Manic depression, a frustrating mess

Jimi Hendrix has released a new album, Valleys of Neptune.  I'm not impressed.  Frankly, it smacks of nothing but self-indulgence and laziness that he'd spend forty years without putting out anything new.  I mean, even Chinese Democracy didn't take Axl Rose that long.
Today I tried out my rabbit material at the club for the first time.  I made the mistake of reading it from the script rather than trying to memorise it - that made me go too fast to be comprehensible, and also set up a barrier between me and the massive audience.  Of one paying customer, and ten comedians.

There were a few laughs - I managed to find a new digression into unexpected territory.  When talking about how implausible the rabbit's behaviour is, I stated that I wasn't a racist - that's just how rabbits are.  I think there's rich potential to be mined there about the ridiculous prejudices that people have about those different from themselves.  And everyone has those.  Particular the foreigners.  They're the worst.^[1] 

Dorsher timed it for me; I'm not sure if it really took only three minutes to get through (that would average ten words per second, and some of those were proper, ten-dollar words) but I trust any man who's drunk two pints before he goes on stage. You can't fake confidence.

I watched the other comedians until 9:15, then left and took a taxi to track down my girlfriend. I was not in the best of shape; I'd managed to miss lunch until 4:30 this afternoon, and the combination of little sleep, stressful meetings and being turned down for a job was beginning to get to me. Thus when I arrived at the restaurant in Causeway Bay that everyone was dining at, I could hardly see, let alone keep up my end of a conversation.

Thankfully, everyone was done with food, so I attempted to eat something green that had gone cold, and then we walked over to Crumbs for some frozen yoghurt.

Crumbs is an interesting concept for food. They name it after the detritus left over after a satisfying meal, rather than a proper food in itself. It's as though they're laughing at all of us, for being satisfied with these table scraps that they fling at us. I'm sure it won't be long before somebody takes the insult to heart and starts shouting random rudeness back at them. Or perhaps that's what the old man outside HSBC was doing all day today.

The food itself is great, whether it's the yoghurt, the eponymous crumbs sprinkled on top, or the array of fruits and biscuits you can have added. But because the street is full of pet shops specialising in large animals showcased in very small cages, your mind richochets between feeling happy to be eating a low fat dessert that tastes good, and feeling terribly sad and guilty at being somehow complicit in the miserable lives of the cats and dogs that sit in their featureless cages. Damn you, Crumbs! Are you trying to inculcate some kind of bipolarism in all your customers? Relocate to somewhere sanitised immediately, so I can't have any bad feelings from having to engage with bits of the world that I don't find pleasant! You selfish, selfish yoghurt sellers.

What else did I do today? Tried to instill paranoia in work colleagues by talking about the passport-RFID-activated sniper rifle, for shooting American tourists in large crowds. Hope that I don't get turned into the police for that.

¹The other day I read somebody generalising about Europeans, and then defending herself by saying "I know it's a racist statement, but it's true."  Not quite sure how you reason with somebody like that.  "I know it's insulting to call you a wanker, but I'm being sincere when I say that"?)