Thanks to James fron fistoffun.net who sent me this St Skeletor card that someone created and put on www.bt3a.com. Good to know that some of you are keeping the dream alive.
It's really a stupid idea to try and do anything that requires skill or thought in the first two or three minutes after you've woken up. I read something the other day about it taking a while for your brain to snap into gear and you are officially stupid for about the first five minutes.
I have got pretty good all of a sudden at getting up and getting on with stuff the minute my alarm goes off, so I found myself in my bathroom, literally within 90 seconds of opening my eyes this morning. And I don't know what possessed me, but as I stood in front of the mirror I thought to myself, "My sideburns really need trimming" and immediately picked up my beard trimmer, turned it on and started to do the job. I don't know why it was so important to get it done immediately, but that's part of the beauty of still being half asleep. It was only after I had placed the trimmer on my right sideburn and let it do its trimming business that I remembered that I had the trimmer on the setting I use to take my beard back to practically nothing and that when trimming sideburns its best to have it on the least vicious setting or, as I could now see, you are left with effectively no sideburn at all.
Obviously once this was done I couldn't just leave things as they were. If I was thinking straight I might have thought to go downstairs and get a cup of coffee and wake up properly befiore tackling this slightly tricky exercise. But I blundered on and took off my other sideburn as well. It looked very strange, mainly I realised after about a minute of blearily staring at my benuded face-sides because my beard was now longer than my almost non-existant side-burns. How could I go and perform to the people of Croydon tonight looking so ridiculous. They might put up with having the baby-killing pineapple loving Nestle in their town, but they would not countenance a man whose beard was longer than his sideburns. I would be chased out of town at best and hung up from the roof of the Nestle building and covered in baby milk powder and be set upon by cats at the worst. So now I had to shave off my beard to a bigger degree to give my sideburns a chance of standing out.
Should I wait til my mental faculties had returned? Well, yes I should, but I didn't.
I looked in the mirror again. I looked OK now - though it was taking some time to get used to me essentially without sideburns - but the top of the sideburns, where my actual proper hair transformed to burn, there were thicker bits that were unsure whether they were burn or hair. I got out my razor and was about to have a go at those when finally lucidity snapped in and I realised I was in danger of getting to a point where my semi-slumbering attempts to even up my head based hair would leave me eventually without a single follicle on my massive bean shaped cranium. I desisted and went downstairs for breakfast.
Never do an important job like this first thing in the morning, no matter how important your brain seems to think it is. your brain is wrong. For the first five minutes of the day do not listen to it.
Enjoyable gig in Croydon. Thanks to those of you who made it along.
