Gawpfishing. A fun game for all ages.

If you are unfamiliar with Gawpfishing, which you probably will be, since I invented it, I shall forthwith offer an explanation of gameplay:

The game is played in an arena comprising any form of public transport with London Underground being the favoured. Play commences at or after 

sunset. No sooner. This is a sport for two players. One may play alone.

 

Powdered Wigs not compusory

  

Described here are THE LAWS for a two-competitor tournament.

The Anglers locate themselves in the middle of the arena and sit facing eachother. The direction of travel is "upstream". The player facing upstream takes first honour.

 

The "Angler With Honour" casts his Seeding gawp (the gawpcast). This is done by yawning- The second most contageous bodily function the human body is capable of, second only to vomiting, which is a completely different sport alltogether. After the Gawpcast, the Angler in play then "Retreats",or, sits back and waits for either a "nibble" or a bite. If before the next station, his Seeding Gawp is taken and reciprocated by any other passenger seated in "his" end of the playing field, it is counted as "One bite" Subsequent passengers who then yawn as a result of the bite score one point each. A Bite constitutes a full on yawn. A "Nibble" is defined as any detectable sigh. Nibbles count as half a point each.

For any bite or nibble that travels into the "downstream" end counts as two or one points respectively. When the round has finished, ie, anyone who was going to gawp has gawped and it is agreed by both parties, The Angler sitting downstream then has the honour, fishing upstream.

After both Anglers have played one gawpcast each, they must leave at the next stop and move to the next carriage. They then must take their positions opposite to the previous (Previous upstream Angler sits downstream etc) and play resumes.

AT NO POINT does a gawp committed by either angler score any points.

In the event of a scoring dispute, you're obviously taking it all a bit too seriously and need to chill out.

Got all that?

Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be an emo and have a fucking almighty rant.

Yeah.

Before I begin typing, I should mention:

•  I have not thought about this. I had a thought earlier which was the seed.
• The following is merely a stream of conciousness and follows no structure
• as such, my grammar and factual accuracy may well be somewhat fucked.
• This is a rant. Don't take it too literally. Don't worry about me if I start getting too down. I'm fine.

I made a concious decision a while back that I would not post anything in the style of the typical moany bitching onto Facebook. Everyone does that and it's possibly the single most irritating thing to do. I find it obnoxious, especially if the frequency of such whinges is sufficient. See, whatever you post on FB immediately gets propogated to your entire friend list's wall and all of them have no choice but to have to read it... Unless they delete you as a friend, of course, ehich, until it starts getting you labeled as a psyvamp is a tad extreme. Oh, I've had energy vampires on there as friends. In cases, they've been very very old friends who it has pained me to get shot of them, but when you can't log into FB and get more than two statuses down your wall before the inevitable "woe is me", Every single time you log in, regardless of the time of day... Well, they have to go, I'm, afraid. With this blog, you can always just stop reading it and go and find someone else's - Or one of my more lighthearted posts, or go and see what's happening on Facebook.

Anyway, I made a decision as a New Year's Resolution to only ever post happy fluffy stuff. If I was in a blue mood, I would rather than say so, simply post something ridiculous, or if I couldn't think of anything ridiculous, just log out. For the most part, I've stuck to it and it's been a successful little experiment. By only "having happy thoughts", I've found that I am indeed, happier and I at least hope that it has had some knock on effect to people who have been reading my statuses on there. Sure, I've slipped a couple of times. Who doesn't? I've simply tried to consider that no matter how shitty things get, there's always going to be someone who is much worse off.

The fact of the matter is that this approack does indeed work fine and as an experiment, has broucht about some interesting revelations. Because I've pretty much kept my inner emo locked away in its gimp mask, there's seven months' worth of ranting, however. And I'm going to have to spill my mind onto the blog.. And subsequently, through your eyes, and my emo mind will meld with your own... Funky.

So, yeah. Pramble done with, Shit's been pretty fucking low for me the last couple of years and by some strange virtue, I'm still around to blog about it. Yes, I appreciate that I'm relatively doing alright and you probably have it twice as bad as me.

So what's so imperfect about my life then, as far as I'm concerned?

Well, Firstly, the main problem. Chronic Insomnia. This has been going on since Summer 2009 now, with maybe a maximum of ten proper night's sleep in that time. Right now, it's 03:45am on a Wednesday morning. I'll be awake until maybe 6am and then go and crash out from pure boredom. This is not some sort of stubborness, where I deliberately sit up all night on Facebook and watching telly.. Or simply a matter of a screwed up sleeping pattern. If I were to go to bed now, I'll lie in bed, wide awake.. Moreso than awake. You have probably experienced insomnia yourself.. Transient or maybe acute as the huge majority of people do at some point. Perhaps you are chronic and know exactly what I mean. Basically, what will happen is that I will lie in bed, in the dark and my mind will switch on. I will think about everything at once. Sometimes I will be able to devise an entire scheme.. maybe sometimes there'll be flashes of concepts firing that don't form anything coherent at all. There are pictures, words, basic emotions. Memories from my childhood. Everything. But, all of this stuff being like watching some dream sequence in a 1970's horror flick, whilst my body is screaming out for me to get up and go for a long walk or to cook something. This is now two years of it.

The insomnia, I can handle now. Indeed, I've come up with some pretty cool stuff from these little sessions of cerebral superactivity. What I'm suffering with is how it's knocking me for six during the day. I'll eventually pass out at sunrise and get a few hours' sleep. Unfortuantely, this whole thing is a vicious cycle:

I don't sleep because my brain is going mad, mostly worrying about the state of the union. Because it's kept me up all night, I'm having major problems finding work and so on, which is the main factor in these brainfarts.. keeping me awake... and so on. Of course, it used to be much much worse. I was once so depressed that I didn't have this rock video from hell playing in my head every night. In fact, all I had were thoughts about how should I not wake up at all, whould it be such a great loss? What was the point? You get the picture. Pretty dark shit. That's all mostly behind me now though (only occasionally do those nights happen now.. Maybe once or twice a month).

Then of course, there is my employment.. Or hideous lack thereof.

I am currently pretty much unemployable. I don't mean this in a woe is me kind of way. I mean it in a I can't get a job unless it involves below the minimum wage kind of way.

I have academic qualifications. A handfull of computing NVQs, half a degree and some other bits. Unforunately, these are all worth bollocks-all. They're computing qualifications, which, as we all know, might as well be a certificate with a picture of Postman Pat, a gold star and a smiley face and "V.Good" handwritten next to them. The sort of thing your nursery teacher gave you for gluing pasta to a bit of card and writing "mum" below it in crayon.

Computing qualifications are bullshit. Computing degrees, however are what employers like to see. It would have been lovely if before doing these courses if they'd told me that no matter how well I did, I'd still not claw up the UCAS points to get onto a degree course, and when I did get one, I turned up one Monday morning to be told that they'd stopped running the fucking course. Besides which, I absolutely loathe computers wth every last cell in my body. Well, the concept of computers, I like. The endless stream of information on the internet, the great and cool things you can do with graphics and music and so on. As a tool, computers are fantastic things. It's everything else about them that I hate.

I also have City and Guilds in traditional signwriting techniques, business ownership and management, electronics servicing and a couple of others... however, these are very outdated and useless to me now as I've not practiced in years and have forgotten most of it.

Experience-wise, well, this is mostly in the entertainments industry. 15 years of it. I've worked in some of the biggest events to have hit the UK as well as some of the smallest, shittiest little holes. This is what I do. It's what I'm fucking good at, frankly. By no means am I the best.. but I'm certainly not below average... However, I seem to have "MUG" etched into my forehead which only employers can read. I've been desperate to get as far away from the industry as possible for a while now because I'm sick of getting fucked over, screwed out of work and lied out of money. It's endemic to the industry, apparently. I'm not saying it because he's my current and only employer, but Nick's the only one who hasn't tried too hard to piss me off yet.

I've been turning down work lately. Work from those fucking crooks at G F**** (censored because I don't want a libel case). Basically, They've offered me two jobs this year. One was in January. The other, I told them I was already working elsewhere. As it happened, I was working at the museum, voluntarily. See, I'd rather work at KBSM for free for a day than for a vague "promise" that if I sent in an invoice for a day's work, I might just be lucky and get a cheque for £30-odd quid at some point around the next blue moon. At KBSM, I do get a sense of satisfaction, even if I'm just putting flatpack furniture together or polishing a lump of brass. Unfortunately, I need to really work out how to do something equally satisfying AND get paid for it!

So, employers like Experience and Qualifications. I have both... neither are relevant to eachother. I could go and do a proper uni course to do with technical theatre or something, but I don't have that sort of money and it isn't an industry I intend to remain in for much longer. I'm going to need a complete career change.

Now, my sex life.
What fucking sex life? I haven't had that pleasure in about five years. The problem here is that my ex was a fucking WHORE, who, whilst we were together, she was (unbeknownst to me) still married, AND fucking some dude behind my back (to be fair on him, he had no idea about me. We met at a party once and had a Loooooooooooooonnnngg conversation). Then, when she'd decided who she'd rather fuck and ditched me, whe then proceeded to go and fuck no fewer than eleven of my closest mates in the following two months.

She was the third consecutive (that I know of) girlfriend to have been shagging around behind my back.

This kind of left me with a couple of niggling issues to do with selfconfidence and trust. Niggling issues roughly equates to absolutely fucking decimated. I decided after that to take thirty months of celibacy. The way I saw it, this was so that I could clear my head and sort my life out. It wouldn't have been fair to have bounced straight into another relationship from that and try and split my attention between myself and silly personal problems and a girlfriend. In my opinion, a relationship requires 100% attention and I couldn't give that. Anyway, after those thirty months, I was in kind of a worse state than I was anticipating and took an extension to fifty months.

After things began to improve, I realised that I'd been in such a state that I'd kind of let myself go a bit. I'd lost two dental crowns (Purely down to shoddy dentistry) that I couldn't be bothered to go and get re fitted, so I'm left with half a head full of teeth. I have long since forgotten how to speak to a female other than purely "friend zone" and to be honest, I'm certain that I still have pretty enormous trust issues if there was anything even remotely deeper than that. So, I'm hideously ugly both inside and out. Splendid.

Health... This is where I've been lucky. Aside from the insomnia and what I believe to be some form of arthritis-y type of thing in my knees which varies between nothing at all to being unable to stand up, depending on the temperature (Come the beginning of winter, when the temperature begins to fall is worst), I haven't had any great issues health-wise. I know people who have spent more time in hospitals than out of them. I know people who by rights, should be dead by now but aren't and I know others who sometimes are so ill that sometimes they wish they were dead, I'm an olympic athlete in comparison to some.

So, yeah. I'm pretty fucking fed up right now, if I'm honest. I'm treating this blog post as some form of free therapy. I'm not expecting anyone to read it. In fact, it's pretty personal shit and I might delete it tomorrow anyway, but I've said what I felt that I wanted to say and in half an hour's time, I'll either remember something else to add, or start feeling a little better.

We'll see.

Your friend, P.v.G.