It's one of those bleak evenings

I'm tired. I always tired. It's my default state. But, now, I'm more tired. Tired plus. Now with 10% extra tired.

I've been working hard on this project, fighting mismanagement more than anything else. And I'm left wondering - why? Why am I doing it? It's not something I love. It's not something important to me. It's not even something that's going to lead to something I love or something important. So why am I doing it? To pay the bills? I don't know.

Maybe I'm afraid to do anything else.

I'm tortured by my own conflict - I have to achieve or I feel worthless, yet I need a simple, easy life. Those needs are mutually exclusive. There will always be something missing, something I don't have. And I've lived with that conflict my whole life.

You know what's worse? Me moaning about it. Oh, and a laptop that moves the cursor into the middle of a sentence as I type making it much harder than it has to be to type this. Oh, but none of that is what I meant. What's worse is that when I see someone around me doing well, I don't feel proud of them or happy for them - I feel jealous and disappointed in myself. Man, that's petty. Anyway, it's just one of those evenings. Enough of that.


Something big happened yesterday. Big for me. See, if I was ever going to buy into a church, it would be the Church of Bill Hicks. I don't know if there is one but, if there isn't, there should be. Bill Hicks' last performance on Letterman was never aired. Letterman pulled it. And it was very clear from Hicks' reaction afterwards that he was pissed off, and quite hurt by the experience. Bill Hicks tried to get the footage so at least he could show his parents. CBS never delivered. At one point I'm pretty sure they said it no longer existed.

And then he died.

Well, fourteen years later, last night, Letterman aired the footage. More than that, he brought on Bill Hicks' mother and apologised. Now I think she really should have stuck it to him but it's clear from this Letterman segment that they had given her the footage some time ago and the air was probably cleared at that point.

I knew what was in the footage, as Bill Hicks did the set on another performance after to show that there was no reason not to air the footage. And I've seen Letterman apologise about the whole thing in interviews before. So there were no surprises here. And, yet... something about it really moved me when I watched it. Like, I just had something in my eye - I was still all manly, like. There is something just terribly sad about his short life and a performance that seemed to mean a lot to him that he never saw, and the respect he lost for David Letterman. And now finally seeing it after all these years.

It meant a lot to me. I'm not even really sure why. I don't normally like cluttering up my blog with YouTube videos but, for this, I'll make an exception. In three parts, here's the segment -

Part 1:


Part2:


Part 3:

That pounding

I will get these chest pains checked out soon. They're not good. But, yeah, it doesn't help to see what they're doing to the Cluedo board (that's what we call the board game Clue - not sure why they added the 'do'). Should I care? Probably not. It's been about fifteen years since I last played the game.

Maybe it's that, as I get older, I feel the earlier parts of my life slip away into unexistence (is that a word?). Before long, everything that was normal to me will be gone and I'll be redundant and the next to go. Unless this heart attack kills me a lot sooner, that is.

But Russell Crowe playing Bill Hicks in a movie? Now that is heart attack inducing stuff. Poxy pain in the ass, slighty-twisted-face Russell Crowe? Playing the late great should-have-been-a-messiah Bill Hicks? That's just wrong. It's just wrong.

Russell Crowe never should have made it past that awful futuristic film he was in with Denzel Washington.

I'm not usually one for YouTube linkage but this calls for a Bill Hicks clip. It's not a funny clip, there are plenty of those all over. No, this one is a message - a message of hope. He always came across as angry and pissed off at the world but it seems to me that was only because he believed we were capable of so much. He was hope.

Not Bob Hope, of course.