Time passes so quickly. There you are, walking around Cambridge eating Jarlsberg cheese out of your hand, when SMASH! ... a week has suddenly gone by. I used to think that I fell into mini comas, but apparently this is how everyone feels.
All of a sudden, the vocal deadline has started to approach for IML Mission 3. It has reared up like a post-coma rush. It's not in my face yet, it's not days away, but it's there.
My usual method for describing approaching deadlines is to compare them to how close Omar Sharif has come over the horizon in that interminable scene in Lawrence of Arabia. I'll say, for example, "the deadline is three inches high now", or "the deadline is horseback, about three metres away" or even, "the deadline is shooting at me with a rifle; it's an Arab. What the fuck is going on?" It's a very scientific comparison and more people should use it.
Fortunately, I've been doing a lot of reading about wormholes during this period. And if there's one thing that wormholes can actually punch in the guts it's time itself. That's very useful, I thought. These IML deadlines are very tight - let's see if I can use my assigned IML theme to lengthen the amount of time I can spend on the vocal.
Thus, as well as research, I have been conducting experiments. You know, making homemade wormholes out of locks of David Bowie's thigh hair that I bought on the internet, mixed with malt loaf and my own vomit (it's not hard to induce vomit these days - I just peer outside and catch someone's eye and I'm there). Anyway, I succeeded. What I mean is, I passed through my own wormhole - please don't sneer - and emerged in 1977.
No, really.
So what does this mean? Well, it means that - as well as technically being at least three decades older than anyone else in the IML - I've been working on my vocal track now for over thirty years. It's been an obsession. Everything about it had to be perfect. I'd spend half a decade honing it and then I'd suddenly become exasperated and scrap it and start again, moving on to new recording technologies and production techniques. I've made at least sixteen different versions, using at least three hundred different vocal melodies and four hundred different sets of lyrics. At one point I had the perfect version on tape, but then someone on a hover board pinched it from my paws and I was back at stage one again.
It's been an epic adventure, not unlike that of T.E. Lawrence's, except for the lack of similarities. But all epic adventures, of course, have to come to an end.
So where am I now?
Well, after thirty years, back now in 'real time', sharing the same deadline as everyone else in the IML (I can see you, Sharif), I've decided to start from scratch again. You might say that I travelled back in time for nothing, that I've wasted thirty years, but I don't see it like that. Experience is everything. Well, not everything - experience isn't a packet of Frazzles - but it is important. I've been through three decades to get to this point. I've been through a wormhole of my own creation for Christ's sake. Now, more than ever, I am ready to start writing some lyrics, to sing heartfelt of my travails, and to discuss the delights of watching Overboard with Goldie Hawn at the theatre on its cinematic release in 1987 (now that is why people should time travel). My work starts now.
Time passes so quickly. There you are, walking around Cambridge eating Jarlsberg cheese out of your hand, when SMASH! ... a week has suddenly gone by. I used to think that I fell into mini comas, but apparently this is how everyone feels. 
Well, after thirty years, back now in 'real time', sharing the same deadline as everyone else in the IML (I can see you, Sharif), I've decided to start from scratch again. You might say that I travelled back in time for nothing, that I've wasted thirty years, but I don't see it like that. Experience is everything. Well, not everything - experience isn't a packet of Frazzles - but it is important. I've been through three decades to get to this point. I've been through a wormhole of my own creation for Christ's sake. Now, more than ever, I am ready to start writing some lyrics, to sing heartfelt of my travails, and to discuss the delights of watching Overboard with Goldie Hawn at the theatre on its cinematic release in 1987 (now that is why people should time travel). My work starts now.
