It’s been a bit of a nothing week, but I needed that. I went into this week with 17 nights off from the hell of the stand-up circuit, though that unintended break has been eaten into now as I pick up the odd gig this month. I think this brief sabbatical came about unintentionally because of the amount of time the flat and its various fixes, Checkatrade-admin, are taking up day to day. While it wasn’t planned, it is welcomed. I make no bones about how I feel about the gigging. I believe I can go all the way, but at what cost to my long-elusive happiness but also to the thing that has probably cost me that happiness, the writing? You cannot switch off if you’re a performer. It goes beyond the writing. There’s all the rehearsing, the managing your pre-gig anxieties (some of which is needed I think, you need that edge) and then the crushing disappointment of being on yet another badly run night.
Last Saturday night was a case in point. I ventured out in the heavy rain for what was a 10-spot in central London only to find the absent promoter had passed the night on to a young MC, the former having booked on all of his pals onto the night meaning there were too many acts. The 10 I’d rehearsed throughout the day now had to be a 5 and so I had to step out of the venue, work out what short set I was going with and manage as best as possible. I ended up fluffing one line at the end but at least I had the skill and experience now to handle this. It does remind me of the issues NYPD Blue actors (Series 1 of that show changed TV forever and remains the finest single year of TV I have ever seen, despite all the great shows that followed after it) had with co-show runner David Milch, whose drug issues meant he would write on the hoof and present actors with hand-written scripts and changes on the day those actual scenes were being shot. It’s like that.
I’m just not being very effective at anything right now. There’s too much stuff going on, the focus is shot, the sleep just isn’t there and the mood’s default setting is a worrying one. I do put a not insignificant part of that down to the stand-up. If I could rediscover the focus of old needed to write to a serious level, I would imagine the little desire I have to continue gigging would be quashed and I can get back to doing things that work better for the person that I am and want to be.
This morning I’m off to a film location with my DOP. This is for the long-planned, long-postponed comedy short I’m making in the new year. The plan is to see if that single location, a big place, can be passed off as multiple locations. I’ll be taking a few pictures, getting my DOP’s thoughts on what he makes of the place and chat about it over a coffee afterwards.
Tomorrow, Saturday, I’ve got a Zoom session with a friend to troubleshoot the sound mixer issues I’ve been having since my desktop PC was repaired earlier this year. This is preventing me from even considering releasing the still unedited 32 episodes of my old nostalgia football podcast and I have been considering whether the show can in any way be salvaged and monetised. The Facebook page for the show, and indeed my old, now-deceased Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available show which ran for 400+ episodes across a decade, are still out there but I lost access to them earlier this year and they have now been disabled. I could, though it would be an admin-heavy job, create a new page for the football show, but it would be a duplication of the rudderless page I can’t access. Far from ideal. I have found a useful site that advises on how to try and contact Facebook who have to be the hardest social media of any to deal with. The group pages were created years ago because I had never wanted a personal FB page. It was only last year when I had to finally give in and create one just to get comedy gigs because FB is the standard way to book gigs. That tells you something probably about the demographic that run the circuit.
My last run was on Monday. Like the stand-up, I have welcomed a break from what is, along with the gigging, my least favourite activity, but which along with the gigging is the activity I do the most, and that is because of injury. I can only hope this is resolved by replacing my running shoes. I’m not sure it will be though the running shoes certainly need replacing and I’ll be doing that over the next few days. I’ve got an old friend, a big runner, looking at a shortlist of running shoes I’ve sent him and await his thoughts. With these things, you’re meant to do your due diligence and check the reviews but of course, that one negative review will cast a long shadow over the 50 or so positive reviews. But I will check the reviews.
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