Saturday Night Dreams and Sunday Night Nightmares

Do I open this chronologically or by stating the inciting incident - which is that I just woke up from a nightmare? I feel discombobulated and detached from reality. I’ll contextualise first, why not?

It’s now Monday morning and I have a lot to do, and I’m flying out probably in less than a full week. I always feel dread when I’m about to leave a country for an extended period of time; like I’m killing an alternate timeline version of myself. Maybe that’s why I had a nightmare. I shouldn’t have had a nightmare, because I had a lovely weekend, but I guess that’s just sometimes how brains work.

Saturday Night was lovely and surreal and dreamlike. My friend and sometimes collaborator, D.A. Carter aka Papa Fire, organised a gig of surpassing artiness and lovely warmth.

Here is him doing his freestyle-style guitar and mouth music. It was in a secret underground warehouse space in Marrickville, which was lovely.

His excellent wife, Mama Smoke, made vegan snacks for everyone, and the support acts were so sweet and it felt more like a surprise party than a gig. (I never organise parties) For some reason stars and serendipity aligned and my past showed up in force. Whether it was that I’m not doing many gigs in Sydney this time round or that DA Carter happens to know everyone I’ve ever worked with, so many people from different parts of my life were just there. In the audience. It was like performing in a dream. People I went to school with, people I went to university with. Paolo, who I used to run with in the Hare & Hounds cross country club at Cambridge, and is an Italian man living in New York, working in sustainable energy, just happened to be in town and there.

So many people! Justine and Alex, who I used to be in a three-woman, all-ex-lawyer, comedy group called “Aggressively Helpful” with. A guy in the front row who was the catalyst for one of the jokes I was telling, because he’d told me the fact that sparked it back in second year university.

Let me introduce this person I had a hopeless, unrequited, creative-muse-level crush on in my teens to this one I had a hopeless, unrequited, muse-level crush on in my late twenties. Suddenly, someone touches me on the shoulder and it’s the person I wrote into comedy sketches where the punchline was hugs (my crushes were intense but generally harmless to their victims). It’s enough to make you believe in star signs.

The room was full of friends and Patreonites and people I never thought would appear in the same room as one another. Like dream.

Sunday’s my day off and I got time to percolate on what my life is, and where it’s going, in light of a new project (bugle-related; me-led; to be announced) that has just been greenlit and funded for next year. I had time to wonder and sink into wondering whether Savage on Amazon Prime will sink without a trace or change my life in small ways or change my life in big ways, and what are the statistical likelihoods of each, and can I prepare for any of them? Should I even try?

I don’t tend to think much about the future in that speculative way - it feels like a waste of time - I don’t think it’s worth planning for, because everything changes so suddenly and profoundly all the time. Or because I’m bad at planning and organising,

I miss London, and I miss Sydney preemptively and koalas are now suddenly functionally extinct and I’ll have to write a joke about it for the bugle, and here’s a secret hint - I don’t normally care that much about the news, so it’s quite easy to write jokes about. But to find a way to say something honest enough to be honourable, while also being funny, that’s the real game.

All of which is to say, I just woke up from a very real feeling nightmare and messaged Neil Gaiman to tell him about it and reassure myself, which on reflection is not the way to reattach yourself to reality.