Sometimes I come out of a sort of haze of living in the moment, step out of my body and think: “What the hell has happened here?”. I did just that this morning as I was doing my routine, which now involves having coffee on the roof of the dutch barge and talking to the swans. There’s a pair of them on the opposite side of the river and I’ve named them Captain Stickleback and Baroness Katerina…. Look I live on my own on a boat and I’m embracing the solitude, this includes the craziness. Anyway this morning a couple of Canada Geese joined the stale bread party and were pretty aggressive and loud about the whole thing, like when your party gets crashed by friends of friends that still take M-cat and think Dapper Laughs is funny. So in the midst of this early morning Dr Doolittle interaction I exclaimed to the hissing barely evolved dinosaurs “Get over yourselves and shut up you fucking morons”. A cold feeling washed over me as I suddenly saw what I’d become – a man pushing thirty still in his pyjamas being wound up by geese to the point were he lost his temper. I shuffled back inside shaking my head saying to myself “I really need help, I think I really really need help”. Still you must remember even though this incident is potentially worrying, it IS definitely still funny. The same as when I watch the short clip from a Werner Herzog documentary about scientists in the South Pole I cathartically laugh and cry with tears of joy and sadness. The clip involves Werner in his dry Bavarian tone narrating his quest to find “insanity amongst penguins”, he finally finds his quarry in a penguin who seemingly cannot take the monotony of penguin life and runs off to the mountains to its certain death.
The choral music and the severity of Werner’s tone I have always found hilarious but suddenly yesterday something happened and I saw myself and my struggle with my colony embodied in that penguin. Tears of laughter turned to sadness and I croaked “That penguin is me”… Which made me start laughing again turning me into a confused Frankenstein’s monster of emotion. And that IS funny. My emotions are all at the front these days after hitting depression hard, I don’t have the energy to keep them in and frankly I don’t care too much.
I understand why some people I know and have talked to find it uncomfortable when I jovially retell stories of me having a breakdown in front of a statue of Buddha because I was jealous of how peaceful it looked….. Or when I went on a date wearing gloves and she freaked out a bit when she went to hold the end of one of my fingers and it wasn’t there….. I get how people may think that this is sad or upsetting for me but please please please don’t ignore how funny it is too. Otherwise you won’t find the show I’m doing at Edinburgh this year at all enjoyable.
Yes! I was talking about doing a one man show as a natural evolution from this blog and I actually took the plunge and applied to the Edinburgh Fringe. Two days later I was offered a slot at Just The Tonic for the full run. It is happening and it’s all down to me, which is what I have wanted for a long time. So I need to write a one man show about my life and experiences with my non-conformist left hand and so far I have a title – Wretched. A title gifted to me by Karen Hobbs which is a play on my own name (Richard-Wretched) which also means: A thing of poor Quality. So thats going on the poster…
My life has changed dramatically in the space of less than twelve months. The whole landscape of my future has transformed, stepping out of myself during goosegate this morning made me really look at this. I’m by no means in a green rosy place but for the first time in a long time I can see a direction.
Much Love Richard