Community Singing

So hello...

A quiet 6th of June so far, despite today's Infernal overtones. Apparently we are all going to die in Satanic fire. Hmm. Ten fifty. He's got about an hour left. But yes, quiet. It has been for a while. No more women action yet, despite Melanie's up-bigging of me on Sunday (many thanks; it's not for want of willing, more having no-one at all show even a flicker on interest, ho hum. I am going to stop thinking about that). Work has been fairly low key, consisting mostly of me having to sit on a bus watching an LED sign tell us where the next stop is supposed to be. It has not, as you may have guessed, been the most engrossing time I have ever spent. Kids, shoppers, the elderly and a surprising number of nurses. My Spanish class is clashing with all the good films at The Phoenix... I have learned how to make good roast potatoes... And I am supposed to be able to make this kind of thing funny.

Anyway, Nick and I have been continuing to practice our small act for Friday's big gig. I hadn't made music with anyone for ages. It's huge fun, and never really really annoying for any housemates who might be around. The last band I was in had fallen apart in a shower of apathy and general bonhomie nine months ago and the guitar has been gathering dust ever since. I have instead been dedicated to learning to play the most complicated bass lines I can find. The music the BBC used to use for the cricket is a current favourite - I think it's something by Booker T and the MGs, but I'm not sure. I was twenty before I learned that the Formula 1 music the BBC used to use was the second half of The Chain by Fleetwood Mac. Life has been, as I said, dull.

So with the real excitement lacking, and me not actually being Dylan Moran - much as I'd like to be that's just not going to happen - I have been thinking about acting up. Make some stuff up, tell some lies, exaggerate at least a little bit. Who'll ever know? What can possibly go wrong? Well, I could tell everyone about it for a start.

Not that I am going to go mad. Although, in a way, I am acting already. I have said before that blogging is essentially an exercise in talking to onesself. This way, though, I get to edit what I say before I say it. Normally, when we think if talking to ourselves we think of the crazy man on the bus who smells of farms and keeps laughing at the ceiling. I remember once on the tram in Germany when I was a student:

Max and I are heading into town to buy some, I can't remember, something mundane, anyway. We are sat there when we hear, above the rumble of the tram

Man: Disaster! Elloi! Errint jeder hier, die deutsche Rockband Elloi? Disaster! Elloi!
Me: What?
Man: Wir bedanked zwanzigtausend Zuschauer! Es was so schoen! Disaster! Elloi!

And so on through this man's memory of a gig twenty years past at which he clearly took that one-too-many tab of blotter acid, until we reached the train station and everyone, but everyone, got off.

This may be an extreme example, and also mostly in German, but you get the idea. It was also on a bus in Germany where I was enjoying repeatedly saying my then-favourite German word, Geschlectsverkehr, when Max noticed the funny looks from the schoolkids I was getting and had to gently remind me that it means sexual intercourse. This is not neccessarily relevant.

Where was I? Oh yes. Blogging. We all adpot a public face. Mine is of an uptight Englishman with a chip on his shoulder and a thing about trying to confuse Americans with references to things like public school, Midland Mainline and Test Match Special. Really I am not like this at all. I am polite to the point of being craven and will do anything to avoid a cross word or even a quizzical look. I told someone off today in my capacity as a traffic officer and it was terrifying, even though he was illegally parked and it was my job to tell him. He will hate me now forever and I don't like the idea of that one bit.

Pretending is the new rock and roll. The white kids in Raiders jackets and high-tops pimp rollin' their way through the Shires Centre thinking they look like 50 Cent but actually looking more like Two-and-a-half Pence. The berk on the train leaning intensely into thes screen of his PDA, as if we are supposed to be impressed by him working on a train at quarter to six when we are actually finished for the day and so couldn't think of anything worse. My sister directs in the theatre and is constantly amazed by the huge number of largely talentless Jennifer Lopez wannabes (this is Leicester, not New York, remember) who are full of indignation and Marlboro Lights but no actual talent; when told they cannot be Snow White, they do not accept it and go off to learn to act, but instead call her a dyke and then cry. On Hinckley Road today on the way home from work I was passed by a man in a Ferrari who was clearly driving it around in first gear so it sounded like a racing car. My first instinct was to throw a bomb into his passenger seat, but lacking as I did a bomb I settled on tutting instead. Wanker. He'll destroy his engine doing that, and frankly, it'll serve him right.

It's all an act. This is an act, although the increasing lack of focus is very real. It's half eleven, and on a school night too. I should go to bed. But then, my DVD of Bad Santa is in the player, and that's a hell of a film. Do you hate Christmas? Watch this. I don't know what Angelina Jolie was on about. On the strength of Bad Santa I'd happily marry Billy Bob Thornton. As long as he doesn't sing.

Don't think I'm a traffic warden, by the way. I'm not. I just want to make that clear before I look tomorrow and find that all my friends are... gone.

Good Night, And Good Luck
Dougal