Quick before we leave the house....

Just about to leave and practice for a bit, then go to the gig.... Wish us luck in whatever way you can, and I'll leave a more in depth post a little later.

The mission begins today!

Clock watching... In more ways than one.

One of the things I hate about working in the evenings more than anything has got to be the relentless feeling of keeping your eyes glued to the clock, or to your phone. It's almost like a nervous habit of mine, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who does it, but boy it sure feels like it.

Every five or so minutes, I fumble around in the arse pocket of my jeans for my phone and check the time. It's not for messages, it's not for missed calls, it's always for the time. Anyone could be trying to contact me and I couldn't care less, just as long as I know that the passage of time hasn't sped up miraculously in the last six minutes.

I'm much worse if you put me in a room with a clock and my phone. The time on my phone is ten minutes fast... Now I know that a lot of people do this; Ten minutes fast on whatever time keeping device it is they use and the theory is that they will always be a few minutes early, but it never ever works that way. The presence of the second clock for me is the best evidence for it. Firstly, there's the frantic scrabbling in the back pocket for the phone, checking the time, then looking at the clock. You go from panic, to relief then to smug self satisfaction in a matter of seconds. Panic; Shit, what's the time?! Relief; Oh, it's ok. Self Satisfaction; Well, it's even earlier than I thought. I can relax and feel good about my time keeping.

Thing is, my time keeping is terrible. I'm always without fail about half an hour early for work, so I just sit in the staff room listening to music. So any time I have saved I just waste. I do believe that there is an earlier post about my relationship with time, and it's still true... Time is easy to waste for me, so why on Earth when I save it do I then just let it slip out of my hands?
There are untold hours where I was doing absolutely nothing that i will never get back.

We're also clock watching now because the gig is only two days away now! Yay! I'm still bricking it though. I spent an hour just practicing one particularly difficult bit of guitar playing because it still gives me the most trouble, and live that's where we'll suffer... if the intricate details aren't ironed out, then we'll sound out of our depth. You don't want that on a bands first gig.

Furthermore, one more reason to clock watch : "The Dark Knight." The new Batman film with the late Heath Ledger and the ever brilliant Christian Bale. Apparently required reading for Ledger for the role of the Joker was a graphic novel called "The Killing Joke."

Now, you and I will both agree, that pictures of Ledger as the Joker were... disturbing. And you can see that out of the required reading, he did well.


R.I.P. I suppose. But at least in this instance, watching the clock is worth it. We'll see the newly reinvigorated Batman franchise in the best shape its ever been and we'll see a star turn from an actor who deserves to be remembered as an excellent method actor.

As for me, I'll have one eye on the clock, one on my phone, and a hand poised to circle a day on the calender.

ughh...... hangover hell

It is ironic that I am writing this with a horrendous hangover considering I'd done a massive post on binge drinking and its cultural impact... all I can say is ugh....

My. Head. Hurts.

Why the fuck do I do this to myself? I'm not going to be ok until sometime into tomorrow day. I have things to do, like recover and play computer games, possibly write songs... who knows? I know we have to have a little bit of acoustic jamming and stuff....

Just done a little research on hangovers themselves... no I didn't go to wikipedia, for it is not the font of all knowledge, but the Thinking Blog

(http://www.thethinkingblog.com/2007/01/how-to-recover-from-hangovers.html)

has just told me the the formal term for a hangover is veisalgia; it comes from the Norwegian word Kveis "uneasiness after debauchery" and Algia... a catch all Latin term for any kind of pain.

It hasn't helped me at all. I will probably be drinking water by the pint, avoiding any and all food, and cradling my head feeling very sorry for myself. My housemates and bandmates will tell me one of two things;

1)They have no sympathy for me whatsoever, I did this to myself.

2)Suck it up and quit being a wuss.

*whimper*

Meeting parents and shameless self promotion.

I met Sarah's father today. I really wish I'd not died my hair poppy red mid week and I wish that I had shaved. I didn't exactly look as straight laced as I wanted to. For some reason, every single set of girlfriends parents have hated me. I'm not sure why. I always turn up well presented, I'm polite (Exceptionally so. You have to be if you're going to meet their parents) and I don't outstay my welcome, nor do I touch their daughter inappropriately in front of them.

So why do they always hate me? I found this (http://www.wikihow.com/Meet-Your-Girlfriend's-Parents)

Thankfully it was different this time round. I'd met Sarah's mum first, and she's lovely, and seemed to genuinely like me, so score one there! She now probably thinks I can do no wrong. So it was just the final hurdle of meeting her Father and Stepmum.

Like I'd said, I really wish I'd shaved, and really wished I didn't have poppy red hair (it really is quite vivid), but all that aside, I performed admirably. I showed that I was a responsible adult who thought the world of their daughter and kept up with her old man in the drinking stakes (we did drink an insane amount).

And yes, he liked me. Full score!

Because of this monumental win and the large amount of alcohol consumed, I decided that it would be a good idea to continue the drinking long into the night. I went to my bar, and got hilariously pissed. I then spent the rest of the night shamelessly self promoting Kalmar and our monumentally important first gig. I don't know how it happened, but we are now headlining, and have a forty minute set. Woop woop! My head will be fucking painful tommorrow mind....

The three close....

I worked the most hideous shift... the most hideous fucking shift that can be worked if you're a bartender.

Yep, I'm talking about the 3cl.

You start at three in the afternoon and just keep going until closing time.

Which was four in the morning.

Then we had to clean up.

That is in total about 16hrs.

I'm only 24, and already, I'm beginning to get a little too old for this shit. A shift like that completely kills me. I think I prefer splits.... at least that way you guaranteed get a break. But Saturday was just fucking mental. It was jam packed with people, and they were all looking to get as off their chops as possible. More kept coming in. More kept getting ruder as the night went on...

It shattered me and I lost my temper with one couple. It's the first time I'd done it in months, and I felt really bad about it, but my sympathy is limited if you are wilfully rude and I've been working nearly ten hours straight.

It has to make you wonder why people act like that... alcohol isn't enough of an excuse and people blaming everything on drink is as far as I'm concerned just lazy.

It's a lively and ongoing debate across the country; what is to be done with our boozy nation? Apparently we now consume more Vodka than the Russians. Now that's a scary thought, isn't it? We now drink more Vodka than a nation famous for its fatalistic pickling of its population. The owner of the JD Wetherspoon chain Tim Martin has weighed into the argument too, blaming the visibility of celebrity drinking culture in particular and just cultural problems in general as the reason why there has been an apparent escalation in booze related violence.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/2008/03/should_celebs_carry_the_can_fo.html

From a personal point of view, Saturday was a boozy punch up that threatened to and did happen a couple of times that night. I've had violence threatened upon me, I've had to physically defend myself in the bar, all of this while I've been working...

It's quite clearly a problem that's not going to sort itself out any time soon, and nor is it as simple as saying "they started it," and pointing the finger of blame at famous people. Famous people have always been pickling themselves and finding ever more glamorous ways to destroy themselves for the benefit of their viewing public. One only has to look Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse and the way that the public still continue to watch with morbid fascination their terrifying descent into new drug and alcohol induced lows.... no, Mr Martin is right that the problem we have is a cultural one. How are we going to get around the fact that even with an option for it, there is no 24hr drinking, rather six til about four in the morning at the weekend and only at the weekend? If we want to get rid of the boozy fights, the lairy antics and the terrifying crowds of pissed people wandering up and down the high streets of the UK we have to seriously think about ways to stop this all pervading belief that you only live for the weekend.

First Gig Jitters...

I haven't experienced first gig jitters in a while. Not since I joined Girl 13 actually, and to be fair, the my first gig with the band was the biggest of the bands life at that point. Played at the Ponty Muni hall and actually full of people, it scared me a little. The rest of the band took it in their stride, and within ten minutes of actually being there I'd calmed down. This was all stuff they'd seen before, and to be fair, so had I so it was just another day at the office. They were calm because they'd done it all before.

Kalmar is a totally different proposition. We are untested as a live band. I know that that is a totally academic point; the three of us have played as a collective before, and we were the ones that worked the best together; that's why the band was born in the first place. I'm totally sure that this will not prove to be anything of a different experience from gigging with Girl 13, except that there will probably be fewer or no fights, and we'll actually spend the evening in each others company rather than pissing off and being nowhere to be found for ten minutes.

But the point remains. This is a different band, following a different blueprint for success, necessarily so because Girl 13's obviously didn't work. R.I.P and all that, sad to see the good old days gone and everything, but hey... Kalmar is such an awesome band to be in. It's fun, we challenge each other, we're on the same page, and we're writing good songs that are getting more and more complex every time we step into the practice room. We're in the honeymoon stage of band formation where we're writing on average two new songs every week (we timed our whole catalogue of material today. It clocks in at an hour and a quarter). This is what worries me.

We have our grand designs in the practice room, but will it all fall apart on stage? Will we play everything note perfect but look wooden and gauche? Will we be completely uncharismatic? Will we find that the music we're playing only works in the practice room and we're not competent enough musicians to do it live? Will I severely fuck up a song that Mike and Coran have got down to a T? (And will we never ever be welcome in the lovely pub to the left here ever again? Yes, this is where the battle begins in earnest).

These ladies and gentlemen are the pre-gig jitters. Everything is still new enough to be scary, and it's doubly scary because we have so much forward momentum now that it would probably take more effort to slow the whole process or stop it than it would to just keep moving in the direction we're going. We've invested so much time and effort in being the best we can be as musicians and delivering music we believe in heart and soul that of course we can't help but be scared.

When next Thursday arrives, we'll have our answers. We'll have a played a kickass gig and we'll bed the ghosts of failure and Girl 13 forever. Till then, I'll just sit here and quietly worry and practice furiously the tougher parts of the songs we'll be debuting to the City that have been wondering what the boys in the band have been up to.

When I was a child, I was never afraid of an ass whupping...

Ok, so as an opening title, that's not strictly speaking true. I was afraid of getting my arse kicked by the playground bully, and I hated fighting, but that was just how it went. If you got in a fight, you stood up and defended yourself. I was tried of my older sister emasculating me every day and sorting out my troubles with bullying kids. So I took up martial arts and learnt how to fight as well as excellent ways to avoid such confrontations... I didn't then care that people would call me a coward from walking away from a fight, because I knew better.

But the fact remains... you stood your ground and threw punches, even if they were terrible and were going to make no difference.

I have read an article on the Telegraph online

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/06/nguns106.xml).

I cannot even begin to imagine what sort of lives these children and teenagers are living; I grew up in the suburbs of a quiet midlands town where nothing ever happened officially ever. At the time of course, it felt like a war zone, but everyone feels like that to some extent while growing up, and people who say that their teenage years were not some sort of battleground are just plain lying; even if the struggle is within yourself, it's still a struggle. But every problem could be solved by chucking a few fists about and at the very worst, someones mum going around to see someone else's mum.

The knowledge that it's only a matter of time before a police officer in a major conurbation will have to shoot a child wielding a weapon is one that makes me immensely sad. I could go on about the declining state of youth, the lack of strong father figures (to the point where David Beckham is seriously called a good role model to children), where did the parents go wrong, etc etc... There's no point. Everyone in the world has heard these arguments ad nauseaem, and if we're totally fair, it's no big surprise. One only has to look at the Favela's in Brazil to know that we don't have it that bad.

It must be heart wrenching to be an armed police officer in this country though; You are armed because you live in an area that is armed, and the violence has escalated to the point where criminals will no longer listen to the stern words of a police officer, or even his night stick. All they will listen to is the barrel of the weapon pointed in their face.

It must be heart wrenching going to work and wondering if today is the day you shoot a twelve year old child.

It must be heart wrenching being those children, who already at such a young age have gotten to the point where they feel like there is no other answer than to pull the trigger.