Exercise and a podcast

I regret one thing from last night, and that was eating a felafel sandwich at the Lebanese place on Lyndhurst Terrace at 2am. There were ... unpleasant consequences. But I didn't want to stay focussed on that all morning. Instead I wandered blithely down to the California Fitness in Causeway Bay, and put myself through the mill.

This wasn't as hard as my previous let's-feel-like-death-and-start-shaking experience; I spent ten boring minutes on an exercise bike, then rowed 3000 metres and went for a run. Because I'm impressionable and believe everything printed in GQ, I've upped my exercise routine this week, to attempt an hour of cardio on each session. But because my body is falling apart, it took me twenty minutes to run 3 km. I suppose that's progress: I've improved from fifteen minutes a few weeks ago.

Oh. Maybe it doesn't work like that.
Offsetting the exercise with a burger, went home and passed out, before storming back to Central to record an inaugural podcast with Gary. Who was asleep.

I called him up again and again, but each time I just got his voicemail, declaring that Gary Ass Jackson was ready for my call. Finally he rang me back, and we arranged to meet in Starbucks.¹

Gary wasn't there. I phoned him up again; no answer. Clearly after taking the call, he'd rolled over and gone back to sleep. Now enraged through a lack of naptime and the radiation from my phone burning through my skull, I made a dash down to Staunton Street, to bump into Gary walking along, laptop in hand. Because if you are going to make an audio recording, the last place you want to do it is inside a quiet apartment. You'd naturally seek out a restaurant full of clinking cutlery and shouting children.

Luckily, Fat Angelo's was round the corner, so we went there to make the recording. Our third accomplice was nowhere to be seen (honestly, the whole thing seemed to be an exercise in herding cats) and after twenty minutes I went outside to find her chatting to Amiable Pete. So now I was absolutely livid that I'd been denied my nap. Truly nobody has ever suffered like I have suffered.

The podcast was a meandering affair, interrupted at the fifteen minute point by the Voice of Reason, a man who had remained silent up to this point, asking what the point was.

A valid concern, but one that could have been conveyed more humanely, more diplomatically, and less existentially. I was mystified, Gary was very passionate about something, and Amiable Pete went to the bathroom.

I'd post a link to the podcast, but it's vanished into the ether. So you may never hear our thoughts on reverse-action colostomy bags to enable Darth Vader's continued soup consumption, or the wisdom of miming air quotes while making an audio recording.

But we had quickly settled into some sort of format, although that format consists of three people shouting over one another until somebody reminds us that Fat Angelo's is a family restaurant.

And then we start shouting obscenities again.

Gary has an important message to get across, I want us to be Derek & Clive without the swearing², and Ms Anonymous and the Voice of Reason ... well, podcast 2 got recorded once we realised that podcast 1 was a goner, but by then Amiable Pete had ambled off, so we have five minutes of Facebook paranoia instead.

Listen to it here...

¹ I'm not going to concentrate at this juncture on the foolishness of using Starbucks as a landmark for rendezvous. That's left as an exercise for the reader.
² Basically twenty minutes of Zen-like silence.