I read a reasonably gripping book recently - Black House, by Stephen King and Peter Straub. In this book, the concept of slippage is mentioned. It's a good word, as is the other ubquitous book in the piece - opopanax, which means a word not found in the dictionary, especially if you don't find it in the dictionary. I mention slippage primarily because I feel like I've been suffering it a bit over the last couple of days. I've fallen from the extreme high of Saturday night, where I felt like the world was my oyster, to a bit of a low.

There are various reasons why this might be. The events of Saturday night included some amazing highs, one obvious one being the way that my silly filthy song damn near caused a riot in the school hall I was performing it in. Saturday night's audience reflected the excellent mood of Saturday night - fun, high, lovely, joyous, etc. It feels like reality has set in a bit ever since... and brought things down.

It doesn't help that work is particularly over demanding this week. I was in until 7pm last night, after 7pm tonight, and I expect a late night tomorrow night, which is spliced with some social event, but it's all work-oriented. I think that I'm in a sort of low-simmering state of stress. There's no major panic, but I can feel the walls I'm backed up against all around me.

Gig-wise, there have been a couple of gigs since Saturday's high. Both these gigs have been fairly low-attendance affairs with an audience that may, or may not, give a damn. I should be able to do well with any audience, and I think you have to calibrate what "well" means based on the crowd in front of you. To be honest, though, although I caused laughter tonight, I was nearly phoning the performance in. I was in an odd mood, let's assume work had an effect on that, and I was either delivering the routine without caring, or I was doing something that's not really a reflection of who I am, nor who I want to be on stage.

If it were a year ago, and I was still in the darker places my mind inhabited then, then I would understand why I am behaving the way I appear to be. As it is, there's a lot going right in my life at the moment. I should be giddily exclaiming how good it is that I got an email tonight giving me an award from the very nice people at Darkchat for the performances they saw me at in Edinburgh. I should be thrilled that my mortgage payments are being affected in a good way by the current financial shenanigans. I should be excited about the new arrival in my life (hopefully tomorrow) of a replacement laptop keyboard - one where the T key doesn't come off every few seconds. I should be happy that I've got people to be close to and spend time with (a vague hint at stuff I'm not going to detail on here). In short, I shouldn't be making airheaded american blonde girls nearly cry in the front row of a gig because I was a little too caustic with my handling of them.

Oh, the irony. You wait around, blethering about how comedy is done, receive the email of your award, and then bound onto stage and confuse an audience for a bit until you call it a draw. And when I say "you", I mean "me".

Today's not been the best. I couldn't wake up and I didn't spend much of today glad that I managed it in the end.

However, tomorrow may well be better. I think I'm just feeling a bit run down. Like road kill.