.
But I've accepted it
and I'm, I'm trying to prepare for the transition.
I, I'm beginning by learning how
to care about things that don't really matter so
that I can more easily come to terms with
how disgustingly secure my life is.
And I'm starting with recycling.
'cause I don't know if you're aware,
but recycling is a lie in a scam.
Especially plastic recycling.
They just send that shit to Asia.
I'm entirely certain that recycling is just a conspiracy
by the United Nations to keep Germany occupied.
'cause you might not be aware here,
but it is, I've been to a lot of places
and people recycle everywhere,
but not with the joy of the Fatherland.
It, it touches something in the German soul to recycle.
I'm entirely certain
that those three bins are the only things standing
between us and a fourth rike.
Alright? I'm sure that post World War ii,
the powers that be got in a room in Geneva
and said, okay, we cannot let this happen again.
We know they like to sort things and throw them away.
We just switch out the people for plastic.
And I think that'll buy us a couple hundred years.
Thank you for coming along with people.
I know, I know it was hard for you. Well, it was a fun ride.
I think about moving back to Germany.
I lived there and it was fun. It was fun.
When I lived there, I lived in Berlin
and well, I think I thought about moving there,
but every time I go back, I am over overcome
with the feeling of like, I'm, I'm too old for this place.
And my, my sexual fantasies right now are much less
behe darkroom,
much more public library.
That's where I'm at right now.
And there are certain times I will, especially compared
to London, miss Berlin a lot, you know, London is a very,
quite a uptight, very businessy sort of city.
And the people reflect that to some extent.
And I was at a train station once
and this lady came up to me
and immediately said, are you straight?
Are you single? And it took me a moment
to process exactly what was happening.
Is this a flirtation or a confrontation or a
or a census of some sort?
And then I said, yes, no, and she immediately walked away.
And I had never felt more like a
piece of meat in my entire life.
And I know that would never happen in Berlin.
First of all, no one in Berlin would ever ask if I'm
straight, because everyone in Berlin knows
that everyone is a little gay.
I I, I have never been intimate with a man,
but I have also never been in the same room
as Lenny Kravitz.
And I do believe that it's not over till it's over.
I'll leave you all on this. My, my main reason for
maybe leaving here, being so top of mind is that not any
of you, your social issues
or anything about what you're like, it's annoying,
but I can deal with it if I'm being paid enough.
But it is very specifically that it has come
to my attention, especially in the last couple of years,
that you are becoming poor.
And I do not fuck with that.
You want one more bad decision away from becoming the
northern most member of the global south.
And I have not worked so hard my entire life
to move from one struggling island nation
to another.
When I express this sentiment to, to British people.
Sometimes some, some people get a little bit upset at me.
You know, they'll say like, oh wow, that's very,
very cynical of you to just, to just move
to a place and use its
resources to build yourself out.
And then when it's, when it's no longer of any use to you,
you just leave.
And I said, I said, I'm sorry man.
You know, I'm, I'm from Srilanka. I learned from the best.
If anything, please, please do not think
of it as me leaving.
Think of it as you gaining independence from me.