I wander directionless through the trees for a few hours, thinking about what it means to belong to a place.

This forest is foreign to me, but I feel at home here somehow.

I actually feel more at home when I'm not at home, which either proves that home is a state of mind, or maybe that I don't really feel like myself where I come from. I don't know if that's true, actually.

I mean, I grew up in country Victoria, but you wouldn't know it, really. I don't know what my relationship to country is, you know?

I mean, occasionally I give people directions using compass points if that counts.

I hate it when people in the country do that.

"Righto, matey, what you wanna do- you just want to head east for about 20 clicks and then take a sou'-to-sou' westerly bearing-"

Alright, Galileo. Just give me some landmarks and some street names.

I'm not taking the King's Road into battle. I'm trying to get to Best & Less you dickhead.

You know, I think I think Australia is an incredible country, but the overall feel of the place often elicits the same response in me as that seven year old boy, slow clapping his way into a detention.

You know, I just I just want to shake it up a bit.

We paint ourselves as loveable larrikins, but we're extremely fucking uptight. I think we repress or reject a lot of the interesting parts of this place. The edge, the friction, the variety, you know? The truths that we're constantly protecting ourselves from; that lucky country bullshit that's built on the misfortune of others.

I mean, look at who's running the country. It's pretty gross. The entitlement is pretty disgusting.

And that's not a political statement that's just like human observation. Yucky poos. You know what I mean?

Look, if you don't need to consider any life experience other than what's happening on your own little quarter acre block, or if you can see a doctor whenever you need to see a doctor and no part of your brain is reserved for processing if you're in danger or even where you actually fit in a culturally complex system.

I don't necessarily begrudge you any of that, but I don't want to hear your opinion on immigration policy.

Like you don't get a seat at the table if you're ambivalent about babies in detention, but have time to openly weep while watching the Master Chef finale.

I stop to relieve myself against a small stone wall in the undergrowth and discover that I'm actually standing on the edge of a swimming pool.

It's the ruins of a swimming pool.

It's full of leaves and fallen branches and shit, but it's unmistakable in its aquatic origins.

I look around and slowly it dawns on me that I am standing in the middle of the abandoned ruins of the Cornish estate.

Edward Joel Cornish was born in Iowa in 1862.

He was practicing law by the age of 21, climbed his way up to assistant district attorney and became the personal lawyer and friend of a man by the name of Levi Carter of the Carter Lead Company.

Carter's Lead works was like the largest manufacturer of paint in the United States.

We're talking a good sixty years before people recognized that lead poisoning from paint and airborne particles from leaded petrol causes learning difficulties, aggressive behavior, and a tendency to believe whatever you read on the Facebook.

When Levi Carter died in 1983, Edward Cornish became the president of the company and married Levi's widow Selina.

As they say in the lead business: "You can't cut a dead man's lunch."

Edward sold... I'm keeping that fucking line, I don't care what you think.

Edward sold the company to National Lead. He bought a giant chunk of stocks, and he ended up serving as president of National Lead for like 17 years.

And in that time, he and Selena left the city and they purchased this grand estate in the Hudson Hills.

They bought it from a Chicago diamond merchant named Sigmund Stern.

And I fuckin wish I made that detail up because Sigmund Stern, the diamond merchant, sounds like a character from a Scooby Doo episode.

"I'm Sigmund Stern and somebody's a-been stealing a my diamonds! Roooby, dooby, dooo!"

That bit was just for the racist baby.

Edward and Selina were madly in love. They threw lavish parties in their expansive mansion, and they rolled through the roaring twenties in lead funded style.

Then one day in 1938, at the impressive age of 76, Edward Cornish dropped dead at his desk from a heart attack.

Over the following two weeks, Selina took care of the arrangements, she made sure Edward had a proper send off and then she died herself.

The mansion and the grounds were passed on to Edward's nephew, Joel, who spent the next 20 years largely ignoring his Aunt and Uncle's

prized legacy until accidentally setting fire to the mansion in 1958 and burning it to the ground.

And here I am... 60 years later to the day, standing in the ruins of Edward and Selena's dream home, the charred remains of a shared life, all that was once important to these people reclaimed by the forest.

Good.

Fuck em!

Who cares!?

These are the kind of stories that we give weight and value to. This is the measure of success that we're fed.

Every history book in the world tells a version of this fucking fairy tale but who gives a shit?!

It's easy to lose perspective when you swaddled in safe narratives.

I bought it like, I'm achieving a lifelong dream right now, performing my own comedy show off-Broadway in New York, and it is the worst thing that's happening to me right now. I could not be taking it any more personally.

The fucking entitlement of that; that is privilege.

Privilege is not an abundance of opportunity, it's an absence of obstacles, right?

And the best I can hope for if I use that privilege for all its worth is that one day my legacy will lay in ruins in a forest somewhere and some kid will stumble upon it while pissing on the ashes.

And standing there, I burst into hysterical laughter and I turned round and I stopped running, crashing my way through the forest

back towards the train station, plotting my revenge on the theater-going crowds of New York City.