HeadSpill

Add to My Profile

The Apple Bar, Bristol. It only serves cider. It’s on a boat. What more do you want! I’m in heaven! (Some swearing)

I’m moving in with my girlfriend. It’s horrendous and wonderful all at the same time. I have agreed to share the same space 24/7 for the foreseeable future with a person who has a direct influence over my emotional and behavioral wellbeing. Am i Fu****g mad, or as I suspect possibly in **v* and becoming…I can’t even type the word….comfortable. It terrifies me.

I’ve been doing lots of ‘hard thinking’ recently, which is usually reserved for dire times such as the death of a relative or serious personal injury, where my brain goes into ’survival’ mode and strips away all the many fold creature comforts and niceties right down to the bare bones of what I need to get by. It wasn’t pretty, and kind of came down to a series of pros and cons. Pro’s included happiness, sharing, no longer being lonely, sex and knowing someone with a video camera. Cons included no more privacy, increased responsibility both financially and personally, and the slim possibility that it might not work out. But I don’t want that, and I have a tendancy to over examine things a little too much at the wrong end.

I love taking risks, and this is a massive wonderful risk, and I can’t live in a shared house forever.

It’s Saturday, I’m in a smoothy cafe in Bristol, it’s raining. Life is good.

Leicester summer sundae festival. It’s cult rock poet John Cooper Clarke! How we laughed at the naming similarity. Well, not really. But how rock is he? Well on close inspection most of his face is made of gold, even his eyes. I was impressed.

I am becoming addicted to Hopi ear candles. I had my ears done with them and now I don’t feel like my ears are properly clean without having them done at least once a fortnight. I’d wanted to try them ever since I saw the picture in the holistic therapy shop of an old woman lying peacefully on her side while an unidentified hand holds a lit a candle made of beeswax in her ear, like her head’s a big waxwork cake, or she’s just died and they’re having some sort of weird party.

I also didn’t understand how they work either, and in my speculation before I got the courage to use one I made up my own theory about how they worked. What they actually do is create a kind of vacuum chimney in your ear because the candles are hollow so it gently sucks the wax out of your ear, but not knowing this I came up with the idea that their must be some kind of really long wick on the bottom that is pushed into your ear like an enema and all the wax drips down and mixes with the wax your ear, then cools down and you pull the whole thing out like one big plaster of Paris mould of your ear drum which you could keep and put in a jar.

Since I came back from the US I have work coming out my ears. Some good, and some utter bobbins-but-needs-doing-to-pay-the-bills. Gigs are slowly picking up as the new season approaches, and there’s been plently of freelance stuff on, but some things still need doing, like the small matter of looking for a flat with my partner of seven months, she’s in Edinburgh at the moment and I’m not. Not that I’m jealous or anything, I’m not (Grrrrrr). When she returns we begin the hard veiwing and staring and looking process. Having done one viewing myslef recently just to familiarise myself with the process, i now have my bull**** meter turned up to eleven to dismiss anything and everthing I hear from anyone from a lettings agency. If and when I, er, we, find somewhere we like, I reserve the right to fiddle with taps, poke things down radiators, sniff paint and afterwards drive to the property at night to measure the distance to the nearest shop selling fresh bread and monitor how long it take for two kids to drive past that constiutes ‘gang activity’ until I am wholely satisfyed that the new abode is a silent but accessable stealth castle, in which the feng shui will prevent all arguements from ever happening, and there is a wall big enough to for me to hook up my projector to my HD laptop with the Geforce 8600gt inside it and play Oblivion with the widescreen settings on, 8ft wide, like it’s on at the IMAX down the town. Such a place exists, I just need to find it.

I’m back now, so all this is in the past tense.

If the first week was about travelling and seeing shiney new things and places, then the second was more localised. Rock Island, Illinios is a quiet place, the Holiday Inn was serviceable and the big ice machine was fun to use. Over the course of the Comedysportz tournament the most interesting aspect I found was how the teams played out depending on their background and were they from. The Rock Island home team were very rough and ready, whereas the Los Angeles team were incredibly slick and just oozed performance from every pour. Some were actors who did improv, some where stand ups who did improv, and some were purebred improvisers.
Getting to know of one of the LA team, a chap called Rick, I got a tad upset. He had not just the apperance, but the manner and charisma one of those ‘beautiful people’ you see on telly all the time. Ir was lik everywhere he went he knew exactly how to see the light, and made every environment he stood in look like a set from a commercial. On speaking to him I fully expected to be intimidated by talk of castings (one of the ref’s was in a pepsi commercial while the tourney was on,) and the whiff of ego, but got niether. He was a humble friendly chap. How annoying.
We won our match against Chapel Hill, not hard considering there was 2 of them and 8 of us. We even gave them two of our players for the match.
Four days of wall to wall comedysportz was a blast, and very intense, but about the right length. Highlights include meeting a bloke call Ed Trout, who reminded me of a cross between my old mate Dave and Frank Zappa. He had really good posture. Also standing next to the toilet in ‘Momma Comptons’ restaurant at 3 in the morning quoting references from the character ‘box’ in Logans run to Luke from Portland while eating superman flavour ice cream.

We did and English stand up gig on the last friday was beautiful. A room full of expectant locals and the CSZ teams all watching English guys being funny, and they loved it as much as we did.
The picture here is on the toilet door of momma comptons. Does it look innapropriate to you?

At the end of the week I was becoming a bit tired of the over and innaropriate use of the word ‘awesome’. And I found out I’m a bit shit at volleyball, after that I was ready to go home.