If I was an animal today, I’d be a busy bee. Not my ideal choice. Yellow and black is not this season. Having six limbs would make buying jumpers or trousers pretty hard – depending on which category you classed your extra two appendages as. Personally I’d have one extra of each. Therefore I could hold two pints whilst conducting an orchestra and I’d win all triple leg races. Actually that’d be ace. I also like the idea of sticky knees. Except when I forget I have stick knees, kneel down and can’t get back up. That’d be shit. So yeah, not my ideal animal of choice. And yes pedants, its not necessarily an animal, its an insect. To you I say buzz off.
I’ve spent this morning finally getting all my books and CDs from my flat and its amazing what you discover you own. In terms of books, while I definitely own some classy literature that would make people stroke mustaches and do noises like ‘hmm’ and ‘ooh’, this is heavily counteracted by the amount of tiny shit books I have been given as presents and all the novelty crap people think I might like being a comedian. ‘Oh he’s a comedian, maybe he won’t want interesting fiction, he’ll probably just want to laugh. I know I’ll buy him the Zen Of Farting book. Brilliant.’ Actually its the opposite of brilliant. Its tnaillirb. Its that. I don’t know how you say it and I don’t care, but that’s what it is. I do want interesting fiction. More than that, I won’t ever laugh at someone who’s applied Buddhist methodology to anal gas parpings. You know why? Not because farts aren’t funny. They always will be, fact. But reading about them is the equivalent of watching an action film where everytime something gets blown up the screen goes dark and the words ‘exploding stuff’ appear on screen instead of you seeing it. Add this book to the other shit I own: The Camel Sutra – Karma Sutra with drawings of camels shagging; some crap guide to Spliff which no one who’s smoking would ever be arsed to read and by having it on my shelf I may as well have the words ‘wannabe student loser’ stamped on my brain; and The Little Book Of Life – oddly doesn’t just say in big letters ‘Always Be Disappointed, It’s For The Best’ as it should. There are loads more and all of them, individually make me sad that someone has wasted trees on such toss. They shall be promptly delivered to charity shops by the end of the week so others can pass them on as presents to people they clearly hate. If I had more time I’d cut all the words out and set them free in a forest to hopefully become better books, but that would take ages.
I have a similar thing with CDs. Over the years people have, for comedy purposes, bought me things like a Boyzone CD, knowing full well I’d hate it. I, to play along with the gag, would keep it on the shelf till certain drunk moments where it would be played, everyone would boo at the person that got it for me, I’d insist on playing it as it was a present and there would be laughter followed by a quick race to turn it off before our ears bled. This Boyzone CD sat alongside other horrors of music including A1’s version of Take On Me, which should be used in wars to make the enemy cry, Aqua’s Barbie Girl, a Rick Astley album that doesn’t even have ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ on it. Then there are two Billie CDs which I bought for 50p each purely to play them very loud early in the morning when I was in my second year. This was because my friend Mat had the room next to me and would find no worse wake up call than me shouting out of tune ‘Because we want to!’ until he got up. That was comedy gold my friends. Bloody comedy gold. Sadly, now, student days all gone, they have festered in the corner of my CD racks for many years hoping once again to get played but knowing I’d sooner set fire to my eyes. But, and this is a big but, they are still there. Why? Well perhaps I assume that one day I may need them for a comedy thing, despite knowing that I could just get an mp3 if I really needed it. Perhaps its because I’m too afraid of the look from the people in the charity shop when I hand them over. I just don’t know. Either way, I think I may just carve hate words into the back and use them as frisbees in the park tomorrow.
Last note: Both previews at Fat Tuesday were excellent last night. Carey Marx’s show about beliefs and magic was just brilliant, as was Tom Craine’s show. Go see both in Edinburgh. Really do. Go on. Hurry up. Do it now. See it now. Oh you can’t. Well book now and wait. God, you’re impatient. No I’m talking to you, not God. I don’t believe in him. Or her. Or it. So there. No hurry up and by tickets.
