Please Deviate.

Eurovision first semi-final, Tuesday evening, Ukraine. Three smartly suited young men, the introducers, follow their scripts. It’s painful to watch. Old jokes, practiced reactions, false emotions, no belief, no honesty, all things awkward. The acts on the other hand had more authenticity and substance than usual suggesting a growing pan-European confidence in their audience. But the introducers were: Well sometimes things are so bad they become good again but they were so bad they went past good again back to bad again. They screamed, or at least I did, ‘there is a life to be lived here, don’t waste it in poor acting and hackneyed platitudes. Please deviate from your script and become real!’ But who am I to talk. I slunk into my own habitualities, dribble at the mouth with what I think might please, write a script to navigate my vicissitudes and let gayety and pleasure pass untouched. I wonder of the instances past where some meagre performance clamped shut such opportunities. Comfort is so easily done. I mean I’m not one for poking fingers up people’s noses, that sort of thing, but the simple uncluttered being of a bouncing mind. That for me is spirit and from that spiritual, the process of becoming uncluttered. Uncluttered by the tenets of the performing personality, the mundane manager, of intruding voices; the art of half listening, of taking note but never following. So the second semi’s Thursday and the final Saturday. Lets hope the auto-cue brakes.