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Monday 25 June 2012

Depression straight to DVD sequel.

So, here's something neat. Every morning I wake up and this dialogue plays in my head.
Me: "Well....I have never felt this miserable before."
Brain: "Actually Pete, you have. Yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that."
Me: "So it seems like I try to rationalise it, and make it seem a one off occasion, when it is in fact...every single day that this happens and I try to ignore it?"
Brain: "Yep, it would explain why you want to sit inside in the dark all day, like a Bejewelled loving Howard Hughes."

The Way of the Future...The way of the future...The way of the future...DAMMIT I need a  star gem!


And on such a delightful note, this blog begins. It helps to write about this, so I figured I'd do like a...mid-season recap? I don't know. Let's call it an update from the front, with trenches and shrapnel replaced by this url http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_depressive_disorder with a handy list of symptoms and whatnot.
So I've been on prozac for about 6 weeks, and I've had therapy twice.
Do I feel different?
Yes. I feel like there's less of a filter affecting what I say or do, which is neat for the most part, as I'm able to say or do what I'd like instead of having some 'mental weight' on me. But I'm not 100%. Obviously.
Also Prozac genuinely makes me shift from apathetic and sad  to...more apathetic and less sad. So I'm not exactly happy...which is the main thing in all honesty.
Mopity mope mope.
There's a lot of little...'ticks' so to speak, that are caused by it and are kind of interesting (in a sense) to note down or observe.
One of the more notable ones was the fact I spent an entire week listening to nothing but one Fleetwood Mac album repeatedly (Tango In The Night...if anybody is interested).
This isn't because I really like Fleetwood Mac (even though I do) or that one album (Even though I do), it's because for some reason I was literally incapable of even listening to anything else, playing anything other than FleetWood Mac became a task on par with colonising the moon or piloting a fighter Jet, just completely unfathomable and unheard of.
Here's a re-enactment.

Me: I'm going to listen to some Iron Maiden.
DEPRESSION: LIKE HELL. PUT ON FLEETWOOD MAC.
Me: But...Iron Maiden, or Elvis Costello.
DEPRESSION: FLEETWOOD FUCKING MAC.
Me: Oh ok..
DEPRESSION: NOW SAY YOU WANT TO MARRY EARLY 1980S STEVIE NICKS!
Me: *Sobs*.

I'd like to say that was all hyperbole or exaggerated nonsense, but it isn't. Songs I loved did absolutely nothing for me, and all I listened to was the same 10 odd Fleetwood Mac songs for a week, like an Orwellian playlist.
It'd never work out, that bird's bigger than me.

So yeah...I'm still severely depressed.
It sucks.
I suck.
I want some Lemon Meringue.

Saturday 23 June 2012

Post-Apocalyptic shenanigans: Day 1

I'm alive?
Oh wow.
Oh brilliant.
Oh snap.
I knew my hiding place was beyond the reaches of any corporal entity, they laughed when I said I knew the one place that was deemed non-existent and was out of reach and practically unheard of. But right from the start I knew I was right, I knew that the IMDB forums for the movie 'Maid in Manhattan' was a bleak mote upon the universe that even nuclear warfare would not reach it.

Well, at least ONE person will remember you exist you archetypal formulaic piece of cinematic dross.


Ok, so lets just do a quick one over of myself. Everything seems to be where it was, no hair loss or decayed teeth. My elbow is itchy, although I think that's probably because I haven't showered, so I'll just ignore that.
Out of forums and into the presumed desolate carcass of the old world, but what will it be? Dolorous frozen nothingness, with nothing but the brittle crumbs of former buildings? Or the garish sand-beaten carpet of orange of a world full of blistering heat? I hope it's the former...I don't look good in T-Shirts.

And we have.....SUN! Desert, rocks, small amounts of plantlife, and nary a cloud in the sky. No nuclear Winter for us, although my face will suffice!* Seinfeld Bassline*
The sun is out, looks like we've got a Fallout 3 wasteland on our hands (I'm writing in inclusive nouns, so you guys feel included, suck it Rowling.)

I wonder if Facebook still exists, this would make a nice timeline. And a nice juxtaposition to statuses such as
PETE SMITH IS: Fighting cockroaches the size of a mattress



Hmm, I can't see any buildings. I think I'll head....west, good old reliable west. Stalwart and dependable, like Inspector Morse or the SAS. West it is folks, let's- Wait...did I just see something move?......

.......
......
.....
East!
East it is! East seems cool...yeah, I can dig East.
Shit. Why didn't I get some more reliable clothing...jeans and obscure band t-shirts aren't really fit for somewhere like this, I need something streamlined, ergonomically precise, and sturdy. Yeah, a costume that says 'Don't attack me or I'll BLOODY FUCK YOUR DAY UP'. With my luck I'll probably end up with one of those laughably pathetic jumpsuits from Logan's Run....I really should focus on more important things like getting prozac or food and supplies. But again, those Logan's run jumpsuits are laughably poor. If google still existed I would tell people to use the image search to clarify this, because posting pictures on a blog takes time and I'm a feeb. They would then cup their chin and nod slowly going 'Yes Pete, they are silly...you were correct, and you have fantastic cheekbones.'













Anything less than this will not suffice.


Oh wow, my phone's got signal, how rather anachronistic considering my experience with all things post-apocalyptic. Best send out a mass text to my contacts, I mean, this is a new age, I need to set a standard, a reliable threshold upon which people can feel secure and able to face the mysteries of this new world.

"If your not dead please reply. If you are alive but reply don't then you're a dick. Also, is anybody else really hot? I mean, sheesh, talk about global warming! Hahaha, that was a joke. Pete"


Right, sent.
Let's go East!

40 minutes...I have been walking for 40 minutes and nothing resembling anything other than sand and shrubs have appeared. Can I get just one corpse? Or an airplane wreckage, that'd be pretty neat, I could scavenge for supplies and...pretend I'm on a plane that's crashing...and I'd be all 'OH NOOOOO I'M GONNA DIEEEE!!!! hahaha, just jesting!"
A bag?
Is that a rucksack?
How...arbitrarily placed, did somebody drop it? I mean, it's kind of the sort of thing you'd notice if you just dropped on the floor, it's pretty-oh wait, nuclear strikes- Doi! Almost forgot for a minute.
Let's have a rummage....
12 bottle caps?
How...odd.
Best take them anyway and not bother concerning myself with my ability to store them and immediately gauge their number like Rain Man. Or should I say, LACK OF RAIN Man!! Hahahaha. No seriously, it's probably going to kill a lot of people.
What else...rummage rummage rummage...rummage...rummage.
A spanner. Nope.
A nondescript bottle of water. Did this guy just...put tap water in empty bottles before leaving the house? If so, then he was my kind of guy! Money saving tactics everybody.

Is this? Holy crap- It is...it's what I think it is.
I can't believe I found one so early.
A 'That's what I call Music' compilation CD!

Wait-...no...it's just a gun.
Lame.

Sure it may defend me from rabid wasteland monsters, but it can't play 'Blue' by Eiffel 65...

Thursday 21 June 2012

Stand up set: cut material.

I do stand up.
I had to cut a lot out of my previous set because, rather appropiately, it works best reading it on a blog (OF ALL PLACES) than actually being vocalised, as it straddles between far too 'wordy' and verbose'.


So here's some stuff I cut out of my last gig if anybody is interested.


So a couple I know had been together for a year, and they did the obligatory facebook anniversary announcements because, you know, originality is dead. And a year seems perfectly fine, I’m not one to judge as my potential romantic encounters have the lifespan of a toddler fighting a lawnmower, so a year may as well be a millennia. But it was the way they did it, they both phrased it like this. “Happy first birthday to us!”.
They had turned themselves into a sentient hive mind of a person, they had literally forsaken proper pronoun or rationality and turned themselves into a cult like collective of a person. Somewhere Jane Austen is clawing at her coffin lid with the decayed angry fingernails as she shrieks like a dying poltergeist in the spirit world, this is what love has become. In whatever realm of the collected afterlife, Buddy Holly, St Valentine and John Lennon are having a fistfight to determine who should be most enraged by this.

I liked this, but really had nowhere to go with it or to add it on to anything, so it remains isolated and a fragment. I'm sure you'll cope.

Here's a bit about TV, that was a prelude to my 'Neighbours' set, again cut for pacing issues and because it didn't get laughs as a spoken piece, which diminished the metaphors and phrasing and...whatnot.

I don’t watch TV, I am not an avid TV watcher as I was when I was a child, years ago I’d obligingly sit in front of the TV, as if it was some enforced Orwellian doctrine, if 1984 had cartoon network. And I’d make no noise or movement, I would remain intensely still and silent, with the concentrated precise self collected peace, I was like an Amazonian tribal boy hunting a jaguar, or that man at the park with no kids but he’s still there anyway. And I’d be so involved with whatever was on the tv on a molecular level, that I pretty much shifted into this loud angry nuclear bomb of an individual. It was a self imposed Jekyll and Hyde case, except I’d transformed from a self loathing teenager, into a self loathing teenager who would explode with white hot rage at any interruption or noise. A moth would die in the corner of the room and It’s last solemn throes of life would pierce their way into my ears like a garish missile of sound and ruin Ed Edd and Eddy for me. If somebody walked in and started talking, whatever the volume, they could move a morsel of saliva from one side of their mouth to the other and I would leap up with incandescent hate, like an enraged mother Ape defending her young. I was to put it bluntly, a bit of a dick.
But, no I hardly watch TV anymore, to the extent that it’s such a rapid shift in my life that I can hardly believe I ever watched it. It’s a juxtaposed scenario probably only experienced by denizens of an apocalyptic world, I am Mel Gibson in the Road Warrior, too busy fighting off bandits with a sawn off  to watch Keeping up with the Kardishians. “I’d love to watch America’s Next Top Model but I’ve got to wander this desolate wasteland searching for gasoline.”
America’s next top model, what a wretched piece of television. Tyra Banks is a horrendous human being, she has the most skewered sense of rationality and perspective matched only by a POW broken after a decade of crude torture. I’m more than certain that Tyra banks is merely a mannequin that is a vessel for all the farts in the world.
Anyway, I’ve started to actually have the TV on these days, if I’m on the Xbox or crying into a bucket. 



Again, rambling poetic nonsense that is completely halved when spoken.

This next bit went before my 'chat up lines' and James Bond section. Again, far too wordy and verbose, and unnecessary. It's as if Martin Luther King spent a minute telling people he was black, or if Hugh Grant told people he was British. It's kind of obvious, I didn't need an entire paragraph about my poor lack of relationship history, so it went to the sarlaac pit of my recycling bin.

Every man in this room, I’m about to blitzkgrieg you with schaudenfreude and re-assurance. No matter if you think you’re terrible with the opposite sex, compared to myself, you are a Mongolian horde of charm and appeal. I have learned from experience I am literally a sentient gas cloud of repellance, I am woefully unattractive and about as sexually attractive as an auschwitz documentary. If my existence had some cartoon esque, theme music then every time I talked to the opposite sex, it would play Creep by Radiohead.