Only two shows left to go. I've woken up, booze free, full of sleep and with the prospect of this festival ending. Up until today, I've been excited about this. The behemoth (the largest of all moths) of festivals is done, and the light at the end of the tunnel is made of glowing vegetables and the prospect of my own bed. I should be dancing over lampposts, kicking over bins and singing various songs from musicals in a high pitched mock US accent. So then why oh why am I starting to feel a little sad that it'll very soon all be over? Well a) partly because I'm a fickle idiot who can never be bloody happy with anything, but mostly b) because the monotony of normal life will hit me in the face like a life brick thrown by a monotonous man. Whilst the endless drudgery of repeating the same words day after day, seeing the same people, never having a day off, can all be soul destroying after a while, the thought of sitting in a service station at 3am with a pasty having just performed to 200 people who consisted of stag dos, hen dos and the general menagerie of people who should never be allowed outside, is worse. After weeks and weeks of having your own show, being someone people have chosen to come and see, suddenly you end up back as just a name on a bill. Suddenly you end up at home, not constantly surrounded by people you like, in bars till 5am, talking about how to play dead seagulls like bagpipes. Bah to the fringe and all its wily ways of making you miss it.
I give myself two to three days before I magically forget hitting the wall halfway through the run, or the two tough crowds I've had, or any of the lows, and start to wonder what to do for next year. Its like there is some sort of mental block that appears once you escape the town's borders, and memory is instantly erased and replaced with the desire to lose thousands of pounds doing it all over again. Its very clever and I'm not sure how Edinburgh does it, but it should surely be looked into as it can only be illegal. Its a kind of special city based mind control. I might ask Derren Brown to investigate it and he can prove it as a fraud and then everyone will start up a festival in somewhere drab instead and spend 3 weeks hating it, then never come back and it'll have to move locations every year in order to make it work. Its like I have all the ideas. All of them.
The end of the fringe is very much like New Year's Day for those with normal working schedules and the next day or so will be spent trying to figure out what to do next in terms of writing, where I want to be in a year's time and exactly what DVD I'll watch as soon as I get home. Priorities. There's loads I'm going to try and cram in, including shows and today me and Keith are heading to the cinema to watch the new Edgar Wright film. I like to say we're going on a Pilgrimage. Arf. Then penultimate show and embracing the night life once again before I return to my slightly more sedate usual post gig service station dwelling. I bet the coffee shop man at Watford Gap Services has missed me.
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