Learning by doing

WARNING: this is a test. Also, contains references to bodily functions

Don’t worry, I promise I won’t deluge you with too many posts across too few days. We all have lives to be getting on with.

However, it is fair to say the first Hey, Writer Guy post, for me, represented a quantum leap into the web-based world. My Facebook contributions, across all the years of F’book, have consisted of very little beyond making smart-arse comments about stuff my friends have posted.

So I’m on a learning curve here. And learning, as we all know, involves listening. And after the first post I learnt that if you are a free subscriber to Hey, Writer Guy you were unable to post comments and join the community. Which is completely the opposite of what I intended when I set out to take Substack by storm. I’m much happier getting conversations started than preaching to the masses. Or even just a few people.

Don’t get me wrong, I love paid subscribers more than I love free subscribers. Please do not take that personally if you’re a Freebie, but as a professional writer cold hard cash is the purest form of love. Therefore feel free to upgrade at any time if you are fiscally capable you Freebie people, but (to quote from Bodies, the TV series I am currently struggling to wrap my brain around): Know You Are Loved.

But enough of the crass commercialism and back to the test thing. Today’s test: please, if the mood takes you, feel free to comment about anything to do with this post. I am still optimistic enough to believe that a community of people, communicating with each other on the internet, will always end in a polite sharing of views and beliefs.

The other part of today’s ramblings is me making good on the threat buried within my first post to stray from the stated playing field of talking about Writing Stuff, to the adjoining playing field of talking about Any Damn Thing. Along the way I will also be testing my primitive internet skills by doing things like learning how to insert an awesome picture of Don McGlashan right below these words, at the same time as hyperlinking his name to his website. Amazing stuff this technology thing, said the old guy poking his fingers randomly at the keyboard, out loud, to himself.

Last night I went to see the marvellous Don at Q Theatre in Auckland, Aotearoa. Don was, of course, marvellous but as marvellous as he was Don is not actually what I want to muse upon. So avert your eyes now if you are of an easily offended disposition.

Last night, at Don, despite having an insurance one before going into the gig, I found myself, mid-show, needing to take a piss. So I scuttled out (luckily being on the end of the row so I didn’t have to do that “sorry…sorry…sorry…sorry…” thing where you annoy all the punters between you and the exit).

Now the thing I want to know, in an“is it just me?” classic comedy gag set up sense, is why does taking a leak in the middle of a concert you’re anxious to get back to, why does it seem to go on forever? It’s as if your bladder decides that right now, while Don is playing “Dominion Road”, would be the perfect time to expel all the liquid in your entire body. At a leisurely pace. On and on and on, the stream keeps streaming.

Utterly the worst time this has ever happened to me was when I was lucky enough to score a ticket to Prince’s Piano & a Microphone tour. Having fought the growing need for as long as humanly possible, after annoying many punters on my way out, after dashing across the empty foyer to the gents, my micturition would, seemingly, never end. As I endlessly streamed I imagined Prince working his way through the greatest hits - and I was missing everything, except the urinal.

But that’s enough of that sort of thing. Is it just me? Or is this a phenomena familiar to others? Comment away.

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Oh, and one more thing about the Don gig. At the end of it Don was signing tea-towels. Now, I love me some good merch. And I really love signed merch. And I love tea-towels as merch. But doesn’t signing a tea-towel render the tea-towel useless for its intending function as a tea-towel?

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To prove both how much I love signed merch and also that I know how to imbed pictures, here’s something Paul Kelly signed after I had the pleasure of doing an in-store Q&A session with him at Real Groovy. I’m not entirely sure what he means, though, given we’d just been talking for an hour.