Warming Up #3997
The wife and I were trying out new material at the Tabard Theatre in Chiswick tonight. I have put in a few gigs to work up material for RHMOL. With two weeks to go there are some promising ideas already. The small crowd were appreciative. Better (for me) than the bigger crowd yesterday. I am getting quite excited about this project, though fear I will concentrate on this, rather than the proper paid work I should be doing. Ultimately though I feel that RHMOL might be worth more to me. Artistically at least. And that's all that matters right? Who needs money when I have the laughter and/or indifference of strangers.
We walked home in the rain and it's a sign that we still properly like each other that the soaking we got didn't make the walk unpleasant. It was actually kind of fun walking through the pissing rain with my wife. We chatted away happily. We passed a house that I very nearly bought when I bought the house we're in now. We considered how different my life might be had I done that. Every moment of our lives is a Sliding Doors moment of course (have you seen that film?) and the choices we make impact heavily on our futures. But a decision like that, which might easily have gone the other way, would have led me down such a different path that I thought it was unlikely that my wife and I would be together now. Just so many variables would be different anyway, I'd have had different problems, taken different routes, met different people, maybe married someone else. I think we met at the exact right time for both of us in terms of getting together and though it's likely I would have bumped into her somewhere along the line, how likely was it that it would be at the exact right time? Not very.
But also in broader terms I considered what I might be doing if I had moved into the other house with its off-street parking and bigger garden (could so easily have swung me - it didn't have a video entry phone though). If I hadn't lived in the house I live in now then I would certainly never have done, "The Twelve Tasks of Hercules Terrace" which was all inspired by the bust on the front of my property. Even if I had still run the Marathon and been in the Other Boat Race and done CNPS, I definitely wouldn't have done any of the other stuff without the Hercules connection. I wouldn't have dated 50 women in 50 days which had an enormous impact on my life in many ways, or run through the streets of Pamplona with only a pair of back-to-front women's pants on. I might not even have returned to stand-up, which is a challenge that I took on aftter having pushed myself to do all these other things that scared me. And without a return to stand up and all that came from that I have no idea where my career would be now. It was that choice that basically gave me a direction when I had been directionless and lost. I might not be doing comedy at all any more.
Of course it's pointless speculating as there are so many variables that one choice you make is not really any more important than another and there would already been an infinite amount of possibilities made on the choices I might have made every second since then. There's every chance that had I lived in the other house I would have ended up meeting an important producer in a bar who'd given me a part on TV and I could now be a Hollywood superstar married to Scarlett Johannson (there's EVERY chance). On the other hand I could be dead on that timeline (or certainly one of the timelines that would have emerged from it).
But I am glad that the random sequence of events and decisions led to this night where I walked home in the rain with a funny, beautiful and smart women who had for some reason wanted to marry me. I bet Scarlett Johannson would have insisted on a limo back for the Tabard and we'd have missed out on all the fun. Lucky escape.
Life's just a random load of shit that happens to us and we are cast around in it waves like flotsam never knowing where any of it will lead. I only wished that I'd bought the other house because it was 5 minutes less walk from the theatre and we'd have got a bit less wet. Me and whoever I'd ended up with. Or me alone.
