Well, that didn't last long. The excitement of getting lots of likes on Facebook encouraged me to start racing around between shows, trying to hit five a day and drinking lots of coffee. I am currently in Musselburgh in the garden of the pub having a coffee. The muscles in my legs feel as if they have been cut, like what happened to Achilles in the Trojan War. It was lots of fun but now my mind is a fog and I tremble as I lift the cigarette to my lips and call out for another call sausage.
It was fun. I was the big man. It was a well wind of conversation, excitement, conversation, did I already say that?
Try again. Fail better.
Yesterday ended when the fire alarm went off in Summerhall. I am speaking this post into my phone. I can't say the names of the shows that I saw, because my voice recognition technology will always spell them incorrectly. This feels more difficult than making it from the Pleasance Dome and Princes Street in five minutes. I thought it would be a right laugh to combine a sleep restraint programme with my Fringe antics. Few things are as funny as I think they are going to be when I do them.
The list of things that are not as funny as I thought they were now include a late night podcast in which I pretend that I am some kind of DJ giving shout outs to my imagined listeners. And there is the manifesto that I have written for playwrights at the Fringe, and a monologue describing the difference between mythos and logos. Don't forget the way that my conversations have turned into rehearsals for the next blog post, trying out jokes on any poor PR who can't avoid my stare.
There is cool stuff going on but I have to spoil it. I went to Without Sin at Summerhall. It invites two people into a guided conversation, a structured intimacy. The one moment when free conversation is encouraged and I insult a stranger. They said something to me that showed how they had listened and understood me. I told them that they were boring.
I watched Beautiful Evil Things and spent the performance asking why the script didn't mention my groundbreaking research on gender difference in Classical Greek - research which I have not published and cites a Nazi. I saw Shadow Kingdom, a show about not going on the phone in bed and immediately went outside to check my Facebook likes. I am the critic who thinks that the play is a prelude for the real art, my review.
Tomorrow the mad parade will continue. I shall be back in the press offices, lecturing professionals about subjects they know about. Listen feminists: let me define the patriarchy. Lived experience doesn't trump a YouTube video I listened to as I fell asleep. I have 250 words and each one is a bullet of truth. I don't care, artists, that you spent six months and a mortgage refining your production. I wrote this review in the Assembly Bar and it holds your future. I am Death, destroyer of worlds.
Don't look behind the curtain. I said ignore that boy who is lost and lonely and looking for attention. He isn't the Mighty Oz.
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