I thanked the hatamoto for letting me leave with my nose

A week went past without a gig. Everyone else in the world seemed to have a gig, but we did not. This is an unhelpful thought. Unhelpful thoughts occur to everybody, arriving unbidden and hanging around like odious lodgers who default on their rent before leaving in the night with your wife and goldfish.

This unhelpful thought is compounded by the fact that I believe the hype about emails, I believe it in the same manner that some people believe in God, at an emotional, visceral and impossibly irrational level. Emails are fast, so that means replies will be fast, so that means if I send someone an email there is no reason why I should have to wait any time whatsoever for a reply because the rest of the world is just sat waiting to reply to ME. This is quite evidently the thought process of a lunatic.

Consequently when I send off an email to someone who is looking for bands to play at their venue I enter a shameful spiral of constant inbox checking and growing anxiety. It becomes an unnatural preoccupation. Some people do reply quickly, setting the bar for everyone else. Some people never reply at all, which is not good. Strangely enough very few people fall in the middle of these extremes.

It’s the lack of reply which is the worst bit. It would be easy to just shrug it off and go “hey, relax, them’s the breaks” and so forth. Unfortunately I have not perfected my shrug yet. Instead my intestines seem to slowly wrap themselves around my lungs, getting tighter with every passing day without a reply until, when a critical pressure is reached, the black bubble of impatience bursts and I roar, usually in Mike’s car on the way to rehearsal “Fuck them. Fuck them in the ear!”

Waiting whilst being manly

You see, it isn’t the rejection that hurts. Rejection is tolerable. Never getting a response is akin to having no voice, to simply being ignored. Of course there are many reasons why a response may not be forthcoming, mostly mundane and administrative in nature. That’s why you deploy the follow-up email strategy. To have your follow-up email disappear into the void is harrowing.

The wounds heal of course, but like the rejection of a lover or the death of a pet, they never really go away. Sometimes I wake up screaming or I will be found checking my inbox in my sleep. At times like these I have asked my nurse that I be restrained and sedated. It is for my own good I reason. One day I awoke to find that I had daubed “Good Manners Cost Nothing” in foot high letters of excrement across the dining room walls. Another time I challenged a promoter to a duel to the death with pistols at dawn. The bounder never showed though. It is with sadness then that I must conclude that whilst I am indeed quite mad, it is the moral decay of the nation which has made it so. God Save the Queen.

Mighty Agrippa, Roman God of the Aqueduct!

Yes, I had a haircut. I had my hair cut whilst watching the Italians almost beating the Irish. I had my hair cut because it was too long and I kept getting it in my mouth, or my dinner, or both. Utterly ridiculous.

Later that day we had a gig in the Shipping Forecast. I think we played a blinder. After months of creaky vocal performances I actually managed to do a proper one, without wheezing or croaking much at all. I even did a bit of showing off, not that anyone would have noticed. I didn’t do a Christina Aguilera. Well, I did in as much as I got some words wrong, but not in the overblown melodic mangling way.

So we played a good gig, but not to many people. Most of the people were elsewhere doing something important and vital I suspect, rather than listening to us although the ones who did listen to us were much appreciated. Whatever it was they were doing some of them had evidently finished it by the time the Speed Pets went on and the rest of them finished after that in time to catch the headliners Rialto Burns. I didn’t ponder this at length or out loud to anyone stood nearby whether they were interested or not. If you happened to have thought I was then that was an imposter.

Jupoopitar yesterday

After that we went and ate some chips. Or maybe we had a drink. I’m not completely sure which one came first. I do know that someone had lethal wind and it wasn’t me. And I do remember stating that everything we do is pointless when considered on an interplanetary scale, and there was something about the music of the spheres or something along those lines.

I thought of a new name for Jupiter. Made me laugh. Shut up.

Oh yes, and we decided that we are going to do a series of open air gigs at random locations of interest which we may or may not tell anyone about. I’m not sure where we got up to with that or whether it came before the chips or after the chips or what. Mike did not dance though. And someone used the phrase “a different set of boobs every day”. I have tried to uncover the meaning of this but so far it has eluded me. Send your answers on the back of sock to the usual address.

Now go boil your head.