Today’s a big day for me because tonight, I will be doing my third standup performance at the Kingswood Pub’s open mic night.
And I haven’t written a single new joke. But that doesn’t matter.
Just to add extra challenge and making this a totally Hardcore Mode challenge, before the performance, I will be having dinner with Felicity’s uncle and his wife Valentina.
Two total strangers who are no doubt perfectly normal Canadians and thus are the kind of people I find really hard to relate to or connect with and therefore the meal should be replete with the exact kind of awkward failure to connect I dread the most.
But that doesn’t matter either. Sure, it pumps my social anxiety into the stratosphere, but you know what? Fuck it.
I’m not going to fight my fear.
And I’m not going to give in to it and chicken out of everything to stay home, either,.
Instead…. I’m going to ride that motherfucker.
Like the surfers used to (homo-erotically) say, if it swells, ride it. Surf the fear and use its energy to propel me forward. Ride that rocket as far as it will take me.
Maybe I will succeed beyond my wildest dreams. Maybe I will crash and burn. Maybe I will completely lose my freaking mind.
But whatever happens, I am not going to let fear get the better of me.
Fuck fear. Fuck limitations. Fuck anything that holds me back or drags me under.
Light the fuse on that sumbitch and let’s RIDE.
But before that, I got to get some sleep.
Decided to skip my sleeping pill. Ran out of mirtazapine so I have been taking zopiclone for sleep instead.
I have plenty of it hanging around.
But for what seemed like merely whimsical reasons this morning, I decided to skip the pill entirely and see what happens.
I didn’t sleep. That’s what happened. Duh.
Well, technically, I got around two hours of sleep, then woke up to go pee and found I was completely incapable of getting back to sleep.
So I got up and played FONV for like four hours. Then came lunch and blogging. When I am done blogging, I will definitely give going back to sleep a try.
If I find I still cannot sleep, I will take a zopiclone and try again. I am a little leery of taking the big Z pill at this point because I can’t always predict how long I will sleep as a result, and I have to get in the shower at like 5:45 so I don’t have a lot of time to sleep.
On the other hand, I want to get at least a little more sleep before my big evening. It would increase my stress level exponentially if I was trying to deal with all that while very very sleepy.
On the other hand, it might give me just the right manic edge to be truly, truly terrifying to the audience.
I can make that work for me. I think.
Time for a nap. I hope.
More after the break.
Did the comedy thang for the third time, making it, I suppose, my Junior performance.
That’s how it goes, right? Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior? I don’t know. We didn’t have that kind of thing at UPEI.
Anyhow, my bit went reasonably well. Got kind of lost around halfway through, and hence lost the audience too. Fair enough. I’m new.
At least I have finally found something where I am neither spasmodically incompetent nor naturally so good at it that it’s not even a challenge.
It’s something I can work on, and I plan on doing do every single week. Like I said to Felicity’s Uncle Paul and Aunt Valentina (forgot to tell her how beautiful her name is), there’s two ways to get good at something : studying all about it, and doing it a lot, and I am very much in the second camp.
Hence my writing in this a-here blog every day. I’ve written millions of words into this thing and each one of them made me a better writer. By writing all those words, I exercised that special muscle that turns thoughts and images into sentence and paragraphs, and I benefit from that both in text and in speech.
Anyhow, I didn’t exactly blast them to the back wall with my personality like I planned. Something happens when I actually get up there that has a tendency to scramble my mind and make it hard to follow any plan.
I now know this and will be ready for it next time, and thus hopefully I will be ready to keep my mind from trying to go every direction at the same time and maybe actually put some energy into my performance.
Right now, it’s pretty “all over the place”.
Dinner with Paul and Valentina went fine. I was not all that anxious. Felicity did most of the talking, and I buried myself in my joke list and contributed now and then.
That kept me from getting too freaked out. Just little twinges of panic now and then, easily swept under the rug.
Was thrown a bit of a curveball when I had ordered the bangers and mash and then it turns out they were out of bangers.
So I switched to the house specialty burger, called the Wood Burger, which is very good but very large and I forgot that with that size of a burger, you basically have to eat it with a battle plan in mind, and so the thing ended up falling apart.
Oh well. Next time.
One of these times, I will go up there with gun blazing on my outsized personality and really take the Kingswood by storm.
It probably won’t be any time soon, though. I need to get more experience so that I can concentrate better when I am up there.
Right now, I am still getting used to it.
But little by little, I grow stronger.
One day I will be be stronger enough to leave the next and fly, fly away,
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.