So I was wondering this morning, when you have read your newspaper, do you think it is better to recycle it or to leave it somewhere for somewhere else to read? Is the reuse of resources more important than the spreading of information. It's always great to find a free newspaper on the train or the cafe, but can if you are the leaver rather than the receiver can you ensure that the paper will eventually end up in a recycling facility? And does it matter? Isn't it better that the news is disseminated to as many people as possible? Maybe it's my bookcrossing experiences that have made me think like this - both book trails have gone cold incidentally.
What if the newspaper has a big article about how recycling can save the world in it? Then is the ink on the paper, more valuable than the paper itself. Perhaps that piece of paper will be thrown in a bin, but if it convinces another person to recycle all their newspaper for the rest of their life, then it is worth the sacrifice.
But what if the paper is a Neo-Nazi newsletter or Al Quaid handbook though? Then it's probably better to recycle it and question why you had bought it in the first place. If you are in Al Quaida you want to destroy the world anyway, so you'd be glad that it didn't get recycled.
Yeah, you're right. This isn't that interesting. I will move on to my next thought.
As I was heading into town this afternoon I heard a commotion in the distance. A group of teenage girls were screaming in the distance. People were a little startled and looking to see if everything was all right. But the natural inclination was to think that the girls were not in danger, but were just larking around or excited. But it struck me that the female of the species is perhaps foolish to use the scream for so many purposes. A scream is an excellent warning cry, a call for assistance and if it was only used for this then any time people heard the noise, they could rush to the scene and save the day. But women use the scream fro multiple purposes, for greeting a friend, for getting excited at the sight of a pop star, for indicating pleasure at a joke, and of course if one is lucky, at the height of sexual pleasure. But this multi-use of the same sound totally destroys its impact as an SOS, which is its primary and most useful function. Schoolgirls scream so much that, as I saw today, one can pretty much ignore the sound entirely when it occurs. Which would be a shame if that gaggle of girls was being chased by a machete wielding maniac and cleft in twain. But I didn't hear anything on the news about it, so I am guessing that probably one of them had just heard a bit of gossip that the others found mildly surprising. Which apparently warranted blood curdling screams for several minutes.
Come on women. Get your priorities right. Do not scream unless you are in terrible danger. Or in bed with me. When it doesn't really need to be said that you will also be in terrible danger. I am funny.
The show was a sell out tonight, which is astonishing - it's a shame that the last two days fall on the Easter weekend, when so many people are out of town, though numbers are perfectly healthy. Still plenty of tickets for Friday night though if you're at a loose end.
Again it was a slow start, as the crowd tried to work out whether they were going to like me or not (the bee joke had the least response it had ever had, but maybe I have just given myself an issue about it now) but it soon warmed up and generally the cleverer stuff went down well, which pisses on my arrogant theorum of yesterday (Wednesday night audience member and failed dietter, Steve Berry claims that the door at the back was slammed justas I delivered the punchline, which was somewhat distracting - he might be right, though that didn't happen today).
The show is getting longer and more out of control. This is mainly a good thing, leading to interesting new areas to explore, but as my mouth runs away with me I can go too far. I think yesterday I did go back to the perfectly innocent chubby fella in the front row once or twice too often, and though he laughed along to begin with, I now worry that I needlessly offended him. If so and you're reading, I am sorry about that.
Today I made a bad faux pas that almost threw me. I was picking on a young girl in the front row. It is very dark in the theatre and hard for me to see the audience, but she looked like she might be about 17 and was sitting next to a woman who resembled her, but looked a little bit older who was with a man. As I started doing my threesome bit to the girl, it struck me that the women were probably related and that it was sick and funny for me to be trying to get them together. Now, the elder of the women did not look very old at all, but I suddenly wondered if the girl might be younger than I thought and that she was out with her parents and I asked "Is she your mother?"
It turned out that in fact the women were sisters and so I had made an impolite error, which I was annoyed about, because I was going to make the point that she didn't look old enough and that they could be sisters. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me that they could just be sisters, but the brain works in an unusual way. In an attempt to cover this gaffe, I then tried to make it better by saying something much worse as a joke, saying the older sister looked very old and knackered. Of course this was just offensive and the poor actually young looking woman looked upset. I apologised and it was all in keeping with the stupidity and rudeness of my "character", but things had been rocking along and it did knock me back for a couple of minutes - apparently I literally backed off on stage. Luckily I think everyone forgave me.
The end of the show is getting longer and longer and I goad the audience about how they must want to go to the loo and how I am considering seeing how long I can carry on before they start to leave. It is very much against the theatre motto of "Leave them wanting more." I seem to be starting a new genre of "Leave them wanting less". At the end it starts to feel like a boxing match, with two punchdrunk opponents reluctantly slugging at each other. It's kind of an exciting feeling though. It's wrong, yet oddly compelling and people seem to be enjoying the self-destructive riffing that is artificially extending the show. Especially as I chastise myself for the self-indulgence. It works in a theatre and everyone seems to stay. But there is always the fear that my confidence will turn to over-confidence and that I will stretch the elastic until it breaks. After all, only I know for sure how much things are changing night by night. But for the moment, aside from a couple of misjudgements with the audience, I think it's still working out. By the time I am in Liverpool in June though, the show may be an impenetrable babble of self-indulgence.
