Finding it hard to wake up

Vague intimations of doom; toe hurts on my left foot to the point where I missed my run last night, and felt deathly anyway; put myself to bed at 10pm, didn't wake up until 7, still feeling like I'd been run over by a bulldozer. Ah well. No chance last night then, while suffering what felt like narcolepsy (or the result of caning it all through the weekend and running just under a marathon over the two days), of practising for open mike tonight. Things to talk about:
cheese
women
shoes
elementary education
strippers (although I suppose that's actually just repetition of women)
home improvement and soft furnishings
television
... and the usual ranting about Ocean Park and Wan Chai. I hope that isn't a fair representation of the contents of my mind, but perhaps it is.
Anyway, here's the basis of what I'm working on, which I don't think I'll get away with tonight on stage - too verbose for our needs:
I love Hong Kong, you see, and the reason I love Hong Kong is because in 1830, it was no longer illegal to catch skate in England. That might seem irrelevant to you, until I point out the reason that it was illegal to catch skate in England before 1830 is because the skate is the only fish lucky enough to provide a convincing alternative to a woman, for a man in the position of not having any women to have sex with, but still having a working fishing rod. I’m not going to go into how I know this, but I do.
Now, you may not think this is a good reason to love Hong Kong, but stick with me. If in 1830 they repealed a law about catching fish, that was because some years before, there were enough men in England catching fish in order to have sex with them that there had to be a law to stop them. And if there were enough men in England wanting to have fish-sex that they had to be legally restrained, that implies there were even more spoilsports who didn’t want them to have any fun in their life. Because believe you me, if the most you have to look forward to is getting lucky at the fishmongers once a week, there can’t be much else that you have to enjoy.
But if that wasn’t enough, by 1830 there was enough of an undercurrent of demand that they figured it was ok to repeal the law banning fish sex – which only makes things worse. All of a sudden there will have been desperate gangs of men trying to chat fish up – and “what’s a nice plaice like you doing in a girl like this?” just doesn’t work.
Whereas in Hong Kong, I’ve looked carefully, and there are no, and never have been, any laws against having sex with fish. Which says a lot about the people that live here, one way or another. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the sturgeon died this weekend because of over exhaustion, but if one of you wore it out, you would have nothing to fear from the law.
The trouble is, because I kept telling people about this, I’ve fairly quickly lost all hope of dating anybody who speaks English. I’ve had to widen my net.
No, not like that. I mean I’ve had to start to talk to people who can’t speak English, where the risk of me telling them about fish-fuckery is slightly less. Other problems ensue. I met a French girl, she seemed great, I told her “si je parle que vous avez un beau corps, le tiendriez-vous contre moi?” Now, I had heard that French is the language of love, but if you try telling somebody “if I said you had a good looking corpse, would you hold it against me” they generally think you’re a necrophiliac. Oh well, it feels the same, I keep telling them.