We watched the Simon Amstell standup, and it was actually... well, it certainly was well-crafted. You could see how much work went into breaking it down into small segments that flowed into each other pretty seamlessly, and how aptly placed the callbacks to earlier bits were. A lot of it struck so close to home though, that I found myself drifting away from the humor towards some sort of internal scoreboard, checking off whether I was more, equally, or less fucked up in the currently discussed capacity. The whole thing's on the Internet by the way:
We're running, and everyone else I think is one with the moment, one with joy, one with the universe, and I'm there, as we're running, thinking 'Well, this will probably make a good memory...' Which is living in the future, discussing the past with someone who if they asked you 'Oh what did it feel like?' [you'd go] 'I don't know, I was thinking of what I'd say to you.'
That one gave me the longest pause, because it's pretty all-encompassing, and therefore related to all my other... peculiarities. I think I'm still a bit ahead of Amstell on that front. It's not a crippling mechanism - usually - but it felt very weird when I realized that I had had the exact same thought literally three hours before.
I was at my parents' house, and as I was about to leave, my mother asked if she could show me and dad something she'd been practicing. We sat down in her room, she put on a Russian folk song on YouTube, and sang the second voice to it. It was the first time I've ever heard her do anything like that. She was visibly nervous, and off key at times. At first I had no idea how to react. And then I heard this voice in my head: stay in this, take in as much as you can. When they're gone, you will want to remember it.
So I tried, vacillating between sitting in that room in Winter and listening to my mother sing, and some vague point in the future when this memory would need to be as vivid as I could make it. Unsure whether what I felt in the moment was a direct response to the now, or a bizarre reflection of this projected, inevitable loss.
Maybe I'm not ahead after all.
