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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 2 days

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I don’t keep up with new music nearly as much as I used to. Not even discovering new artists or anything, but even new stuff put out by people I already like, it passes me by more than it used to. Late in 2023, I was shocked to learn two of my absolute favourite musicians had put out new albums in 2022 and I didn’t even notice. For most of my life I’ve found out about new music – both new artists and new albums – via folk festivals and country music blogs. Which is why so much of my music collection is Canadian folk music and American (plus some Canadian) country music.

But I haven’t been to a folk festival since pre-COVID – last year I finally started going to see live music again sometimes, this week I’ll be going to my sixth music gig since last August, which is less than I used to but significantly more than I did from 2020-2023, and it’s been really good. I let myself forget, in the depths of the pandemic, how big a part of my life live music was. I took it for granted most of my life, just going to folk festivals with my dad because that’s what happens every summer. And while I’ve been back to concerts, I haven’t been back to festivals, so I haven’t learned about anything new. And I don’t read country music blogs anymore because I’m too busy reading comedy forums.

So aside from blogs and festivals, how am I supposed to know if even my very favourite musicians put out new stuff? I also don’t do Twitter or anything. And of course I don’t do Spotify. I didn’t really know how Spotify worked until recently, I was just vaguely aware that it’s some demon ruining the music industry so I never looked into it. And I am still not going to look into it! Don’t worry everyone, I still have my principles, I am still horrified by the fact that my brother owns no music files and thinks it’s fine to just rent access to music that he only gets to keep hearing as long as he keeps paying and he has internet access and a corporation chooses to keep it on their platform.

However, my friend whom I moved in with in December uses Spotify, and when I hang out with him in the living room, we listen to music via the TV that’s connected to his computer, and I have to admit it’s convenient. Especially when I started typing in my favourite artists and learned that some of them have entire albums I hadn’t even known about. And, even though I’m pretty sure algorithms are a terrible thing to introduce to art, I have found a few new people I like from that.

I haven’t entirely sold out, though, because I did not sign up for Spotify (I would genuinely never do that, I will draw the line at occasionally benefitting from my roommate using it), I went and bought the albums on Bandcamp. Quick reminder of a thing that I never miss an opportunity to remind people, Bandcamp is the way to buy music where the highest percentage of the profits go to the artist (aside from just handing them money for a CD at a gig, I guess), also it’s the most convenient way to get it for the consumer (one easily downloadable folder with every song on the album as DRM-free mp3s).

I also recently raided the CD collection in my dad’s basement, because there was a bunch of stuff I knew he had and I knew I liked but was somehow not in the music collection on my hard drive. So as a result of that, I have a bunch of new music, and I’ve been greatly enjoying it.

Okay, here’s the actual point of this post, after all that pre-amble: Cody Jinks put out an album one month ago, thanks to the evils of corporatized technology I became aware of it when it was only a month old, I’ve been listening to it non-stop for several days, it’s fucking fantastic. It might be my favourite Cody Jinks album, though I’m aware that recency bias in in play. And I like Cody Jinks’ previous stuff a lot.

I should actually say that this might be my favourite Cody Jinks studio album, because he has a live album called Red Rocks Live and nothing's better than that. It's a solid cross-section of his earlier work so a good introduction, if anyone's interested in getting to know him. Which you should be, if you like his sort of thing. His sort of thing is modern American outlaw country music by a guy who used to be in a metal band. All the best country singers used to be in metal bands (him and Corb Lund).

This live version of his song Head Case is as good as country music gets. Good thing to play for anyone who spouts that claim that country music was only good back in the 70s (it was good back in the 70s, but probably wasn't good back then either if the only thing you listened to was pop music on the radio that incorrectly markets itself as country). My horrible abusive high school coach used to nickname me and any other athletes who struggled mentally/psychologically "head case", and now I play this song whenever I get sad about that, which definitely isn't that often or anything because I'm fine and not still trying to win every argument I had when I was 17. Definitely not.

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Anyway, his new album is called Change the Game, and I can't stop listening to it.

It covers the usual themes - sad, angry, drinks too much, would like to stop drinking so much (going a little harder on that last point than some of his previous albums, or maybe I'm just predisposed to notice that these days), and of course the designed outlaw country anthem, in this case it's the title track and it's great. I keep finding new stuff in it.

I often find that my favourite songs on an album change from what they are when I first hear it, but at the moment, the one I've had on repeat the most is:

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And then I listen to the level of guitar going on in this one that's ages ahead of some of the older stuff:

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But I think once the initial excitement of the new album wears off, this song is going to end up as my favourite:

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I was on the bus to work yesterday when I first put this one on and had to change the track, because the bus is not an appropriate setting for being as emotionally moved as I was by a lyric like "Don't waste your days on dreams that don't fill you/Find out what you love, and let it kill you".

Anyway, I might need to start subscribing to some musician mailing lists or something. Because I'm not signing up for Spotify or Twitter but it is nice to actually find out about this stuff.

#Youtube

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 2 days

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I put my listening to the John Robins/Elis James Radio X podcasts on hold a few weeks ago, due to, as they say, factors, but after a couple of weeks I've decided it's probably okay, I probably don't need to avoid everything forever, and also, I'd gotten to episode 250, over 300 if you include the bonus ones, it only goes up to episode 264, I can't go that far and not just finish the thing. So I'm going to just finish the thing, and then decide whether to jump into the BBC ones or just forget I ever started this.

Put on episode 251 on the way home from work today, a December 29 episode where Elis is off having a family so John just talks to the producer, it gets to this in literally in the first five minutes, and I find myself sitting on the bus thinking - Jesus Christ, Robins. Was it always this bleak?

All right, strong tone to set for the last leg of the bleakness journey! I ended up drinking with my roommate a few days ago after telling myself I wouldn't and I am still upset with myself about it, so actually that tone is about the appropriate level of bleakness for my current state, I am personally on board with it. But it's probably good overall that Elis is usually there to lighten things a bit.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 2 days

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April 2024 was a big month for Scottish comedians on television networks. Here are some things I watched.

Baby Reindeer

I watched this a couple of days ago, and in those couple of days I must admit I have done some Googling and have come to the conclusion that the last thing the world needs is one more person publicly expressing anything about that show. It’s a very good show. It’s very well made, well written and well acted and a compelling and terrifying story well told. I highly recommend it if you like that sort of thing, though I do recommend first looking up what sort of thing it is, because trigger warning for just about everything. Mainly stalking and sexual assault.

I do not recommend further Googling, as I found out after watching it that that it was apparently much closer to “true crime” than I’d thought initially. I mean, I knew it was based on a true story. I knew it covered the same part of his real life as the autobiographical story in his stand-up show Monkey See Monkey Do, which was broadcast on Comedy Central and which I also watched last week and it’s also very good.

But it’s looking like Baby Reindeer may be less fictionalized than I’d assumed, and maybe covers ground that’s less resolved/consigned to the past than I’d assumed, that makes it seem like a weird thing to put on Netflix, and definitely makes me think it doesn’t need more people pontificating about it publicly on the internet. So I won’t do much more of that. Something seems a bit off in general and makes me want to stay away from much comment. This part of the post would have been a lot longer if I’d written it a couple of days ago. Seriously though, it’s a very good show. If you assume it exists in a vacuum.

Dinosaur

I watched this because I liked Ashely Storrie from things like The News Quiz, and she has a special I liked on Radio 4, and, you know, autism stories. I think I made a mistake by watching it immediately after I watched Baby Reindeer. I’d thought I could use it as a bit of a palette cleanser for that heavier show, the way if I see a horror movie I always have to immediately watch an episode of 30 Rock after or I can’t sleep. But Baby Reindeer’s heaviness got so deep in my head that it made it hard to get too into anything else, so my enjoyment of Dinosaur suffered for that, which is not Ashley Storrie’s fault.

I’m pretty sure this show is pretty good for what it is, which is a fairly formulaic sitcom but with the twist of an openly autistic main character who can point out how bullshit more sitcom tropes are. Watching two people get married when they’ve known each other for two months is more fun to watch from the perspective of an outsider who thinks it’s stupid, than it would be to see it just from their perspective.

This show definitely picked up steam as it went along, and as the characters developed slightly beyond stock sitcom people. I think my favourite parts of the show were Ashley Storrie at her paleontology job, so I was sorry that we didn’t see much of that after the first episode. I’m just not that into shows based around a wedding, even if it’s only to point out how bad the idea is.

Overall I came away thinking it was all right, but also that I’d definitely watch a second season if there is one, because by the very end I’d found myself starting to get invested in the characters and thinking this has potential. And the wedding’s happened now so season 2 might be built around something else. And I did think the main character was good. Six episodes was just not quite enough time for me to fully get into it.

Fern Brady – Autistic Bikini Queen

Fucking brilliant, as good as I expected it to be and that was a pretty high bar. I’d heard probably 40% of the material before in some form or another, because small parts of it were in her previous show and her next show, bits of it were in her book, and I’ve sought out so much Fern Brady stuff that I’ve seen her tell a few of these stories in other contexts. But that made it seem like a consolidation of the best jokes I’ve heard her tell before, plus a bunch of stuff I haven’t heard, and it was so good.

It is, as she says at the beginning, only a bit about autism. Well only a bit of it is explicitly about autism – the rest is about her views on life and death and love and marriage, and those are of course partly influenced by autism, and they feel refreshing and interesting and funny to me. The hour went by so fast, I thought it was only about halfway done when she started wrapping up.

I love her delivery so much, I think it's improved over the years and really peaked here. The confidence really adds to it.

There isn’t one obvious theme, aside from the idea that romanticized notions are bullshit, but it still feels like everything she says makes sense together. There’s no classic “sad bit at the end” (though it does build to a fun little ending, no spoilers), but it still felt meaningful as well as funny. A lot of it was delightfully rude but it wasn’t funny (just) because it was rude, and it was edgy without being, you know, a dick about it. All the other words that get thrown around about Fern Brady, brutal and honest and whatever else, were earned. And it was funny.

I hear she’s cracking America now, so everyone should watch this (plus the two other specials she has on YouTube) so you can say you were into her stand-up before she was a huge American star (she's already a fairly huge British star, but still).

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 3 days

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The big story of the 300th Bugle episode AO (after Oliver) should be that it's Ahir Shah's debut, but I'm 7 minutes into it and Hari Kondabolu is already stealing the show. For anyone who doesn't know, Hari Kondabolu is an American comedian who became a Bugle regular I think because John Oliver must have recommended him, as I cannot imagine him crossing paths with Andy otherwise. His role on the podcast is to be sardonic about politics and baffled about Andy Zaltzman, and it's frequently gold (he also has several very funny comedy albums on Bandcamp, if anyone's interested in that).

He hasn't been on The Bugle in a while, and I'd forgotten that sometimes he likes to come on UK comedy podcasts and talk shit about the entire UK comedy industry. He did this in much more detail on the Comedian's Comedian podcast, I found his episode a fascinating exploration of UK vs US comedy. In that episode Hari did express admiration for various UK comedians and for their work ethic as a group, it was a nuanced conversation about pros and cons on both sides and made a great interview. That, however, is less funny than Hari just turning up on a podcast with 2 English comedians and shit talking their entire life's work, as he's done within the first seven minutes of this Bugle episode.

Andy Zaltzman: So, you two shared a flat in Edinburgh in 2011?

Hari Kondabolu: Yes, yes. Ahir was a fetus at the time. He was still in the womb, yet somehow finishing up at Cambridge. And I was a 28/29-year-old comic, hungry, excited for the future, thinking there was a career for me in the UK and beyond. And, no. No, not so much.

Andy Zaltzman: So, Ahir, are you going to Edinburgh this year?

Ahir Shah: I'm going back to the Fringe. I'm going to do a fortnight of the show I did last year.

Andy Zaltzman: Well that sounds like quite a long show. Is this the edited down version of it?

Ahir Shah: Yeah, it's like one of those Mark Watson things that takes absolutely fucking ages.

Hari Kondabolu: Has anyone ever made money at that festival? My understanding of how your system in the UK works is that you spend two weeks to a month in Edinburgh, and you lose all your money, and you owe your management company all the money for putting up the show, and then you spend a good chunk of the year paying them back. It seems like it only works because you have good social services that allow you to survive somehow.

Andy Zaltzman: That's a charmingly nostalgic view of the state of British social services, to be honest.

Ahir Shah: Yeah. The Edinburgh Festival, brought to you by the NHS.

Andy Zaltzman: Well, you know, it's just good for creativity. Most great figures from the creative arts through history were stung into action by needing to earn money. So that's the way the Edinburgh Festival works, clearly, is it makes people hungry in that regard.

Hari Kondabolu: I really do love watching a bunch of half-finished hours of comedy that should have probably taken a year or two more to be polished and perfect, but of course the drive for having a new hour every year is so important. And then making the full hour of comedy brilliant, and then not recording it, and sharing it with the world. Therefore no one has ever really seen it other than a few people in your own country. It's a brilliant strategy.

Andy Zaltzman: It's a great strategy, yeah.

Ahir Shah: I'm feeling really intensely patriotic at the moment, after all of these - it's like, you leave our festival alone, okay? You visited one time. You visited one time. It doesn't even count.

Hari Kondabolu: I did visit one time.

Andy Zaltzman: Well maybe we should take up the New York system of just doing the same seven minutes for twenty-five years, and ending up bitter at why fame has passed you by.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 3 days

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Update: I've just realized there has been a Perrier (or whatever it is) Award winner in every Taskmaster season since 13. Bridget Christie, John Kearns, Jenny Eclair, Sam Campbell, John Robins. So we have to be due for Ahir Shah next, right? Him or Jordan Brookes or Richard Gadd, according to the pattern. And they wouldn't break a pattern, would they?

Yes! I think it was just over a year ago when I first asked when we're going to get Ahir Shah on The Bugle, because he'd be great. Now they just need to get him on Taskmaster, and quick, before The Bugle raises his profile so much that he's too big for TM.

Also good to see they've got Hari back, it's been a while. Oh, and, small thing, this is episode 300. After doing 295 in the original run with John Oliver. Andy got so close to 300, and then HBO made him start all over, and he still got back there. Well done!

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 3 days

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 4 days

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Just finished watching Baby Reindeer and Jesus Christ that was intense, I knew it would be from what I'd read and from watching his Monkey See Monkey Do show last week, but still, I would say it was even harder to watch than I was prepared for. Very good, well made and everything. But way too much going on for me to make any thoughts coherent enough to put into a Tumblr post within 20 minutes of having finished the show, which is when it is now.

I'll probably make an actual post about the actual show at some point, but in the meantime, in the absence of me knowing what else to say about it, I will say that if you finish watching Baby Reindeer and then Google Richard Gadd's early stand-up to see how similar it really was to what we saw in the show, you will learn that the jokes in the show were actually taken verbatim from his real routines, such as this one where he's compered by Baby Ed Gamble in 2012:

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And if you watch that video, possibly while having the same algorithm-influencing search history as I do, you will find this video in the sidebar, which I found quite funny:

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Elis James heckling his co-host from a different mic is pretty funny. Baby Reindeer was fucking horrifying but very good. Those are all the comments I've got at the moment.

#Youtube

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 5 days

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This is a post I decided to make entirely for my own reasons and is definitely not just me doing that thing I do sometimes where I read something elsewhere on the internet and write a reply to it in a post on a different website to people who don’t have the original context. Such petty behaviour is beneath me and I would never do that. But anyway, here is how a post comparing Jon Richardson to John Robins should look.

They have a lot in common, obviously. They’ve both based their comedy personas on “I am bitter and anxious and think about things until it ruins my life and get upset when other people do things differently from me, and for related reasons I have a drinking problem”. Both of these comedic personas are… I mean, if it’s that far apart from the reality, then they’ve done a hell of a job of committing to the bit for nearly 20 years. I assume the truth in overlapping personas is why they venerate each other’s work so much, and get along so well, Jon Richardson seemed to get Robins in the divorce (his, um, first divorce – the first time he got divorced from a blond comedian with ADHD). There’s not a lot of point in pitting them against each other when they seem to go together in many ways.

However, here are some differences that immediately come to mind:

- I guess I can’t speak to this for sure as I haven’t listened to Jon Richardson’s solo radio show (aside from the couple of Robins-featuring episodes that I’ve listened to as part of my Robins-completism), but based on the radio shows I’ve heard – all of the Jon/Russell 6 Music era from 2006 to 2008 and almost all of the Elis/John XFM/Radio X era from 2014-2019 – Jon Richardson is really harsh on the radio and mellows a bit in his stand-up. While John Robins gives us a bit of a moderated and euphemized version of his darkness on the radio, and then just unleashes it all in stand-up. The latter version seems like the logical way to do it, given the nature of radio and the nature of stand-up. But I think Russell specifically brought out something in Jon that made him furious, so when he was on his own he comparatively calmed down.

- Having said that, I would argue that mostly, Jon Richardson’s stand-up is about how his outsider way of doing things is better and everyone else should do that too. While John Robins, in stand-up, will tell you his manifesto and then quickly acknowledge that trying to live this way has ruined his life and it would be better if he could be more like other people. But on the radio it’s the opposite. John Robins mostly defending his own darkness-based choices, while Jon Richardson was moaning about how the reality of living that way was actually pretty harrowing and he should stop.

- In stand-up, at least, Jon Richardson tends to keep it fairly superficial, getting deep into household things and only making tenuous ties to bigger stuff. While John Robins will do the jokes about domestic things only as a way into what Elis James has eloquently called “the cynical inclusion of emotional heft”. And that was true for several years before his Darkness of Robins show, even if he didn’t go as big on it before then. Jon Richardson is willing to imply the emotional heft a little more, rather than staring the audience down and laying it out.

- This is me speculating but it doesn’t take a lot of speculative inferring to say Jon Richardson might be more capable of adjusting his most difficult qualities in certain situations to make himself easier to work with, which would be how he got the decade-long panel show career and Robins not so much. Also, it takes no speculation at all to say Jon Richardson can usually “play along” his way through an awkward panel show situation, which John Robins demonstrably cannot. Though there are some exceptions to Richardson’s ability to do this, ie. the Jimmy Carr tax episode and that time when they made him go talk to strangers in America with Sean Lock.

- John Robins wrote a fun and friendly book with a positive message about mental health and Jon Richardson wrote the most harrowing fucking memoir I’ve ever read.

- John Robins has a pointlessly intense and earnest side that Richardson never quite reaches – not in his public persona, at least. I have never seen Jon Richardson unironically quote both Phil Kay and Anthony Burgess while describing breaking up a fight in the streets of Edinburgh.

On the other hand, I’ve never heard John Robins get jealous of a clock because someone else was checking the time instead of looking at him. Richardson certainly has his own brand of intensity.

And here are some similarities besides the very obvious (anxiety, alcoholism):

- Both have politics that are left-wing but less left-wing than I am, both are very pragmatic in their political views and seem to have more pragmatic than ideological objections to the far-left, both specifically a big fan of taxes.

- Both fairly obsessive about letting people know when they have done more work on something than other people, and generally cannot even the slightest disparity in fairness.

- Both are highly competitive, and by and large, pretty good at the thing they get to be competitive about during public performance on a long-term basis (Jon is pretty good at Countdown, John is good at quizzes and quick-thinking-based games). This comes into play in their actual competitions (Catsdown, the games they play on John and Elis’ radio show, they’ve both done Taskmaster), but it’s also a much larger part of their overall comedic persona.

This is interesting as a status thing, because it can be both. When they’re winning, it can be a way for them to claw the high status from a persona that usually isn’t that. But even then, it isn’t always. Even at the best of times, it’s very easy for their competitive nature to get turned around on them, it just takes one person (this person can be someone else in a competition, or it can be Jon/John pointing it out about themselves) to point out how pitiful it is to want to win something unimportant that badly, and it turns into a low status thing.

Of course I’ve thought of this lately because Taskmaster’s airing again, and various people have wildly different views on whether competitiveness on a comedy show is a good thing, but I’ve realized that one of the ways I diverge with other people on that is on how I view it, status-wise. I don’t like the hyper-competitive contestants because they’re cool, I like them because they’re not. Even if they actually are very good at the thing they’re competitive about, they’re still walking around caring deeply about something arbitrary and pointless. The cool people are the ones who don’t give a shit, and in many cases I dislike them for being so cool. To use the current example, fuck Steve Pemberton for being “together” enough to do a whole Taskmaster task while still thinking about how to best show off for the cameras and help them with their edit. I like John Robins and his inability to moderate his maladaptive qualities even when doing so would be professionally beneficial to him. And through that, I like the guy who is winning points-wise, but it still feels like supporting the flawed/lower status one.

This has been a post I've made for no particular reason and not as a response to anything whatsoever, but on an unrelated note, I may have made a compilation almost four years ago of John Robins and Sara Pascoe on that one car crash of a Mock the Week episode, because I wanted to show someone why I didn't like that guy, and Tumblr didn't let you embed videos in the middle of posts back then, and I hadn't yet figured out that it's easier to just share videos via Google Drive, so if I wanted to embed a video in my Tumblr post, I'd upload it to YouTube to do it from there. I did not properly think through the ways which that can cause a video you've made to break containment, and may someday be used to make a point you don't even agree with anymore, now that you've gained a view of John Robins that's broader than that one terrible Mock the Week episode. The point is, never post anything outside of Tumblr. And don't let Mock the Week be your introduction to John Robins. And if you're a comedian who gets invited on a panel show, maybe think carefully about which of your stand-up bits you want to take out of context on camera.

Oh, John Robins has better music taste. There's another big difference. That's important.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 5 days

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Sarah Keyworth won the thing that is no longer a Barry Award for their excellent show this year that everyone who can should watch. It's called My Eyes Are Up Here and it's about family and identity and ADHD and top surgery and growing up and and lesbian foursomes. It has excellent jokes and structure that ties together and an ending that sneaks up on you. And now they're officially the best comedian in Australia. Well done.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 5 days

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Comes from the Two Hearts (musical comedy duo with Laura Daniel and her husband Joseph Moore) Instagram here. Apparently everyone is having a good time at the Melbourne Comedy Festival this year.

I once spent two weeks traveling around New Zealand with a (too) large group of people that about half Kiwis and half Aussies (aside from me and my three Canadian friends who'd gone down there for this), and I can confirm that that's exactly how combative it gets when you put these people in a room together. They all spent two weeks making fun of the differences in each other's language and accents as though they didn't all have exactly the same accent. They just had slightly different words for coolers and flip-flops.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 5 days

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So, does anyone want a spreadsheet with every character Daniel Kitson has ever named? Because I’ve made a spreadsheet with every character Daniel Kitson has ever named. There are 198 of them.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks, re-listening to all his shows with fictional characters so I could make a spreadsheet. I’ll be honest, when I started the project I thought it would be much smaller and more manageable than it turned out to be. You try picking apart where a character’s voice is coming from in a show with multiple unreliable and frequently narrators, characters inventing each other, confusing timelines, stand-up and songs and stories blending into each other, meta experimentation. The meta experimentation was the worst. I mean, it’s very good if you’re trying to have your mind blown by audacious theatre. It’s not so good if you’re trying to pin them down to a spreadsheet. I think I did fine.

It specifically lists named characters only, meaning I left out some major characters who have no names, ie. both Kitson and Key’s guys in Tree. Though on the other hand, I included some things that are can only extremely tenuously be called characters, just because they were given names. Like Isy Suttie’s car in the Christmas show. And various hypothetical people that characters in various shows invent. And one time in the play Mouse, when Kitson’s character (one of the two characters played by Kitson that interact with each other and have the exact same name because they’re different versions of each other, you see the problem in trying to spreadsheet this) just lists various first names and then says what he associates with those names, I included that too because technically it’s a name.

I don’t generally share my name on this site but I will say Tim Key has voiced characters in two different Kitson story shows, and in both of them, he had a love interest with my first name. My name appears three times – twice connected to Tim, once in a character named by Gavin, none of them are outright villains (I mean, let’s assume his date in Tree didn’t know he was married), so I come out all right. Some people don’t. There are a lot of bad guys named Brian. I think Brian is the most common villain name, followed by Barry. The most common hero/Kitson self-insert name is William. Followed by Benjamin, I think. More Claires than I'd noticed before putting this together. And a lot of characters where them sometimes going by one version of their name and sometimes going by another is significant to the narrative (again, this is a strong storytelling device but makes for irritating admin).

I caught a couple of characters where I think I know why he picked that name, but idle speculation is beneath us. Given the size of this spreadsheet and how long it took to put together, I think most names were chosen just because he'd already used every name he'd ever heard and was scrambling to find yet another one.

There are a few things missing from this spreadsheet. I'm pretty sure there are only two Daniel Kitson story shows I've never heard: A Made Up Story from 2003, and The Revenge of Heckmondwyke from 2008. A Made Up Story was from before he was as big a name so I think there were fewer people bootlegging him, and I've just never found a recording even though it was performed lots of times. Its two main characters are in my spreadsheet because I got their names off a review, but God knows how many other characters are missing.

Daniel Kitson does this thing where every once in a while he goes into Regent's Park with Gavin Osborn and does stand-up and a story show, and Gavin plays music during the story, and sometimes Gavin plays how own songs too, and for some reason those Regent Park nights are a part of the Kitson catalogue with which I'm particularly obsessed. It just think it's an amazingly cool thing, those little one-off nights in this cool theatre. I have "Go look at the Regent's Park theatre" on my list of things to do when I go to London this summer, as a pilgrimage to where history's taken place.

Anyway, The Revenge of Heckmondwyke was the story portion of the 2008 Regent's Park night, which I haven't heard recorded. However, the version of Impotent Fury of the Privileged that's on Kitson's Bandcamp page was recorded on that Regent's Park night, and I don't think he'd have recorded only the stand-up half of the night and not the story show, which means at least one Revenge of Heckmondwyke recording exists, Kitson must have it. He's just choosing not to share. Which is annoying, both because I want to hear that show, and because it's one of the few things standing between me and having a complete set of Kitson and Osborn in Regent's Park recordings (that, and the original Stories For the Starlit Sky from 2009).

I usually try to be slightly more discreet than this about the exact nature of my collection so maybe I'll take this post down in a bit, but I wanted to share at least temporarily because this took me 1.5 weeks and it's too big. Look at it, guys. Look how many characters there are. Why did I write down all those characters? There was no reason to write down all those characters. But there they are.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 5 days

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“I know I sound a bit self-righteous, but that’s the risk you run if you yourself are right.” – Daniel Kitson

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 5 days

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I finally decided to listen to the Perfect Brains podcast, did all four episodes that are out so far in the last couple of days. And, okay, I wasn’t going to say this because I didn’t want to be pointlessly negative about something people enjoy – but now that I no longer hold this opinion, I can say, I was pretty skeptical when this was first announced. It felt like a weirdly manufactured pairing, since as far as I knew Sam Campbell and Lucy Beaumont had nothing to do with each other before Taskmaster, and it’s not even like they clicked with each other especially well during Taskmaster.

It felt like one of those things where people on Reddit (or, to be fair, Tumblr) see two people on a panel show and say “Oh my God, they should have a sitcom!” And then Avalon just gave them a sitcom podcast, not because there were any artistic reasons to believe that would actually work, but just because fans thought it would be a funny concept. This seemed especially true since they didn’t even have a format when they launched, just said “Okay you guys liked these two on Taskmaster, well here, subscribe to this then.”

And I wasn’t convinced it would work. Sam and Lucy don’t have anything that would make them work well together except that they’re both weird, and they’re not even the same type of weird, or particularly compatible types of weird. Zany characters can be very funny on their own, but when bouncing off someone else, the “straight man” role exists for a reason. The weird one has to be paired with someone who’s been tailored to fit with them.

I can say all those now because it turns out my concerns were unfounded – this shit’s hilarious. It still seems like a bit of a cynical idea that might have just got lucky, but it really works. Possibly because I didn’t need to be worried about the lack of a straight man. They have a “straight man” in the podcast, and his name is Sam Campbell. And it turns out it’s amazingly funny to listen to Sam Campbell playing the straight man. He’s surprisingly good at it.

There’s a kid at the autism centre where I work who speaks almost entirely in “scripts”, in which he’s repeating things he’s heard elsewhere (songs, TV shows), mostly talking to himself, sometimes he can be persuaded to answer a question but only if it’s a very simple one and he can answer with something from his repertoire of quotes. By last week, I’d spent probably 50 hours with him one-on-one in various sessions over several months, and I was very used to his voice. But then we introduced a new program that he didn’t like, and when I started doing it, he suddenly said “All done all done!” in a completely different voice that I had never heard before. It was significantly higher-pitched. He normally mumbles a lot but this was clearly enunciated. If I heard that voice out of context I’d never have guessed it was him. It was shocking to realize I’d heard him say thousands of words and this was the first time I’d ever heard his “real” voice. How he sounds when he’s talking as himself, and not scripting from other things he’s heard. (Not relevant to the story but just to be clear: I didn’t finish the program after he said that. I do not torture children for a living.)

That’s what I thought of the first time I heard Sam Campbell respond to one of Lucy Beaumont’s most absurd statements. Sam stays in character on everything, even situations where most comedians break character (Taskmaster podcast, Off Menu), so the first time Lucy caught him so off guard that he just gave a genuine surprise response, his answer shocked me almost more than her statement. I had that same moment of “Oh shit, I’ve heard you say a lot of words before but I think I’ve just heard your real voice for the first time.” It’s not constant or anything, Sam’s still mostly in character throughout this. But every once in a while Lucy will throw him right off and it’s delightful. Her mother had him unable to keep up any persona for pretty much the whole time he was on, I think he nearly forgot he was meant to be acting and just enjoy the stories. (Please note: That moment of “Oh shit, you became a different person for a moment there and I think that’s the real one” is as far as this analogy goes, I feel the need to clarify because I know the internet is full of speculation about Sam being somewhere on some spectrum or other and that’s not the point I’m making here. I have no theories as to what spectrum Sam Campbell may or may not be on. But I do have views on how funny it is when someone gets emotionally pushed to the point of suddenly turning into the “real” person, my view is: not particularly funny if it’s a child confronted with a therapy program they don’t want and you should probably back off, but very funny if it’s a comedian who’s too confused by another comedian’s mother’s holiday anecdote to remember to do his inflection.)

The biggest downside to this podcast is I just can’t imagine anything living up to that guest episode. Tim Key was so good that by the time his segment finished, I felt bad for Lucy and her mother trying to live up to that. But I needn’t have, as by the time Lucy’s mother was done, I felt bad for Tim having given his time to that podcast only to be comedically upstaged by someone who isn’t actually a comedian (although Lucy’s mother is a playwright, and she sure crafted some theatre in that episode).

I’ve gone through various phases in my assumptions about Lucy Beaumont. It started with – well obviously that’s a character, it’s funny. Then – she is committing to that bit really hard, is there any chance she’s just actually like that and has lucked into her career? Then – oh that was some shitty misogyny of me to even consider that, no one wonders whether someone like Sam Campbell is a character act, obviously Lucy Beaumont also has a differently-pitched voice of a completely different person that she uses in real life, she just never lets it come out in a performance. Then I listened to her on the Comedian’s Comedian podcast where she started talking about how all famous literature was written by ghosts, and Stuart Goldsmith gave her so many opportunities to clarify herself, he kept saying that’s an interesting idea but she means it metaphorically of course, and she kept saying “No I mean it completely literally, I think people are possessed by spirits”, and you could hear the moment when it clicked to Stuart that he wasn’t going to get her to admit she’s doing a bit because she’s not, and he finally said “Are you pulling my leg, Lucy?” and she said no, and then he hurried off the topic. And after that I stopped feeling bad about wondering whether Lucy Beaumont might be actually just like that, not some carefully crafted character. I mean, obviously some of it is crafted. Obviously she couldn’t get where she is if she didn’t know what she was doing and understand that some of her absurd thoughts are funny, and funnier if she plays into that. But I think she does mean this stuff.

Hearing her mother on that podcast has broadened my view of Lucy Beaumont further, to thinking – oh, she might be the normal one. She might be genuinely like this but only because that’s her compromise between the normal she was taught and objective reality. And she, being very intelligent (and you can’t have as successful a career as Lucy Beaumont with having lots of intelligence, even if that someone goes alongside the belief that 1984 was written by an angry spirit), figured out where to find the humour in that compromise and in the gaps, and it’s worked out great. That’s my current working theory. I’ll let you all know how it evolves in another ten or so episodes.

The guests were great, but the three episodes with just the two of them have been funny too. Sam Campbell obviously brings a lot to the table, I’ve had the theme song stuck in my head for 48 hours straight, so fuck him for that, and Paul Williams too for good measure. It is fun to listen to them pass the brain cell back and forth, jockey for which one gets to be the weird one, and Sam Campbell normally loses, which is funny. But he still gets to be the weirder one often enough for that to also be very funny. Four episodes in and I'm sold.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 6 days

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I enjoyed that latest Taskmaster episode a lot. I don’t know why I’ve hardly written any posts about this season since it started, as it’s been really good. Here’s a brief summary of my updates opinions four episodes in:

- The main thing I wanted for Nick was a chance to show off his magician-related skills. He got that chance in the tension task… it did not go as I’d predicted. However, he has made up for breaking my predictions by turning out to be the sweetest person in the world. It’s been a while since we’ve had a proper cinnamon roll on Taskmaster. I think his gentle banter with Greg continues to be the funniest thing he brings, it’s delightful every time.

- Steve Pemberton won me over in the first couple of episodes, but then lost me pretty hard by admitting he broke that egg on purpose, I must admit I am now pretty focused on hoping he loses specifically as punishment for that. I got mad at him then for sacrificing the task in order to play to the TV edit/try too hard to be funny – he’s done similar things several times since, like imposing extra rules in the Mr. Blobby task and writing puns in the hand task. It is not in the spirit of Taskmaster! He’s probably basically fine but I want him to lose so that future Taskmaster contestants understand you do not come here to perform, you come here to play. I don’t even just hold that belief because of how competitive I am, I also think it’s much funnier if you let you and throw yourself right into the game, which he’s not quite doing, and it disproportionately annoys me.

- I find Sophie Willan’s unpredictability entertaining. Usually she’s shit at the tasks, and every once in a while she’ll be great. She has no idea what’s going on almost ever but apparently has a good eye for art. She talks to horses. She nearly drowns in a river that only goes up to her waist. She demonstrates sexy dances that literally no one asked her to do? She has never seen this show before. You never know what she’s going to bring to the table next.

- All right, Joanne McNally’s won me around. She went in with a significant deficit in my opinion of her because I say some quite shitty things on a different TV show once, but four episodes in, she’s been entertaining enough for me to forgive it (I mean… I don’t actually forgive the sentiment expressed, but I can decide I like her enough to choose to assume it was just a misguided attempt to be funny). She’s breathing life into tense situations and tension into situations where the task explicitly requests it. She’s also never seen the show before but she’s throwing herself all the way into it. She’s consistently funny. She’s sharp and knows what’s going on, task-wise, almost all the time, while making it look fairly effortless. She didn’t do the prep work but I respect that she still showed up to play.

- Well, we haven’t had the full-on meltdowns from Robins, but I kind of knew that would happen, as they caught him just as he was moving into his “sober and more enlightened” era. It will always be a loss that Taskmaster never cast Farthinggate-era Robins when they had the chance, but I’m actually surprised at how much I’m enjoying “on his best behaviour Robins”. Mainly because it is visibly incredibly difficult for him to not have competitive meltdowns and to play it as chill as he is (which still isn’t very chill, it’s just chill compared to what he used to be), and the tension of that difficulty can be very funny. Maybe it’s like how people trying to avoid swearing on the radio is funnier than just hearing them swear. I’ve heard John Robins have plenty of proper competitive meltdowns – it is a new and uniquely entertaining thing to watch him sit there and try to physically force every nerve in his body to not do that. A whole new level of the pointless intensity. Those team tasks especially have potential for it. Also, they’ve used the same joke several times now, but I don’t mind at all. They could keep implying that John’s fucked up a task and giving him time to panic before saying it’s fine – that might get old after 100 or so episodes, but 10 episodes wouldn’t be nearly enough for that to stop being funny. I’d be fine if they keep it up all season. I desperately hope he wins but I also hope they torture him.

I have to admit I may have got too into the competition too early in this season, because normally it isn’t until the last few episodes, if the scores are tight, when I start to get really concerned about whether it’ll end up going my way. But yesterday, while watching episode four, I found myself genuinely stressed during every task because of how much I want John Robins to beat Steve Pemberton. I mean, I want him to win, but I specifically want him to beat Steve Pemberton, because I do not want someone to get away with being smugly too good to throw himself entirely into Taskmaster. I’m too invested. I knew John had gone in one point ahead of both Steve and Joanne, and I was keeping score in my head throughout the episode, of how far each score led him to extend his lead over both of them. I don’t usually count points as the episode goes along until episodes 9 or 10.

Most tasks I’m less interested in John’s total score and more interested in his score relative to Steve. I realize Joanne is also competitive and a threat to win and I want him to beat her too, but I don’t think she’s as likely to win overall, she’s not as competitive in general and the only reason she’s so close to the top right now is she got a lucky 5-0 that’s not likely to repeat itself. Also, if she wins I’ll be disappointed, but not nearly as disappointed as I’ll be if Steve does.

Anyway, I thought episode 4 was great fun. It does feel a bit more “simmering” than some other Taskmaster seasons – I almost wrote “gentle” but I don’t think that’s quite true, because there seems to be a lot going on. It’s just not all being shouted the way it is in some seasons. I like it, I enjoy the unpredictable mystery of Sophie Willan and the incomprehensible charm of Nick Mohammed and the understated arrogance of Steve Pemberton (in a “fuck this guy but he makes a good villain” way) and the simmering anger of John Robins. Also Joanne McNally is there, cheerfully shouting whatever thoughts occur to her, and they’re almost always funny.

One note I do have to mention in writing a post about Taskmaster s17e04 – if you have a good friend who’s recently quit drinking due to quite a severe and life-ruining alcohol addiction, with rum as his drink of choice for a number of years, you should maybe not trick him into drinking rum on national television even if it’s non-alcoholic? Ed Gamble said on the podcast that he thinks the rest of them got regular rum and only John got special non-alcoholic rum, and I think/hope Ed was wrong about that, because you really shouldn’t trick people into drinking hard liquor at work even if they’re not alcoholics in recovery. Especially since any of those people could have gone all in and drank the whole glove for a laugh. Going out of their way to procure special non-alcoholic rum is a pretty weird thing to do when Ribena has been used on the show before and has to be cheaper/easier to find/avoids the thorny issue of alcohol altogether. I found it funny that they threw pickled onions in there, because anyone who’s listened to John Robins on the radio will know he’s obsessed with pickled onions; I figured Alex added that as a sort of in-joke with his friend, to the point where it’s almost unfair that by being friends with Alex, John gets an item on the task tailored to things he’s most likely to recognize. But Alex will also know that rum was John Robins’ drink of choice for a long time (I mean, I know it, so I'm pretty sure his real-life drinking buddy Alex Horne does), which sort of makes putting rum in the task look like an incredibly twisted and fucked up version of that joke. I'm sure it was just an oversight, but still, pretty big oversight. Even if they didn’t have an alcoholic in the cast, why bring alcohol into it at all when you could just use some other drink that starts with R?

Having said that, does anyone know if non-alcoholic whiskey can replicate the burning sensation of the real thing, or does it just try for the taste? Asking for a friend who's trying to give up whiskey but really misses it and specifically misses its burning qualities and that friend is me. I actually hadn't thought about non-alcoholic hard liquor until Alex mentioned it on the show, I just knew about non-alcoholic beer and wine. I might look into that. But anyway, they probably shouldn't feed it to people who are at work without warning.

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 6 days

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Completely unedited and probably incoherent personal post that I didn't even try to justify writing about by connecting it to comedy in any way. Just needed to put it somewhere. Regular posting about comedians shall resume shortly.

A little while ago, I wrote about a friend of mine in a post, how we first became close 10 years ago, how we have been ever since, and at the end I said the connection between him and the actual topic of my post was a bit tenuous, I’d just taken any excuse to write about him because he was on my mind, I hadn’t heard from him in a while and was worried that he might be ruining his own life again. He does this sometimes. He’s very scatterbrained, he has almost no impulse control or organizational skills, sometimes I lose track of him and sometimes it means something’s gone wrong.

In that post I called him Rhod, because I don’t want to use his real name, and Rhod Gilbert reminds me of him, demanour-wise. Given the nature of this post, however, it feels weird to name him after any actual person again. So I’m going to call him Jacob. Because that isn’t his name but it also isn’t the name of anyone else in particular.

Like I said before, Jacob and I met in 2013 when I moved to a different city to compete on their university team, and he was there too. He was a little older than me, and a more successful wrestler than I was, he had stories of competing internationally that I was never quite good enough to get. I liked him, but I was also terrible at fitting in on the team where I didn’t know people, so I didn’t really get to know him or anyone else at first.

Long story short: end of the season, national championships, I’m in a quite important match, partway through I have a panic attack, the ref physically pulls me off the mat and drops me in my corner and says I have the three minutes of allotted injury time to get it together and be able to fight or I’ll forfeit, my actual coach is there but useless, the medical trainer is there but useless, Jacob is there as my teammate just to play backup/support to the actual coach, he immediately steps in, takes my hands, helps me breathe, gets me to bring what I’m aware of down from the entire arena full of screaming people down to just us, promises me I’ll be able to finish the match and won’t collapse again because he’ll be right there, I go back out and finish the match, I win, Jacob celebrates my win like he’s just won the championship, twelve hours later he and I are drunk in a hotel room at 3 AM and I’m telling him everything I think is wrong with the way our sport is run and he’s telling me how he ran away from home as a kid because his stepdad used to beat him up, because once you go through a moment like that one together, all emotional barriers are pretty much gone.

Years passed, I moved back to my home city and coached my home team, he moved to a bigger city and took a coaching job there, we lived five hours apart but saw each other almost every weekend at tournaments and talked on the phone regularly. We got elected to the provincial oversight board together and fought all our battles together to try to get rid of just the top few layers of corruption and predator protecting, mostly to no avail but we fucking tried. He saved my team thousands of dollars per year – and every one of those saved dollars meant my team was able to help more low-income athletes participate in the sport with their membership fees waived and their insurance/tournament fees covered – because when I told him it sucks that my team is full of athletes who don’t have the money for hotel rooms so even though we cover them as much as we can they can’t always afford to compete, Jacob told me that every time we compete near the major city where he lives, we should have our entire team bring sleeping bags and we can stay in the gym where he works. All of us – 20+ athletes and 4 or 5 coaches at most weekends – he let us spread out on the mats and all crash for free, any time we wanted. We sat in opposite corners from each other and took bets on whether my kids could beat up his kids. He got himself named coach of the provincial team and talked me into coming with him to big tournaments in the States to coach said provincial team, and I went even though I knew it would be a nightmare, and then the next year I went again even though I knew it had been a nightmare before, and by the end I told him that if I told him our friendship will not survive one more weekend like this and I will drown him in the Atlantic Ocean if he makes me sleep on another hotel room floor because he forgot to book enough rooms, but of course the next year I went again, one time I yelled at him in the middle of the night in the streets of Atlantic City because he was gambling in front of children “You know, I argue with people about you!” and he asked “What people?” and I said “People who think you’re not responsible enough to run a provincial team trip!”, because I do, people are always asking me why I’m so close with him even though he keeps doing incredibly stupid shit, and I can’t tell them it’s because he saved me one day in 2013, I just tell them he’s a good guy when you get to know him, I have defended him to a ludicrous degree, even when he didn’t make it easy, by doing things like gamble in front of children on a provincial team trip and then genuinely not know why I yelled at him in the street about it.

When he took an MMA fight in 2018, he was too nervous to tell his own people in case they came and possibly saw him lose, but he called me, and I drove 2.5 hours to theveorst small town I've ever seen, to see him fight in a cage they'd set up in a run-down dive bar-like building, where the guy nearly broke his nose but then Jacob got up and kicked the shit out of him, he won, and then we sat outside and I drank beer while he smoked a cigar and said he was glad I was there but I can't tell anyone what happened because it's too much pressure to live up to. And then he went and gambled all night because he does have quite a serious gambling problem. Though to be fair to him and not too sound too hypocritically condescending, I did then drink all night because I have a drinking problem. But at least I refrain from drinking in front of children. Anyway, that’s… that’s the short version of our relationship.

The last time I went so long without hearing from him, it was because he and his girlfriend had broken up, he ended up sleeping in his gym for a while, and then got kicked out of there due to some terrible decisions he made, which also meant losing his job, and had nowhere to go for a bit, though he did eventually end up back at a different gym and in a new apartment. During that time, I kept getting messages from mutual friends, from our old teammates, because people knew he’s fallen on hard times and kind of disappeared, and they knew I was close with him, and they texted me to ask if I knew if he was okay. And I didn’t. But eventually he started calling again, and he put things back together.

This year I didn’t hear from him for a few months. At first that was relatively normal; I’ll frequently send texts that don’t get answered because he sees a squirrel or something and then forgets about everything he was ever supposed to do before that moment. But he’ll usually reply to me if I follow up. And he usually calls me up every few weeks even if I don't contact him, more often if something’s actually going on. Sometimes less, it might be more like every few months sometimes. So I didn’t think much when the first text went unanswered, then a month later and I texted him again, still nothing. Then I heard from a couple of other people who know him, asking me if I know what’s going on with him, because they haven't heard from him lately. I didn’t know. I brought him up in a tenuously-related Tumblr post, because he was on my mind and writing about him made me feel a bit better, as I was worried he was ruining his own life again.

Well, we know the answer now. We have for a while, actually. A post appeared on Facebook a few weeks ago announced he’s having a baby. With a woman I’d never heard of. The last I heard there weren’t any women with whom he had a potential baby-creating relationship, though I don’t always keep track of those well.

It’s been over two weeks since that Facebook post went up and I haven’t messaged him. What the fuck are you supposed to say to a friend who’s proudly announced they’re having a kid, even though they definitely should not be having a kid? And this guy definitely should not be having a kid. It’s one of the worst ideas I can possibly imagine. I think almost no one should ever have a kid, but this guy really shouldn’t have a kid. Even my friends who think kids are mostly a good idea and most people should have them – even they think Jacob having a kid would be a disaster. And I know they think that, because they’re all messaging me asking what the fuck is going on with Jacob announcing that he’s having a child with a woman no one’s heard of. And I have to tell them I don’t know, I haven’t talked to him.

Because the thing is that if I send Jacob a text, 30% of the time I won’t hear back because he saw a squirrel. 10% of the time he texts me back. And 70% of the time, he calls me, anywhere from four seconds to ten days after I sent that text, to discuss that text via a vocal conversation.

I could figure out what to text him. It’s fucking weird, but if I put enough effort in, I could come up with some appropriate-sounding texts along the lines of “I see you are having a baby, that’s an interesting idea, what’s up?” But I couldn’t do a phone call. If I text him that and he calls me, I will have to maintain a tone of voice in a conversation that makes it seems like I think this is a reasonable idea. And I don’t know how to do that.

I’ve never had to do this with him before. More than that, our relationship has always been defined by us not having to do that with each other. If there’s a situation where I can’t be honest with anyone else, I can always be honest with Jacob. And I always know he’s being totally honest with me. I tell people that sometimes, when they ask me why I hang out with him even though he’s a mess, and I’m in my role as Jacob apologist. I say that actually, it’s very fucking relaxing to have a conversation with a guy who doesn’t have the psychological capacity to edit anything between his brain and his mouth. I never have to worry about where I stand with him or what he thinks of something, because he’ll just tell me. I never have to worry about editing what I say to him, because I know it can just be anything I'm thinking, even if that thing is "you're being a fucking idiot right now". I don't even realize how exhausting I find it to walk around avoiding saying what I think and guessing what other people think, until I talk to someone where I don't have to do that.

We’ve always been like that. When something horrible is happening and I have to spend all day around people who are letting it happen and at the end of it I feel like my mind is going to break from the effort it takes to pretend I think that’s fine, and I talk to my friends from my own team and they just say it’s a bit annoying but it’s not the end of the world, I call Jacob at the end of the day and whatever horrible furious things I think he understands. And he calls me and tells me how angry he gets and how fucked up everything is and I know he’s not covering anything up.

When my friend died a few years ago, the moment I heard the news, the very first thing I did was call Jacob. I didn’t even move. I found out via a text that came from someone who’d heard from the person who found the body. I read the text, and then didn’t even stand up, I just called Jacob. Didn’t think through the fact that in reaching out for someone to talk to, I’d also be putting myself in the position to have to break devastating news to someone who didn’t already know it, because the guy who died was a friend of Jacob’s too. They were competing at the same time and at about the same level. My friend who died used to tell stories in the pub about how wild things used to get on Team Canada trips with Jacob, when they were running around Europe and Asia together. Quite a bit more wild than just gambling in front of some kids in Atlantic City, it turns out.

Anyway, I called Jacob to tell him what happened, but he was at work, and then the reality of what I’d be doing to him hit me, and I said this can wait until he’s done because I can’t ruin his day. He could hear how upset I was, and just the week before I’d been on the phone with him while I was panicking about COVID, and he’d told me I can always call him if I’m having a panic attack and want someone to talk to, and I realized he thought that’s what this was, that I was calling to talk through anxiety and just didn’t want to burden him with that at work, so he told me it’s fine, he can take a break, just tell him what’s wrong. And I realized I wasn’t preparing him for the news properly, I was making him expect irrational anxiety and then I was going to drop something so much worse on him, and I didn’t know how to lay the groundwork so while he was telling me to calm down I just cut him off mid-sentence and said “[Guy’s name] is dead,” and I remember being shocked at how fast his voice turned from calm and reassuring to barely being able to speak through tears. The news had taken some time to hit me but it didn’t for Jacob, the very first words he said after I told him, he was already crying.

And in the few weeks that followed we talked a lot, and I realized why my instinct was to call him first, rather than my friends from my own team who’d been in those pubs with me and the guy who died. And it was because I didn’t trust myself to be appropriate enough for them. I told one of them that I couldn’t stop thinking about our other friend, who’d recently been kicked out of the group for trying to fuck a teenager, and how colossally unfair it was that he hadn’t died instead. I asked if she’d had any thoughts like that and she said… no, that’s a weird thing to be thinking right now, petty stuff like that doesn’t matter. I called up Jacob and told him the same thing and he sat on the phone with me and we made lists of people who deserved to die more than the guy who actually did.

A couple of years later, when a coach we both knew died, Jacob found out before I did, and he called me to break the news. We hadn’t been incredible close with that guy so it wasn’t anywhere near the same level of devastating grief, but we still knew and liked him, it was sad, we were sad together. A month later it came out that that guy had committed suicide because he was about to go to court for sexually abusing a teenage girl. Every other person I knew talked about how it was a weird mixed emotions situation, conflicting anger at him with it still being sad that he died, not knowing how to feel. Again I felt alienated, like I was the only one who had my reaction, which was: “He deserved to die and I’m glad he’s fucking dead.” I called up Jacob and told him about the reason for the guy’s death. First thing Jacob said was “Well the right thing happened then. It’s good that he died.”

This is a fucking weird set of examples. I swear Jacob and I have bonded over more than just agreeing that some people deserve to die. Those are just the first examples that come to mind because I’m trying to explain how much our relationship has been defined by him being the one person I can go to with my very worst thoughts and it’s okay because we can say anything to each other. And it turns out my thoughts about who deserves to really genuinely die are my worst ones. I can walk around all day listening to people say polite things about polite circumstances until I can’t stand the politeness anymore, and my friendship with Jacob is an escape where no one has to be polite.

Last spring, when my then-roommate tried to kick me out of my house and I was scared of where I’d live, and he had someone subletting for him whom I couldn’t stand being around for horrible petty reasons and she had a friend over that I couldn’t be around and I got home from work to find I couldn’t be in my own house, and all my other friends were off with their partners or wherever else and I couldn’t talk to them anyway because they’d tell me to just get over it and go home because it’s not worth getting so angry about, so I just walked off to a field and sat down to wait for my house to clear out so I could have somewhere to go, I called Jacob and told him all the most petty horrible reasons why I couldn’t go home, and he told me this sport is better with me in it and principles are worth having. And then he talked shit about a bunch of people from his own team who were annoying him until I forgot about my stuff. It was lovely. Two weeks later he called me when he'd been stuck outside his own living situation for similarly stupid reasons. And I talked shit with him as well.

This is what we do. We’re honest with each other. But I’ve learned in the last few years that that’s a big thing that changes when you go from your twenties to your thirties. In my twenties, my friendships were mainly based around me and some guys making fun of each other and making jokes about everything each other did. You know, basic juvenile and sometimes probably problematic – but successful – ways to bond. But when you get older, your friends start making serious, long-term decisions, and you’re not allowed to make fun of those because those are for real. And while there can be some nebulous difficulty in working out what is and isn’t fair game, the two hard and fast rules is you are never ever allowed to question their choice of serious romantic partner, or their choice to have kids. You just can’t.

I don’t fully understand all the rules around that – I just know that serious adult relationships have rules about how people outside the relationship are not allowed to know too much about it and are definitely not allowed to think it’s a bad idea, and if those people break that rule, they have to be cut off for the sake of the relationship. So because I know I’m not great at intuitively knowing where the line is (you know, autism), I try to err on the side of caution, and whenever my friends get into serious relationships, I just stop ever asking them anything about that side of their life, and if they volunteer a story about it, I just nod and say “Oh cool” and say absolutely nothing else and express no opinion whatsoever, no matter how much I’m thinking “This seems like a terrible idea.” But that’s so fucking awkward, it is anywhere from really annoying to outright psychologically painful to have to hang out with someone while constantly avoiding saying what I’m thinking, so I end up spending less and less time with that person, until they eventually break up, and then I’m allowed to say “Oh yeah, that seemed like a terrible idea,” and then we can be friends again. Until they find someone new and the cycle repeats.

But this was never an issue with Jacob. I never felt like there was something I couldn’t say to him. It was such a big deal to feel like there was nothing I couldn’t say to him, and nothing he couldn’t say to me. Not that he always did tell me every single thing that happened to him, or vice-versa. He doesn’t know I have a Tumblr blog and have tried stand-up comedy. I didn’t know he’d impregnated someone, at least until I saw it on Facebook. We’ve both got our own stuff going on, it's normal in our ten-year friendship to go months without talking. But I’ve always felt like I could say anything to him, and if I haven’t, it’s just because it hasn’t come up.

When a friend gets a partner and then we slowly drift apart until they break up – that’s not going to happen here. Jacob is never, ever going to not have that kid. That’s forever. And I know that is not what matters in this situation, at all. What matters is that this is going to do – whatever it’s going to do – to his life. What matters is a kid is going to be born to a guy who is not equipped to raise a kid. That’s what matters. That’s what I’ve been talking about with my friends, as we discuss what the fuck Jacob is thinking, and I apologize to them for not having the Jacob-based inside information I’d normally have, because I haven’t spoken to him.

I can’t tell them that I’m worried about the fact that a permanent barrier has gone up in a friendship I thought would always be there, because I’d look like a terrible person, for even considering that in the face of these much more important things. And that’s why instead, I am putting that concern on my Tumblr blog. It’s not even the classic case of “My friend’s having a kid and I’m worried they won’t have time for me anymore.” I mean, that is a huge issue in most cases, but probably not really here. Jacob and I have always had a long-distance friendship that can ebb and flow and be picked up where it left off. He could still do that with a kid, it’s not about that. It’s that I’m never going to be able to have a fully honest conversation with him again, he’s going to become just another person I have to bite my tongue around, and pretend I think this terrible idea is a good one. I’ve spent years outright telling him when I think he’s being a fucking idiot, but now he’s done the one thing I’m not allowed to question.

Even though you can't fucking do that. You just can't. You can't mess around with bad decisions when there's an innocent kid involved. I realize it's horrifically selfish of me to be worried about my friendship when the real problem is a kid. Why the fuck is the one decision no one's allowed to question, a decision this big and important and such a huge problem if someone gets it wrong? I know it's my worst opinion that no one should have a kidcunless they're incredibly prepared for every eventuality, which he is definitely not and almost no one else is either, but he's even less than most people, he's always been my friend who makes dumb decisions and I defend him and apologize for him because I love him despite his flaws and he accepts mine too. But if you're going to live like that, you can't involve an innocent kid.

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