Monday was drier, thankfully. Rain on a Monday kills me though this year, with THE café closed on a Tuesday, and the back-up café now also closed on a Tuesday, rain on a Tuesday really leaves me on the floor. With my short film set to go into production early in the new year, and struggling with how dead my Tuesdays are, I enrolled on a local film making course and so far, I’m finding it useful. I always found it hard to take on information in a classroom, I don’t know why, but my academic history is littered with one disaster after another, though anything in the late eighties can be excused as I was having to share the marital bed with my dad during those first two GCSE capitulations, so I think I can get a bye on that.
I am trying to find a better way to handle the more than distinct possibility the roof is leaking yet again, but I’m not sure I’m managing to. What is striking, to me, is how my mood lifts so quickly at the merest hint of the day brightening up. It’s been a long time since my SAD was this pronounced. The many serious problems in this flat make me feel like I’m reliving all those years in the old family bedsit, and this really pains me.
There was no full writing session in THE café, so to speak of today. My focus is so shot, I think I was satisfied with what I did today. I made notes on a rough ten-minute version of the new five-minute set I debuted last month. I’m still not focused enough to polish it and make it ready to learn and that’s just down to all the rubbish going on. I’d gone to the café after visiting my aunt and uncle. My uncle’s stoicism I the face of his terminal illness is remarkable and reminds me of my old friend Lopez who handled his looming early death back in 2009 with a courage I’d never seen. My uncle was running through his current symptoms today and it was a tough listen but in amongst this darkness, him and my aunt still manage to make me laugh with their bickering. Two weeks ago, we didn’t even think he’d make it out of the hospital. Somehow, he pulled through those dark ten days and here they are, once again going at it over the smallest thing.
At THE café, I managed to again put the amputee’s back out by holding the door open for him. I think he thinks I’m holding the door open for him because he’s an amputee. I’m holding it for him because that’s what I and others do in general for people as they’re coming in behind you or coming out just as you’re coming in. I do it for everyone. I feel if I suddenly don’t do it for him, it might look odd given he’s an amputee and that in some way, I’ve singled him out for the non-door opening. He didn’t even thank me.
I’ll say this about the guy: he might be rude, but I’m always impressed by how fashionable he is. Again, not because you don’t expect an amputee to be into fashion but just because he is very fashionable for a middle-aged man, easily THE café’s trendiest guy. I’m always struck by the fold in his trousers too. If I were in his shoe, I’d struggle with that part of things because I can’t fold clothes for toffee. It’s why I never worked in fashion retail to support myself during my academic years. As someone who only irons about four times a year, I have to place my tops in a certain way on my shelf so that I don’t need to iron them again. Hanging them up, for me, can always seem to leave a top out of shape.
The flat continues to take up too much of my time and money repairs wise. I don’t want to learn more about DIY but every day right now, I’m having to read up on stuff and watch videos. Corroded taps being the latest. I hate living here. I’m aware of how negative that sounds but as I was telling one of my closest friends tonight, I feel the stress of this place now entrenching itself in my body at night. That’s what stress does. You can see how it finishes people off early and I am at that stage of life now where I need to be careful. The pandemic was a case in point. Sometime between the first and second lockdowns, I ended up with the biggest health scare of my life and I hadn’t seen it coming and I still haven’t quite absorbed that lesson.
So, what do you do when you’re feeling this dispirited? Well, I was down for a Gong show tonight at The Comedy Store and boy did I regret it. Now as a storyteller, I’m not a natural fit for a Gong show. I’ve only ever beaten one, not that I’ve done that many, but I have had some horrendous experiences at the few that I’ve done. It’s a completely different audience to the usual audience you get at a stand-up night (you’re lucky to get an audience at too many London nights) and I don’t consider it ‘proper’ comedy. If it feeds into your regular material, sharpens it up, they can be worth doing. And if I can at least get that out of a gong show, when I know I’m going to struggle to win on these nights, that’s something. But I didn’t get that tonight. The gong show requires a very different skill set and an ability to hold your nerve. I’ve got gigs tomorrow and am closing a show on Thursday with a 20 spot. I’m not having sleepless nights about those shows but the last two or three nights, the dread of tonight’s Gong was definitely affecting my already hopeless attempts at a decent night’s sleep that go back years.
As a storyteller, I feel that doing a Gong show is equivalent to the time in 1991 when the great Bjorn Borg made his tennis comeback after nine years away and insisted on using a wooden racket. Borg was utterly annihilated by the world number 52 Jordi Arrese and would play twelve games in all on his return, failing to win a single set in any of them.
I was about to come on when the MC decided to get someone on stage from the audience. These always strike me as a ruse because usually this ‘audience member’ is a comic and as a comic, even one as introverted as me, you get to know hundreds of comics and the girl that came on is a gong specialist, easily made up of the tough stuff I lack to get through a gong show. She almost made it to the end. I think she kind of deliberately threw it away at the end as if to say, having beaten these nights before, ‘You know what, I don’t need you.’
I was due on as the eleventh act of a very long night but came on twelfth. I was five words in before someone shouted, ‘Fuck off’. And then made two attempts at getting my second line out before being gonged 36 seconds in. The worst of the night so far. The next two acts were gonged off even quicker. The audience had turned. I’d done really well the first time I did The Comedy Store last year but tonight, despite hours of rehearsals, was a disaster. So how does this serve my quest for the elusive happiness? I have the courage to do this, because I gig four nights a week though a Gong show takes even more nerve, but I was up there. But why do it if I know the odds are so stacked against acts like me. It’s live streamed too so many would’ve seen that humiliation. A gong show is blood sport comedy. People go there to see comics crash and burn. Historically, go back hundreds of years and performers would get pelted with rotten fruit at the theatre. In this internet age, even on ‘civilised’ sites like The Guardian, read the below the line comments on any article and you’ll see how quickly so many are to fire off nasty comments. I think a not-insignificant percentage of people have that in-built. It’s not something I can relate to.
I had never considered doing Gongs until I spoke to one comic in the summer of 2022, a brilliant act who told me how he’d done some and how awful they’d been. These days I think he’s beating the gongs but I’m sure he too will struggle to forget his own Gong trauma history.
That’s how comedy works. Nine days ago, I do an excellent pro gig. I was comfortable on stage with an attentive audience laughing throughout. Tonight, bleurgh. But why did I have to do it? How does this serve me trying to get my head right? As I left, I ran into one of my favourite comics on the circuit. We’d just gigged together last week. This guy is old school. His material, in this modern world, means he doesn’t get the gigs he deserves but he is a very funny act. But he saw me and two other acts barely make it to 90 seconds combined. He wasn’t going on until the second half, but he was in a panic because, and there was that word again, this was a ‘nasty’ audience in tonight that he hadn’t encountered in this particular space and he felt he might be in trouble.
I keep trying to find the time to put in a call to MIND to see where I might be able to find the right drop-in group to chew the fat with. I need that companionship I think, and it would be helpful, I think, to sit and talk to people experiencing what I’m living through.
I did a 6k lunchtime run before seeing my aunt and uncle today but as stated in a previous post, the running isn’t lifting my mood as it used to. And the running shoes are definitely shot. My left foot was again feeling it today so I need to get that gait analysis redone this week so I can get the new trainers. At least though I was out on that run. And at least I had the courage to go up on stage tonight knowing that wasn’t a regular stand-up audience I was facing but one made up of a large contingent of pissed-up tourists. I’m also honest enough, as I was when I beat a gong, to know that even if I’d gone through to the final, it wouldn’t alter my mind on how I feel about these shows. If the London circuit was stronger and offered quicker progression, I wouldn’t bother with these nights.
Had the evening been better, I would probably have better appreciated an extraordinarily funny moment tonight in Piccadilly. I had signed in at the Comedy Store and left to have a wander in Waterstones in Piccadilly, which stands on the site of the old Simpsons on The Strand restaurant, famed for its regular appearances in the original Holmes cannon (and the pastiche books), where my late dad used to work when I was a boy. I miss buying books in shops, that experience but they are a tad overpriced there. I left the bookstore at 19.30hours to run through my set four times (for 36 seconds…), having taken loads of photos of books I could only dream of buying but which I’ll try to see if I can find in some of my libraries.
There was some guy in the middle of the road going up to all the vehicles heading towards Regent Street, and trying to cadge a lift of them, whether it was a Taxi, a private vehicle of a bus. He was hailing them all down. It took me a few moments to see he must’ve been high or drunk. There was then this extraordinary moment where he went up to a car window. There was a couple in the front. Neither rolled their window down. The off-his head guy walked to the back of the car, flipped open their boot and proceeded to give this loud Tarzan yell INTO the back of their car. The resonance of the echo was something to behold. Everyone within two hundred metres would’ve heard it. It was funnier than anything I saw at tonight’s gig or probably most gigs to be fair. Had I not been in the ‘zone’, I would’ve appreciated right away that I had just seen something I would never forget.
I always, in my mind, go back to the act who quit stand-up late last year because while he was good at it, he wasn’t enjoying it, and it affected his mental health. I could always connect to that when he told me he was walking away and why he was stopping, but it comes down to if I quit now, I don’t think I would ever come back because I think once you quit something, you should stick to that. And the quitting would bother me. Unless I could get back to writing like I used to, and with everything going on, that’s not likely. I admired him for walking away. That took a lot of courage, because the guy had real potential.
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