The house welcomed me back under the warm, bosomy embrace of its scalloped white arches. That was a super weird sentence to type.

It was shaky and difficult at first, returning to Canberra and being terrified of life in general. It felt like I had to build everything back from the ground up: home, work, health, the works.

HOME
The home part was actually pretty easy: life at the Ponderosa became even better after my return. The first step was getting rid of that pesky fourth housemate. Tammy, Zak and I had always lived with a fourth housemate, because it was a four bedroom house and that was just the done thing. However, every person we got into that room turned out to be a complete oddball.

Partly to fill the long days (I didn’t start work until 3:30pm), and partly to raise extra money for an overseas holiday, for the last half of 2008 I started looking for a second job. I found one in the most unlikely place: Magnet Mart, a Bunnings-style hardware megastore.

Because you think of hardware, of DIY, of outdoors, of building and gardening and household repairs, you think ME, right?

For five months, Monday to Friday, 10am-3pm, I operated a cash register at Magnet Mart. How did someone who knew as little about hardware as I do manage to operate a cash register at a DIY megastore? EASY: my area of expertise was only the cash register. They had experts for every department, that was their job. It was literally store policy that I not deal with anything beyond the bench on which my cash register sat. It was perfect.

I gave away the Magnet Mart job at the beginning of 2009 when it looked like another spot might be opening up at the radio station’s Creative department, meaning I was back in the office working regular human hours. Things were picking up!

Later in 2009, I caught another break: I was invited to submit a writing audition to the head writer at weekly variety TV show Rove. Somehow, one of the jokes from my submission made it through to the final cut (I assume all the regular writers ate lunch at the same place and all got food poisoning and died?), and I ended up getting one of my jokes on air in the “news” segment.

I took a photo of my TV at the exact moment Kristy Warner delivered my very first TV punchline. LOOK HOW IMPRESSED SHE LOOKS WITH MY JOKE

With my audition clearly proving successful, I was invited to continue submitting jokes for the rest of the season. In my third week of submissions, George Negus was the guest newsreader. It’s because of me that one of Australia’s most respected media figures—a member of Australian television royalty—told a joke about environmentally friendly German sex workers.

I knew it was only a matter of time until I would be asked to join the team full time, and be able to move to Melbourne. So imagine my surprise in my fourth week of submissions when, at the end of the show, the host himself, Rove McManus, stood up in front of a nationwide audience and called out my name.

KIDDING. I’M KIDDING. He announced his retirement. Rove ended a week later. My career as a TV comedy writer was over in less than a month.

So it wasn’t all upward for my career, but hey: I still had my daytime office job back, and I still had my Magnet Mart staff discount card.

HEALTH
During the time we lived in Kaleen, Zak had become something of a regular at the local Kaleen Sports Club; the kind of semi-naff local bar/bistro/pokies venue that peppers Canberra suburbs. The Kaleen Club had meat tray raffles three times a week, and on at least one of these nights the three of us go down for dinner and to enter the meat raffles. Ten dollars bought ten tickets, and each ticket had five numbers on it, any one of which could win a tray.

Around the same time, Tammy got the opportunity to move to Melbourne and took it, while Joel decided he would finally move into the house he owned and had been renting out for years. Zak and I ended up moving in with our friend Gaff, who lived literally around the corner, in a huge house he shared with his friend Amy.

The Parthenon was disbanded. But out of The Parthenon’s ashes rose something greater: The Ponderosa.

I could not be more excited about this photo, because something has happened that I had really hoped would happen at least one in this series. See the rear of that car in the driveway? The dark blue Corolla? THAT IS THE REAR OF *MY* DARK BLUE COROLLA. GOOGLE STREET VIEW HAS CAPTURED PROOF MY EXISTENCE IN AT LEAST ONE OF THE 60 ADDRESSES AT WHICH I’VE RESIDED.

With a total of four bedrooms, the house was similar in size to the Parthenon, but differed in some ways. It was only one storey instead of two, didn’t have a tiered backyard or blushingly heavy lemon tree, and the front yard was sadly without a little-boy-peeing water fountain. However, it did have two lounge rooms instead of one, ducted climate control, and a solar heated swimming pool. So, you know. Swings and roundabouts.

Who the fuck needs a roundabout WHEN YOU’VE GOT A POOL?! PS: in this photo, the pool has a cover on it: I swear the water was NOT, as a rule, lumpy.

The other major difference was that it had no Greek styling to it, so we couldn’t just call it Parthenon II. However, the kitchen was a weird colour of yellow, and the exterior of the house had this stucco scalloping all over, and the whole thing had, to the ignorant eye, a vaguely Mexican feel to it. And that’s how it became “The Ponderosa”.

Because our compulsion to give everything a name was matched only by our tone-deaf cultural stereotyping.

The reason I describe this house in so much detail is because The Ponderosa holds the record for being the place I have lived the longest, which I feel requires some attention. I lived there for three and a half years. The closest contender to that record is the one year and eight months I spent in Tin Can Bay; less than half the length of time spent in The Ponderosa. This is a big deal.

After the first six months or so, Amy moved out. By some wondrous, perfectly timed, only-happens-in-season-finales-of-TV-sitcoms miracle, Tammy returned to Canberra and moved back in with us. 75% of my Canberra family were reunited.

:+:+:+:+:+:+:

By 2007, Sarah and I were into our third year doing breakfast radio for 104.7. As always happens when a radio show starts to lose its new car smell, we had to start upping the ante in terms of “big events”. To that end, February 2007 became “Face Your Fears” month: a month of Sarah and I doing stunts that involved phobias. I faced my arachnophobia by holding a scorpion (NEVER AGAIN), my fear of falling by being forced off a 10m diving board…

NEVER AGAIN. 

…and my fear of pain by what else? Getting a tattoo, in the studio, live on air.

NEVER AG—actually this is negotiable. But I won’t be AT work, STILL WORKING during the next one.

After I got this tattoo I would loudly and obnoxiously tell anyone who would listen the same dumb joke over and over about how now Canberra FM could never fire me because I’d just shown such commitment and loyalty to my workplace. I had permanently marked myself for them. Technically they owed me for life. I was safe as houses! Untouchable! A platinum-level employee! And so on.

Do you see, perhaps, where this is going?

In April of 2007, the Sarah half of “Chris & Sarah for Breakfast” resigned. Commercial radio and commercial branding being what it is, without “Sarah” there was no “Chris & Sarah”, and so the entire show was iced.

Can you believe these two obvious consummate professionals didn’t go the distance? Astonishing.

In the space of one morning meeting, my six year friendship/working partnership with Sarah imploded, my career evaporated, and my sense of self worth plummeted. For six years I had been working at being an on-air comedian: first idly dreaming about it, then actively striving for it, then shaping my entire life around it. It had come to define my adulthood, and between 9:15am and 10:30am one April morning, it was all taken away.

I reacted to this change in my life the only way I could think of: I got super mad. I became a 24 hour sulk dispenser. Maybe all the teenage temper tantrums I’d neglected to have during my actual teens had came bubbling to the surface. Whatever it was, I spent the rest of 2007 careening down the slopes of a double black diamond hissy fit.

Despite the whole upending-my-career thing, the management at the radio station were exceedingly good to me. They found me another role on air, even though the usual course of action would have been to fire me. My new job was at the lowest rung of the on-air ladder; a battering for the old ego, having occupied the very top rung only days earlier, but it was better than unemployment.

Not only did the bosses at the radio station find a way to keep me on, but they said nothing during the extended period I spent a touchy, directionless, vibrating tumour of mournful anger. They waited patiently for six months. Only in the seventh month did they gently inquire if perhaps I wouldn’t mind acting like an actual human being in the workplace, please, as my endless stomping about was starting to dislodge the light fixtures.

I tried to channel my anger away from work, but the only other place I was ever at that wasn’t work was home. I channelled my anger home. And that’s how I invented Rage Ball.

Rage Ball involves two people standing in the pool at opposite ends, throwing a ball back and forth, aggressively complaining about life. As the game progresses, both the complaining and the throwing intensify, until eventually the players are simply pegging the ball at each other’s heads while screaming personal insults. Bonus points are available if, rather than hitting your opponent in the head, you hit the water in front of their face with enough force to splash chlorinated water into their eyes. The first person to rage-quit Rage Ball loses the game.

Note that the rules of the game only dictate how a player loses: nobody ever wins.

On December 31, 2004, Sarah and I said goodbye to our friends and families, crammed everything we could fit into my 1981 Commodore, and made the 13 hour trip to Canberra. We nearly didn’t make the whole trip, because a 1981 Commodore doesn’t like doing that kind of thing on a whim. There was a real touch-and-go moment featuring a struggling radiator, a roadworks-induced traffic jam, and a heartbreakingly close but inaccessible BP: it nearly killed our careers, our friendship and the car. BUT: eventually we made it to the nation’s capital, ready to start our new lives.

104.7’s on-air line up for 2005. When we started, the station was mid-transition from a full on ROCK station to a pop-based “hit music” station. Sarah & I inadvertently became the face of this new brand, and a lot of people resented us for it. And not just listeners! The guy second from the left? He was so mad about the station’s new direction and on-air changes, for the first three months he flat out refused to speak to us directly. (But he became one of my closest friends, so clearly his convictions are paper thin.)

The whole experience was bizarre and intimidating. Even though we were still idiot kids from Brisbane who had no idea what we were doing (we tried to keep that quiet as long as we could, but eventually we had to actually go on the air), we were being treated like minor celebrities. High-spending clients of the radio station gave us the oddest free things, like gym memberships and meat trays (MESSAGE RECEIVED, CANBERRA #bodyshame). We had cocktail events held in our honour, did local TV commercials and “appeared” at events as if our being there was a big deal. On one occasion we were the “celebrity judges” for Fashions on the Field at a Race Day: that event currently holds the record for The Least Qualified I Have Ever Been To Do Anything, Ever.

The pièce de résistance, though? WE GOT OUR NAMES ON A FUCKING COFFEE MUG.

THIS IS WHEN YOU KNOW YOU’VE MADE IT. (Yes, I took this photo just now, in June 2015. No, I didn’t even have to leave my room to get it. This mug and my tattoo (spoiler) are the only remaining links to my short time as a celebrity: I keep it with me always.)

The whole time this was happening; while we were being celebrated and paraded around like something worth seeing, we were completely befuddled. We didn’t feel like important people, we didn’t look like important people. It all felt so out of place. Not to mention that we were dead on our feet. With no budget for a producer, we were doing all the background work ourselves, and with no real clue what we were doing, all the background work took twice as long as it should have. Between interviews, planning meetings, pre-records, audio editing, writing, client call-outs and other show prep work, for the first several months we would start at 4:00am and not finish until around 4:00pm. Tired and confused: that sums up most of 2005.

Finding living arrangements befitting of this new life was at once very difficult and exceptionally easy. The difficult part was learning that Canberra was more expensive than I had realised. I had grown to love living alone since my time in Kelvin Grove, and was determined to do it again, but discovered I couldn’t afford to do it in Canberra. (Sidenote: This is not even a little bit true: I absolutely could have lived on my own in any number of places if I’d put more than five seconds thought into it. But remember: I was very tired.)

But once I’d come to terms with having to share, finding somewhere to live was the easy part. I wanted to be in the Ascot of Canberra. And I decided that the Ascot of Canberra was Dickson. Dickson is quaint and adorable and its main street looks like a movie set. It was pretty and central to my needs and I decided I was going to live there no matter what. (Sidenote: Dickson, while definitely lovely, is not the Ascot of Canberra. Kingston is the Ascot of Canberra, and is on the other side of the lake. I was way off. But remember: I was very tired.)

I’d even picked the building I wanted to live in: it was called Coventry.

From “The Tuscan Quarter” to “Coventry”. If you want to tour the world without a passport, I can highly recommend pretentious apartment building names.

Sitting above a startlingly dense collection of restaurants, “The Coventry” is part townhouse complex, part apartment complex, part secret hidden rooftop garden. The townhouses/apartments themselves form a border around the edge of the complex, while the middle is made up of an oasis of palm trees, water features and boardwalks.

This is on the ROOF. And yes, I did borrow this photo from a recent real estate listing. What? IT’S FREE ADVERTISING FOR MR BLACKSHAW.

I had to live there. I was going to live there. And I searched every corner of the internet looking for any sharehouse listing for 12 Challis Street.

I finally found one, which is how I ended up living with Hai. Hai mostly kept to himself playing World of Warcraft on two computers at once: His main character on his PC, and his secondary character “mostly for healing” which ran from a laptop on his knee. Hai was very friendly, though he was also a world class mansplainer. And he did do a lot of complaining (manmplaining?) about his impending promotion and how the move to six figures would push him up a tax bracket. Like, a lot of complaining. It dominated most conversations. But I would have happily listened to any number of complaints or unnecessary explanations of simple things if it meant getting to live in that building, which I was so in love with despite not once looking at any other place in any other suburb even for a single minute.

The apartment itself was glorious: two storeys, with each bedroom featuring its own full-sized bathroom. The shower took up one third of the entire room, so I could comfortably lie flat out on the shower floor without touching any surface (which, can I say: it cannot be overstated how handy that was for a hangover). Meanwhile, one entire wall of the bedroom—floor to ceiling—was glass. This was alarming at first; not just for me, but for the birds who flew headfirst into it on a semi-weekly basis.

That’s a LOT of window, right? And note the mirrored wardrobe doors. On no level was getting dressed in this room comfortable.

One time a magpie slammed straight into the glass right in front of my face as I was idly staring out the window. I didn’t know the true meaning of “high pitched squeal” until that day. And those stupid winding windows that only open a fraction meant I was never able to reach far enough to get all the feathers off the splat-mark.

Avian suicide attempts notwithstanding, the apartment was wonderful and the location was great. And I don’t just mean the location of the suburb within Canberra, I mean the location of the apartment: twelve feet above seven different restaurants. And it wasn’t even twelve feet of stairs: there was an elevator. As it was, the new hours I was working did not lend themselves to good choices, meal-wise:

4:30am: Ughhhh. Breakfast.
9:00am: Show’s over! Phew, I’m starving, it’s technically still breakfast time, yeah?
12:00pm: Oh my god I haven’t eaten since breakfast at 4:30am! Let’s have lunch!
3:00pm: I work so hard, I deserve a little treat.
5:30pm: No, see, because of how early I start, everything is earlier, so technically this is my dinner time.
8:00pm: Why yes, I’d love to meet you for dinner!

And so on. Combine that with living 27 seconds away from Chinese, Szechuan Chinese, Japanese, Ethiopian, a dessert place that only served frozen custard, the best Indian restaurant I’ve ever been to, and Dominos (and this isn’t counting the dozen or so other restaurants and fast food joints directly across the street) and it wasn’t long until things went south.

Well, not south. More like simultaneously east and west.

Learn from my mistakes, young players: get your promo shots taken BEFORE you start eating like a hobbit.

:+:+:+:+:+:

Okay this isn’t part of the main story. This is a bonus. Consider it a thank you gift for staying with me for nearly one whole year. Like any fresh new radio show, we were thirsty for ratings. We were always looking for big stunts to do. Long story short: I lost a bet on air and my punishment was learning a cheer routine with the Canberra Raiders cheerleaders, and then performing said cheer routine at a game alongside the Raiderettes. Which is how, on April 10, 2005, I ended up at Canberra Stadium in front of 19,000 people looking like this:

You read that correctly; this image is embedded from Getty Images (which, incidentally, is why it is so inelegantly placed: thanks, rudimentary embedding code!). Getty Images’ one and only image of me is in drag and mid-cheer routine. Worse still? This photo has now been on the internet for TEN YEARS.