For every day of my life from July 7th, 2009 to December 31st, 2011, I wrote a blog. Every single day for almost two-and-a-half years was chronicled in some way, shape or form. It was an exercise designed to encourage me to write but, more often than not, it was the ONLY thing I wrote.
Sometimes it was interesting. Other times it was banal and barely worth a look, but in that sense it was definitely an honest representation of what it’s like to be a reasonably new comedian. It’s all there for you to see, and it’ll stay there, but I can’t keep doing it every day anymore. It’s too much work. Too much hassle. And not nearly interesting enough for you or me.
After getting home from my dad’s on New Year’s Day, I was almost two weeks behind on these things. I wanted to get to the end of the year, at least – even if that meant ending on the horribly odd number of 909 consecutive daily blogs, rather than pushing on to 1000 on April 1st 2012 or the third blog birthday a few months later – but it was a struggle from start to finish. I operated under the delusion that I would carry on into 2012, and as each day passed I made a note on my whiteboard about potential topics that seemed to be the most noteworthy events in my day.
‘Jan 1st: toilet on train,’ it said. ‘Jan 2nd: hoovering stairwell.’ Are these really the most noteworthy, write-about-able things I have for the first two days of a new calendar year? When I’m more up to date with this guff I tend to crack them out fairly quickly without too much thought – for better or worse – but now I was distilling this backlog into the most basic terms, I suddenly became aware of how repetitive this sort of thing can become. On January 3rd I spend all of my day playing a video game, so that was my topic. On the 4th, it was going to be about a dude at a supermarket till reeling off the names of the items I’d bought as he put them in a bag. Is that it? Is that my life?
In truth, no, it’s not. I have a decent life at the moment. Sure, I’m struggling month-to-month to pay the bills, I’m frequently befuddled when comics who seem to offer nothing new skyrocket to success while I languish in a part time job, and I recently had an email from My Comedy Nemesis after my blog about him went a teensy bit viral and he read between the lines enough to confront me about it. For about half an hour I felt terribly guilty about it all because, much like during the show I saw that led to that blog, there were flashes of kindness and honesty in his email that made me feel a pang of affection for the bloke even if I really disliked the sort of thing he was doing on stage.
Eventually I realised I was mistaking guilt for hunger, so I had a Petit Filous and responded to his message. I’m pretty sure a line has been drawn under the affair after my fairly detailed reply about why I disagree with what he does and what exactly I didn’t like about his show and his on-stage persona hasn’t resulted in another message from him waiting in my inbox. We’ll have to wait and see.
Aside from these concerns, though, things are going okay. I like the gigs I’m doing, and I like the direction I’m going. It’d be nice to get more of them, but wouldn’t it always? The various worries related to taking something to the Edinburgh Fringe aren’t hanging over my head because I’m taking the year off. Rather than losing thousands of pounds in Scotland, I’ll try to make a bit of money by doing some work-in-progress shows at the Camden Fringe. Rather than spending August 17th 2012 in the Pleasance Courtyard, nursing a pint after a terrible hangover and fretting over low audience numbers, I’ll be getting married to the woman I love. A much better way to spend the day, don’t you think?
Let’s consider for a second that I was still trying to bash out a daily dose of nonsense long into 2012. It’s safe to say that my good lady-wife wouldn’t take kindly to me taking time out of our first few days of wedded bliss to write a fucking blog, and nor should she. Would you prefer to be quaffing cocktails on a beach or hunched over a laptop writing about how lovely it is to be quaffing cocktails on a beach? I’d plump for the former, personally, and I’d also hate to read about how lovely things are. If we go away for two weeks, that would be 14 days of nothing but pleasantness, and who the hell wants to read about that?
Conflict! Anger! Frustration! These are the things that made this nonsense worth checking in for. Happiness? Love? Affection? Pah. That stuff’s for me. You don’t need to know about it.
I’ll still tweet, of course. I’ll still write blogs. Not being tied to a daily routine (that I frequently fall behind on) means I can write about things on here with a bit more urgency. It means I’m more likely to finally put pen to paper on the tons of ideas that have sat untouched in a notebook for the last year or so. It gives me the opportunity to take a few weeks off for a honeymoon. Would you really begrudge me that much, dear reader?
Good. I should hope not.
Writing every day hasn’t always been easy, but it has often been fun. Long may that aspect of it continue – but on a much more informal basis, thank you very much.
