After a good show yesterday and a reasonable crowd of over 100, numbers dropped sharply again today and I let my disappointment affect my performance, which is deeply annoying to me. It still went OK, but I found the shocked responses of the audience a bit dispiriting and wasn’t my usual jolly self, which makes for a different kind of show. I don’t suppose anyone really noticed, but I was cross with myself afterwards.

In the bar across the road someone commented on the men dressed as sperm who are still patrolling the Melbourne streets, handing out condoms (even though this is nonsensical, the condom is the natural enemy of the sperm. If a sperm every gives you a condom I would treat it with suspicion. It is in the sperm’s interest to give you a defective prophylactic.) They said that the sperm had teamed up with another troupe of leafleters who are publicising a show where actors dress in cartoonish suits that make them appear nude (made of see through tight-like material with false genitals and breasts and stomachs attached). Apparently they were creating quite a spectacle and Japanese tourists were stopping to have their photos taken with the sperms and “naked” people.

I commented in my post-show misery that it appeared that the sperm were creating more of a buzz than the show that they were supposed to be publicising and I could envisage a scenario where the sperm get snapped up by a big American producer to take their show to Broadway. “See how the sperm satirise the fragility of their own existence by handing out the very objects that will prevent them from reaching their goal. A goal which is almost an impossibility in any case given the sheer volume of sperm in an ejaculation. It is a telling metaphor for the counter-productivity of our own lives. Of the certainty of our own failure….. Plus the suits are real funny.”

Those sperm will end up advertising soft drinks and crisps and have their own cartoon adventure series and I will be left performing in cavernous theatres to a few dozen easily shockable Australians.

I am pleased for the sperm. They deserve it. Sperm get such a bad deal in our society, it’s good to see a couple of them rising out of the sewers and making it big.

On a similar, but tangential point, I am reading about masturbation at the moment and it struck me that if God didn’t want us to waste sperm, why did he make us produce so many in each ejaculation? Even if one is successful, around about 500 million more are wasted every time anyone spoufs up. Why didn’t he make just one super-efficient gigantic sperm, about the size of a trout which was guaranteed to make it to the egg? Plus it would give men some notion of the agony of child-birth. Maybe that’s why God didn’t do it, because he knew men would never participate in reproduction if it was likely to do them any physical harm.

Maybe the human sized sperm wowing the people on the streets of Melbourne at the moment are all part of God’s plan to move towards that system.

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