There are two kinds of people in this world. There are normal people, who have normal hobbies, such as, for instance, swimming, rollerblading, stamp collecting and/or poo sex. Then there are the mad bastards like me, who basically hate ourselves.
Our hobbies include being eaten alive by a cannibal and letting it be filmed and put up on YouTube, letting bitchface Heidi Klum humiliate us on national television for having fat ankles and/or entering talent contests involving clowns where the audience, after two minutes, are invited to boo us off of the fucking stage like a pack of baying, hungry, medieval retards.
What is wrong with us? Let me be more specific: what is wrong with me? Why do I do this to myself? Why did I do it to myself? Yep, people, it’s my Fritz Nacht der Talente post-analysis blog.
It’s not like the signs weren’t there, in the run up to the night itself or anything. The evening was destined to be a total humiliating failure, and, deep-down, deep-deep-down, I knew it. One night, about a fortnight before the show, when I was severely drunken, I got the words “Fritz Nacht der Talente” mixed up with the words “Irak Krieg”. Look, it can be really anstrengend speaking German when wankered, okay.
“It’s not a good sign,” I hissed to my boyfriend. “I just got the words ‘Fritz Nacht der Talente’ mixed up with the words ‘Irak Krieg’ .That means they occupy exactly the same place in my subconscious.”
My boyfriend rubbed my severely drunken back comfortingly. “It’s a good sign,” he lied, soothingly. “After all, we won the Iraq war, didn’t we…”
Another bad sign was my irrational fear of clowns. I fucking hate clowns, I do.
“Maybe,” I told the featured poet as we sat in the Catering-Bereich beforehand, “maybe what I need to do is tell these Fritz people that I lost my virginity in a horrific gang rape experience involving fairly evil clowns.”
He grinned. “If you do,” he said, “I want to be there. Just so I can see their faces.”
Okay, so then, if you read my blog last week, you know what happened. I read One-Night-Stand Etikette, at first they cheered – really loudly – but then I panicked – tried to continue reading over their wails of disapproval – I didn’t want the fucking clowns to carry me off – and then their cheers turned to boos – and then I spent two, possibly three very painful minutes reading my story to the end while 1,700 people booed and booed and booed and booed, Very Loudly and Booily Indeed. Why do I do this to myself? Why did I do it to myself?
The depression set in afterwards. The humilation of a bad gig is bad enough – people avert their eyes from you like you have a hideous purple birthmark on the side of your face, you wander round the bar, thinking to yourself: Oh, this is what it must be like to be Uncle Graham – i.e. shit – but when there’s been booing involved the whole experience becomes pretty fucking unbearable. The Fritz people were being generous with the Getränkemarks, too. They were being more exuberantly generous with their Getränkemarks than a deceitful Lidl-Kassierin. I could’ve bathed in Getränkemarks, had I wanted to. But I was too depressed to bathe in drinks vouchers or drown my sorrows. I needed True Solace. So, I came home and ordered pizza, and ate it, naked in bed, while watching a DVD of The Inside Man on my laptop. The pizza had bacon, those funny snot-green chillies thingies and dollops of creme fraiche on it. It was as delicious as my night had been horrific.
“I mean, you need to chalk it up as experience,” Al from the Supernaturals said to me, a few days afterwards. “It was a good experience, right?”
“Al, have you been listening to anything I have been telling you? It was a horrific experience, and I feel really humiliated and traumatized and stuff. It was slightly better than the day in October 1996 when all the boys at school signed a petition saying I should never speak again. Because I was a really annoying person. But only just.”
“As long as you learned from it, it was a good experience,” Al said. “That’s the thing about being a performer. You’re always learning, it’s a learning process. And that’s what makes you a good performer and not a bad performer. The ability to learn. So have a think. Have you learnt from it?”
I had a think.
“I think so, yeah.”
“And what have you learnt from it?”
I looked at Al. I knew exactly what I had learnt from it. And I am gonna share it with you kids, so you can learn from it too. Here is the lesson, What I Have Learnt. It goes as follows:
I.
Really.
Fucking.
Hate.
Clowns.
Thank you and good night, Kinder.
