Scrubbers!

I

Is Scrubbers! a good name for a band? I’ve been writing some punkier songs recently and I think that would be a great name. I also paid for a Tinder and Hinge subscription for a week. Hinge didn’t get me anywhere but I met two girls off Tinder. When I say ‘met’ I mean we are chatting online. I’m going to give it up though after this week. It’s a time drain and it’s also peculiarly soul destroying. I’m starting to go out more for meetups and with new friends. So I’m meeting people anyway. The dating apps are a bit like Spotify. Impersonal and lonely and expensive. No thanks. It’s amazing that since my last clinic visit three years ago I’ve survived without really having any friends. It was difficult for me to go out on my own, particularly at night and I struggled to go into Zurich with all the noise. Now, it’s getting slowly better and I even went out till 11.30 the other night, to a place I’m familiar with but still. Sometimes, my Dad accompanies me on the train still, which is really nice of him. I get tired and confused a bit still. I don’t think most people really get it - the whole schizoaffective bipolar thing. It simply crushes you. It’s like you fit a whole life into 3 months of intense manic energy and then you pay for it with a few years of depression and not really being able to do anything. But I’m proud now that I have a part-time job, some friends, some recordings, some writing. As close to a normal life as you can get. A friend of mine said he was unsure for a while which Tim Chase he was talking to but now he’s sure it’s The Normal Tim Chase. That will be the nae of an album at some point but I’ve got to do Hang Out and Immediate Consumer Love first. My retrospective will be called Just Hanging Out - a line from Pink Sunglasses. I want it to be a small, folky, mostly acoustic record with a bit of drums and stuff. It’s really hard to make that kind of record. Flora Falls are a good example of an act who have managed to do the quiet, folky thing well with good production. It’s not easy at all. It’s much easier to make a bombastic record. 

II

Talking of Flora Falls, here are my top ten by non-famous artists. It’s mostly friends of mine, with the odd random band I saw thrown in. ‘Fuck It’ by Rene SG, ‘The LVC is Shit’ by the Sex Pests, ‘Headed Home’ by Phoenix Rivers, ‘Everyday Love’ by Flora Falls, ‘Sweet Redemption’ by Benjamin James Caldwell, ‘All the Apples in the Basket’ by David Newberry, ‘Fuck Your Cool’ by the Folk Roadshow, ’67 Cadillac’ by Port of Call, ‘Jonathan’ by Long Conversations. That’s nine. There must be something else. Hallo Venray - Two Feet. Classic.