Fa la la la la oh fuck it.

So I've discovered some pretty important things about myself recently. I'm prefacing this post with that statement so everyone reading this blog has fair warning that I'm about to be totally self-analytical and narcissistic. It's not entertaining, folks, but can you blame me? It's tough to be as entertaining as I am on a day-to-day basis without some kind of valve to let off a little of the existential steam now and again.

So I've discovered some pretty important things about myself recently. Ever since I returned to Toronto a few months ago, I've been trying to come to terms with the grand and sweeping and somewhat less-than-graceful forty-five degree segue the span of my recorded life took over the course of the last eleven months. Approaching the end of what qualifies, without a doubt, as the strangest year I've experienced in all twenty-four I've been breathing, I find myself reflecting on the spectrum of choices historically laid before me -- the ones I made consciously and the ones forced upon me -- and how they've led me to where I am, at 10:51 a.m. on 24 November, 2008.

Brief overview: this time last year I was dealing, poorly, with my move back to the home of my childhood, medicating my intense depression with too much alcohol and, contrarily, the promise of a move to warmer climes, a graduate education and -- ostensibly -- a happy marriage. I was working a comfortable job as the evening front-desk manager (read: receptionist) at a successful car dealership; my responsibilities were limited and the paycheques were sizable, particularly given the comparatively tiny sum my parents requested in the way of rent payments in exchange for food and shelter. Leaving aside the deep isolation I felt from my close friends and my fiancee (in Toronto and Texas, respectively), I had it pretty good.

But I'm not the kind of person who's satisfied with "pretty good" (in fact, I don't really know a lot of people who are). Therein lay my first choice: I could either a) take advantage of the time and relative fiscal freedom afforded me by my living arrangement and use it to create works of unimaginable brilliance, or b) drink myself into a foolish stupor at every opportunity and lament the molasses-like passage of time I felt all the more keenly due to my separation issues. So suffice to say I fumbled that ball something fierce by choosing option "b".

Fast forward to January. Relationship falls through, blah blah, I've covered this. Shortly after this revelation I discover I have not been accepted to either graduate program to which I applied. And I'm still at home, still fancying myself a receptionist, and still living most of my life in largely self-imposed artistic dearth. Relations with my family are reaching an all-time low as they see me, fucking up on a supremely grand scale, and doing little if anything to slow my descent. Their responses to my increasingly erratic and self-abusive behaviour span the gamut from concern to confusion to anger as they struggle to come to terms with the selfish, irresponsible, and ultimately pathetic choices I have begun making with reckless abandon. My family is, in a word, a saintly group of people who did their very best to support me, and deserve far better than what I handed out in those months.

Fast forward again to July. My contract at the car dealership is about to expire, and I have no employment lined up. Every ounce of my energy is invested in finding accommodations in Toronto, because somewhere in my vodka-soaked brain, one of the last neurons standing has fired, prompting me to decide that all my problems would be solved by a return to the city I have always considered on some level my home. There is no plan -- there is no forethought. There is only this overriding desire to get out: out of my ancestral home, out of the mind-numbing sameness of the cultural wasteland in which my family has established that home, and out of the artistic abstinence and emotional time-release safe into which I had placed the core of whatever constitutes me. The only way out, I reasoned, was via a Budget rental truck and a one-bedroom somewhere in the urban spread.

Of course, that line of thinking was a shining example of the kind of Grade A, not-from-concentrate, 100% farm-fresh bullshit I was feeding myself at that time. Because geography has far less to do with your state of mind than the kind of on-the-pedestal importance I was placing on my big move south. It's ridiculous to assume that if you can't be happy in one place, you'll be happy in another. I'm not downplaying the importance of having your own space -- not at all. I am a very private person (believe it or not) and I really needed personal space in which to breathe -- space I necessarily couldn't be afforded living with three other people whose schedules coincided with mine to the point that I was never really alone for more than a couple of hours at a time. But the point is, I was unhappy in my own head -- and I could have been moving into the Penthouse Mansion and it wouldn't have made me any happier. What was required was a reboot of my personality, a ground-up rebuild of what was going to be the New Direction, now that the Old Direction had detoured, Earnhardt-style, rather spectacularly into a brick wall.

Fast forward to August. I receive a call from my best friend, with whom I'd been cohabitating prior to my big move back home. Turns out the surrogate roommate I'd provided when I had to leave him holding the back at the end of August '07 was unexpectedly moving out, giving him little notice and less time to find new digs for himself. It wasn't without some trepidation that I agreed to move back in; I had made a promise to myself that I would never live with another person again. But with my finances significantly depleted by the months of self-pity to which I'd subjected myself, the chances of finding affordable accommodations on the timeline I'd set out were slim to none. So I bit the bullet and made the move. It was exactly three hundred and sixty-five days to the day that I'd moved out when I came back to the same neighbourhood, the same apartment -- even the same room I'd left a year prior when I set out to pursue the Old Direction.

Since then...since then, the New Direction has rapidly come to fruition. The tenets of the New Direction are as follows:

1) My goals are my own, and no one else's. I very nearly relocated my entire life to a foreign nation, pursued a degree in a field I had no real desire to achieve, and realized a life the dream of which was not my own. In my estimation, it was a bullet dodged, and I have no interest in revisiting such a self-debilitating course of action.

2) My art is the most important thing in my life. For too long I allowed the ambitions of other people to impede my creative outlets -- I neglected my music, my writing and my penchant for performance in favour of following a "responsible" lifestyle. I have never laboured under the misconception that my artistic endeavours will ever garner me anything resembling a secure future, I have decided unapologetically that the creation of art supercedes any desire I might have to live a life of comfortable mediocrity. It sounds painfully idealistic, but if I don't give this a fair shake I'll spend the rest of my life waking in the middle of the night with that familiar itch on the inside of my stomach wall -- the nervous insinuation of "what if".

3) I no longer make apologies for the man I have become. I have walked across coal pits of considerable distance in order to come to these realizations, and I'm not willing to compromise the wisdom I've gained through exercises of existential agony in order to placate the people around me.

4) In opposition to this, I no longer take for granted the people closest to me in my life. My close friends and my family stuck by me when people of lesser intestinal fortitude would have rightly closed the book and walked away. These are people of the highest integrity, and I am truly blessed to count these people in the number of those I can trust and on whom I can rely when times get tough, as they doubtless will again in the future.

5) Perhaps most importantly, I believe in myself and in the tenets of the New Direction. For too many years I clung to the trappings of modesty and self-deprecation in order to somehow validate my talent and my value as a person. And while I haven't necessarily walked away from that philosophy, I have come to realize that I have to look out for my own interests and sell myself on my own merits, because if left to their own devices, there are precious few people who will do it for me -- and it's not the job of those people that will. So my assumed confidence may border on the delusionally narcissistic -- but I can safely say I don't care.

My best friend nailed it the other night when I apologized for coming in late (again). I have spent considerable time out on the town, as it were, meeting new people and reacquainting myself with the city -- and, of course, getting up to all manner of hijinks that will serve to paint the silly, silly canvas of my day-to-day with engaging and entertaining material for songs and stories alike, and truth be told I'm happier than I've ever been whilst throwing myself into these situations, but I felt a degree of guilt that I have been living as I have -- in accordance with the tenets of the New Direction. My friend voiced it thus:

"Simply put, you have spent the last six or seven years living for everyone else. Relationships you tried to make work despite overwhelming odds, a university career you never enjoyed, trying to make everyone around you happy and comfortable and proud of you. This is the first time in your life that you haven't been accountable to anyone, and frankly I think you deserve the chance to live for yourself, for a change."

I had never thought of it that way, but upon reflection I think he makes a good point. I'm wired to associate my own needs and desires with some kind of weird guilt complex, like there are more valid opinions to which I should subscribe, like my time would be better served ensuring that I avoid stepping on any and all toes. Hearing my friend validate my desire to pursue self-exploration, regardless whether or not that movement lines up with what other people perceive to be the smart move, was exactly what I needed in order to finally start to feel good about myself and my day-to-day.

What the hell am I trying to say in all of this? I can't say, really. All I know is that for the first time I'm happy -- unequivocally and without the caveat of anyone else's happiness infringing on the simple, base enjoyment of waking up in the morning and doing what I love all day long.

The album is in pre-production. I'm writing new material for the page and the stage. I've even launched myself back into acting. If you'd told me a year ago this is where I'd end up I would have been shocked, dismayed that so much would fall apart in a scant twelve month span, in mortal fear of the kind of pain and self-recrimination that would be necessary to get here -- but maybe, if I'm honest, I'll admit that even a year ago I might have been just a tiny bit excited that I would get a shot at all the things I loved -- the things I was willing to give up for the sake of living into a role I would have been forced to play for the rest of my life.

I've discovered some pretty important things about myself recently. Foremost among them is that I deserve things, things I had until now ascribed strictly to other people and never to myself. I've fucked up large in my life, over and over, but the more I think about it, the more I think I might have finally afforded myself a legitimate opportunity to make good on all those things I have always said I'm about.

They say everybody gets a second chance. At long last, I'm starting to think they're right.

honesty.

I

I am a liar --
I have been.

From air I called dust; phantoms;
I made them dance and
it was as though I had made them live.
They danced; not alive, they are
blown asunder in your breath.

I have stolen --
valueless, infinite.

Blood with blood I salved wounds
and taken from me I took back;
Your trust: your enduring faith,
again and again I took you,
valueless and paid for.

II

He watched himself fucking against a bed corner,
driving her into the mattress, her face away from his,
and the guilt in him, watching him, being him, denied him.
When she came, she looked back, into his face,
and he closed his eyes and wiped cooling sweat from his back.
Shortly afterwards he packed his bag.

III

I was soft --
self-determined endgame.

Father Jack and all the rest, in high
judgment seated among shadows and flags;
the impurity of mind, manufacturing ghosts,
the impurity of breath, making of them particulates.
Crushing paranoid collapse: remove the witness.

IV

He lay on his back where he had fallen in the gravel and mud,
and it seemed the stars were a cosmic baseball field mirroring the ground;
he knew fear then, by the stains on his jacket and the star-bright pins
of his eyes -- he knew his polluted mouth and his swimming teary vision,
and the words -- caution, always caution -- in his stereo-looped sense memory.
Stumble drunk Tuesday night, walking home to nothing.

V

I am called Traitor --
President-in-Exile, fraud.

Mirror-flash recognition; it's as we feared, Sir:
we've been compromised by
That -- you have always known That --
oh, his fractured Ghost, come to claim him, finally,
In His coal-mine eyes he will claw and
That will be his prison.

VI

Standing quietly with his hands muting strings, waiting for the words --
and they do not come. Hum pitch and stuttered coughs and
and
It's like waiting for dawn at two-twenty-seven a.m. Ring.
Aside-set for bruises, chair shuffle waste of time. He's choked, and
the audience has gone looking for another show.

VII

You, That -- we,
forgive him?
for
give him?
Oh, only in exchange.
Yes.

VIII

I don't know your God. I have not walked with Him; I don't understand His significance. These steps I walk alone, not in the sand. I leave no footprints to be followed, only breadcrumbs and blood.

I don't know your God, but I have run from your Devil. He is your Devil, too, after all, isn't he? A decade's worth of running, and the breadcrumbs are all consumed. That -- He -- there, behind me, cold on my shoulder like a lesson.

I have run from your Devil for ten years, and He has been My Devil; and I have been yours, and You have been His, and We are ourselves all angels.

And we forgive.

IX

Today I stand. I carve it in my arms, to remember, always to remember.

I am Myself, angel -- That. Fraud; Being; Perfect.

It's getting light. Finally, it's getting light.

X

Say it again -- make it real -- please, time is running out --

Today I stand.

Today I serve the truth.

adventures in writing

(Written 28 August 2006, 8:06pm. I know I'm jumping round a little bit, but I'm finding more writing on my hard drive than I remember having. Bear with me.)

An exercise, right? Okay. Three glasses of water: Check. Cigarette: double Check. Sustenance: In Transit. Shower to feel human. Built like a human so I better act like one. Beer number one: yet to be cracked. Might avoid for the evening, might go with water instead. Doesn’t rot my brain like beer. John Coltrane on the tape deck. Will switch to Psychedelic Furs later, but fuck music for the moment. I remember making the transition from writer to musician. Kind of a cop-out, allowed me out of the writing gig. Letters are infuriating. Sound is painful, right? I talk and I talk and I remember standing and talking in Hart House summer 1999 and I remember the infuriation of the standing placation I received. It’s like comedy, right? It’s like making people laugh, except there are tears. There should be tears. There weren’t any tears summer 1999, except maybe mine when I went back to the concrete basement at 60 Gilley Road and wrote my first song. It started there, I think. I couldn’t imagine more placation and I heard that musicians are above contention. When I was sixteen that was true. More water. Somehow it’s intoxicating me, not the same way as beer and gin, intoxicating like I’m cleaning out my insides. It’s kind of a contradiction. I put in my eyes earlier and now they’re gumming up. I always get gummed up when I can see. Short staccato sentences, that’s what stream of consciousness is about, right? Who am I asking? Maybe I’m asking her. Maybe I’m performing to a sold-out show of one. I have to stop doing that, I think. I think I have to stop making my day-to-day an exercise in theater. Should I stop doing that? I think it makes me happy, I think it makes it safe to glance at the mirror beside me. My eyes are always worried, I think as I look sideways at myself: that profile in the mirror. I remember writing about the mirrors a couple years back, when I first moved here. When everything was different, right? Adding “right” to a sentence makes it less cliché. “When everything was different” on its own sounds like it walked of its own volition out of a Harlequin Romance novel and onto my page. I don’t know how it got here, don’t ask me. I thought I buried cliché back when I burned secret cigarettes outside my parents’ house and then ate leaves from trees hoping the chlorophyll would cover up the smell. From what I understand it didn’t. I find myself going back and correcting small errors in continuity as I move along because the goddamn green squiggly lines on the Microsoft Word screen irritate the shit out of me. Stop don’t think. Don’t read back over. She said it’s a bad idea, and I believe her. She could tell me the sky was fuchsia and I’d probably believe her, at this point. It’s getting hard to concentrate around the burning pit of my stomach. It’s not hunger, you understand. Humans get hungry and I’m a freezing cold animal machine, just because I’m not as hot as Henry Rollins, who is and was and will be the Hot Animal Machine. I’m gears and wires and faulty circuit boards wrapped in a chewy mammal shell. I read yesterday that pollution is shrinking the genitals right off of polar bears and it makes me remember the polar bear tales my dad brought back from Churchill Manitoba 1979. I don’t know why dates are that important to me, but for some reason they give me something to hold onto. Dates are important – history is important. It’s history that makes us. That’s what I was trying to explain to Crazy Sean, that all the Buddhism in the world can’t eradicate memory. It reminds me of that movie, the one with Jim Carrey, the one I actually liked. Erase the memory, erase the experience, erase the importance, live in a vacuum, grow like astronauts, come back to earth with back problems, you dig?

Burned the motherfucking chili. Spent ten minutes scrubbing the pot, the new one I’ve been trying to keep in good shape for the sake of the married couple it belongs to. Now my hand doesn’t work right, won’t type properly. People wonder why I’m tied to the mundane – here’s the proof. Writing, even writing like this, dragged me out of synch with the rest of the world, and as a result I damaged something important to somebody else. Isn’t that always how it works out one way or another? Decided on beer after all. For whatever reason, alcohol keeps me in touch with the mundane, reminds me to eat even while telling me I shouldn’t, gives me an excuse to burn the chili. Now my hands are shaking, probably not from withdrawal Fucking green squiggly lines are telling me that I should have written “and gives me an excuse…”. Like I didn’t goddamn know that. You’d be surprised what I’m aware of, given the opportunity to elucidate it. I’m feeling it now, the desire and intense drive to stop right here, go eat my burned-ass chili, maybe watch a movie, maybe the rest of American History X that I started the other day. It’s overwhelming, the desire to stop. I don’t think there’s any real reason for it other than laziness, at least I hope there isn’t. Otherwise there might be some – fuck, some validity to the idea that something’s trying to stop me. It certainly feels that way. My hands are fucking up and making me go back and fix typos, I couldn’t even think of the word “validity” a second ago. I’m concentrating on John Coltrane, I’m trying not to give in. My eyes are getting gummed up again, make me leave, make me go take out my contacts, then go wander, go wander around my apartment, maybe have a smoke, maybe finish this beer, maybe go eat and watch TV and kill kill kill my brain. Rot it out, replace this pain with the Simpsons or something. Don’t think, for God’s sake don’t think, right? There I go asking questions again to people that aren’t there. I am holding on to an image of her and trying to remember what makes me this way. I’m not that deep, goddamn it. I’m not that tortured, I have no reason to be. There’s this little Jim Morrison that lives in my head and stares in the Narcissus pool all damn day. I’m not this important for fuck’s sake. I’m performing, I’m a parody of whatever I’m trying to be. I’m the ice-cold animal machine and I’m programmed to do nothing other than what’s required. I’m trying so hard to break this ceramic cover that I can see through and can’t reach through, you dig? Like I have to get through it, like I sealed it up and then forgot that I needed to get in and out of that room. Drink of beer, drink of water. Eyes squeeze shut. They open again and nothing is solved, nothing is clearer. I don’t want it to be clear, I want to obfuscate this and everything so I can not do what I’m trying to do to myself right now. That’s what it is: if I get back in touch with this, with whatever it was that made me that way, I get back in touch with all of it. If I write I touch it and I’m really trying to be a better person. Here’s the next step now, an intense desire to drink. It’s like a cold pit in my stomach, a prelude to burning that cools down to a nice warm expanding feeling in my limbs. The cold animal machine powers down and simmers lukewarm in gin and maybe a little bit of lime or something like that. I can smile then. The beer is a mild approximation, but it feels good. I’m calmer, now. The ceramic is loosening up a little around the edges and the words are starting to come more smoothly. A deep breath, then I let it out. I feel better. The only problem is now I’m more susceptible to that intense desire to stop, now it’s more of a “why keep going” than a directive to stop goddamnit for whatever reason. Now it’s more of a time to relax vibe, put your feet up, you’ve got Coltrane on the deck, put on something else, put on something you can halfheartedly play along to, pick the same old strings in the same old way, don’t think, don’t create, birth is painful. It’s easier to play somebody else’s songs, you know that? It’s easier to read other people’s poetry, even easier to read my old work, because I’m comfortable in the notion that it wasn’t me that wrote it, you know, it wasn’t me that traced lines and lines and lines and lines along my arms and along the mirror with a rolled-up twenty, it wasn’t me that did those things, that monster poetry thing isn’t me you know? It doesn’t have to be me, at least, I can be a better person, I can change and I can get better and I can leave it behind leave it behind leave it behind safely in the past where it can’t get anybody. Of course I’m lying, of course I have to take responsibility, of course I can’t put it off any longer because I’m trying to be a better person because that’s my thing, servo verum and all that, got to make it true if it’s going to be true. It’s only going to be true if I can say it in the mirror so say it in the mirror. It’s true it’s true. I take responsibility and I accept the consequences and I won’t do it again, not ever. I’m leaving it behind, I’m stopping, I’m stopping, I won’t hurt you anymore, I promise and please believe me when I say I promise because I promise. My hands are shaking and I can’t control it because it all comes back. This is why I stopped, don’t you understand that? I mean, come on, who wants to live like this? Who wants to have to exert this kind of control all the time, who wants to be this way? I know. This is unhealthy, this isn’t an exercise it’s a waste of time, I’m going to drink my beer and pick my old songs and be obscure and be obscured, why won’t you let me? Can you still love me if I’m obscured? Can you still love me if I’m not a poet? Can I be normal and still experience the extraordinary with you? I don’t know if I can, I don’t know if you’ll let me lobotomize myself that way, or let me keep lobotomizing myself that way, because that’s what I’m doing you know, I’m flushing it out, that’s why I like water because it’s flushing out all the disease. I’m never ever going to read this again after today, I’m never ever going to do this again after today, this is disgusting, this is a waste of time and energy and a waste of electricity, why can’t I just go play a video game or drink more beer or something? Since when do I have a code to live by? Since when do I have anything to prove to anybody? Fuck you for making me do this. I don’t mean that. This is so hard. My skin feels like it’s crawling, I don’t know how much more of this I can take. Maybe I should eat the burned-ass chili and step back for a minute, I think at this point it might be healthy. I promise I promise to come back to it, I promise, okay? I’m going to just eat and come back. I’m going to just try to feel more human again and kill the pit in my stomach and then I’ll come back. Deep breath.

10:33PM

My Psychedelic Furs tape is dead. It’s twenty odd years old, I guess I can’t blame it for crapping out. It’s too bad though; I like that band. Iggy Pop also went down for the count as Real Wild Child was on the other side. I’ve decided that Iggy Pop is what I’m into for the moment, though, and so I’m rewinding another tape…it’s Iggy with Bowie somewhere live I think. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t care. Long as it’s loud and grating. I was just outside on the deck for a cigarette and the skyline looks like the world’s longest bleeding mouth. Looks like some sadistic city planner took an Exacto knife right across the horizon and plated it with glaring orange lights. I’m beginning to wonder whether it was a good idea to fuel the ice cold animal machine because the deeper I dig the more regret I find. The gin is helping, but not much. I feel it chewing at the corners of my perception, like something I can only see out of the corner of my eye. I seriously considered the amount of time it’d take me to get to the first floor if I stepped off the balcony. This is part three. If it can’t stop me from writing through laziness and booze I suppose it’ll do whatever it takes, right? I’m not asking you, I’m sorry. You don’t know the answer. Lock me up. Seriously, I think I need some time away. Nice white walls and a padded room. If there’s one thing this has taken away from me it’s the desire to avoid cliché. I can honestly say that I don’t give a fuck anymore. I’m sweating right now and yet I’m freezing cold. Maybe I am getting sick. Maybe I’ve been sick all along. What if this is some kind of mental illness? What if none of this is any good, it’s just symptoms of a disease and I don’t even know I have it? I want to feed this music directly into my head and turn it up as loud as it’ll go. Iggy’s got a fever and so do I.

just play

(Written 27 March 2007, 11:53am)

Slide up, hit the right note and the band comes in just as sure as if I was holding up the little stick, that magic wand they give symphony conductors. Watch me for the changes. And I can’t help but think, who the fuck put me in charge? What do I know about lonesome highways east of anywhere, let alone some state so foreign to me it might as well be Mars?

But it is magic, after all, isn’t it, when thirty years’ worth of stale smoke and freezing midnight load outs comes in, in unison right behind me, waiting to execute that progression and give me room to sing about what’s more or less fiction to me. It’s like war: you have to trust your brothers to keep you safe, out of the line of scrimmage, to give you some covering fire to get you through to a foxhole between verse and bridge where you can’t do any more damage to the words, where you can slide up and hit the right note and let that be your validation.

My fingers form chords like prayers; please forgive me father for I am a sinner doing wicked acts, but I just can’t seem to stop. This is my alleluia, can you understand that, this is my movement of faith. It’s God talking through us in a minor key, all of us together like we’re a bummed-out, small-time host, holding secret worship under cover of sticky tables and tobacco clouds. It’s a whiskey confessional: forgive me, let me do my penance right here. It’ll be stigmata fretboard and sacramental bourbon, and I’ll bow down to you, I’ll be the altar boy in your church. It’s magic, isn’t it, a sacred mystery, Father, Son and Holy Gibson.

Raise my voice, crack and waver, imperfect until I slide up, hit the right note, and it all comes in behind me. And if that’s not sacrifice, then forgive me one more time. Count it in: one, two, three, four.

notes on notes

(Written 27 March 2007, 9:28am)

“The most important thing you can remember,” my father said, “is that it’s not what you play.” He paused then, exhaled twin columns of blue smoke from his nostrils. “It’s what you don’t play.” He never moved when he talked that way except to bring his cigarette to and from his mouth, red dot glowing in the dark of the garage from out of swiftly graying beard, and then it’s all lost behind a cloud, blue on black and fuzzed out. He never looked around either, when he did this; he stared straight ahead like he was building the fourth wall, like he was on TV and his only audience was a camera lens. Nobody’s there but everybody’s watching. Like a VH1 special: “Behind the Sophist”. Everything was about life lessons, he use to say, or at least he did through his talking. His words would articulate in shapes out of the smoke and I always wondered how anybody could get that much distance out of a single drag; it was like his lungs were full of dry ice. Iron lungs producing fog, iron brain forging new tools out of melted-down old cliché. Listening to him talk was like a soliloquy entirely built out of quotable one-liners. It’s what you don’t play. Take care of the pennies. Let people think you’re stupid. If you’re warm and comfortable. Look at yourself in the mirror. It’s not what you play.

“One note.” Pause, exhale. “One note, held the right way by the right player, fills a room in a way the Steve Vai’s of the world never could, no matter how many sixteenth-notes they played in a second.” Inhale. Ember lights up eyes boring through east wall. “You can play with anyone if you’re a respectful player because – ” Exhale. I mouth the next words with him, safe because he’s focused on the audience he can’t see. “ – because there will always be people who are better and people who are not as good as you are.” More or less, I think. But I don’t say it. Instead I say, teach me. I imagine he’s smiling wryly at the lens, in the dark, while he mechanically raises and lights another smoke. Zippo flash. He’s looking right at me and he’s not smiling. Lighter flashes out: ember bounces like a laser sight and I hear the chair creak as he leans back.

“I can’t do that.” Says it like I should already know. I don’t, and I tell him so. Exhale, through the teeth this time, like a filter on a coffee pot. “I’m not qualified.” There are always people better. Let them think you’re stupid. But I didn’t get that.

If I could have thought “self-effacing modesty” I would have, but instead I look for the camera, the teleprompter that convinced him this was what I wanted to hear. Good for ratings, but too cerebral for the target audience. And anyway I was thirteen and had never played a bar, not yet, because who wants to listen to halting scales and “Boogie Bass” exercises when there were a million tiny rock stars to choose from, all playing “Texas Flood” almost convincingly enough for me to believe the telephone lines really were down.

“Better you develop your own style,” like he read my mind, “rather than parroting somebody else’s. But it takes time.” How much time? If thirty years isn’t qualification enough. Smile for the people watching at home. One more cliché – to thine own self.

The smoke hung in the air after he went inside to mix a demo tape for the young singer-songwriter who was living with us. It’s what you don’t play, Dad, I said to the east wall, tasting the blue smoke, unfiltered, the whole atmosphere of the tired cliché.

the joys of self-analysis

(Written 21 January, 2008, front desk, Dave Wood Mazda)

I am officially sick of self-analysis. My stomach feels like I swallowed a length of tubing and my mind churns in its ever-efficient mechanics but it's as though something in the wiring has been stuck or rerouted so all that work just turns into a degenerative feedback loop. I'm almost certain it causes damage: definitely it causes the wires to overheat.

I spent the weekend taking part in wedding festivities for some close family friends who tied the knot on Saturday. I even played a song for the couple's first dance and danced with the bride myself. I drank some vodka. I ate some cake and smiled at everyone. I stood beside the dance floor and watched people dance.

Almost everyone there is engaged to be married or is already there. The people who are engaged are so excited, the energy is almost palpable. The people who are married are either very happy or totally despondent and on the edge of a divorce. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of middle ground.

I talked to a friend of mine whose wife left him for his brother a couple of years ago. It took him a long time, but he lost a lot of weight, got his life in order and now has a beautiful girlfriend with two children of her own, and he loves all of them dearly. Obviously there is no fixed bar by which to measure the varying levels of misery and joy that come from interpersonal relations.

The words people speak at weddings are so powerful even though they've become clichés thanks to thousands of Hollywood romances. Until death, to have and to hold, cherish, love, protect. This is heavy stuff, not to be taken lightly or undertaken for the wrong reasons. I really hope the new Mister and Missus have enough of their shit together to be able to persevere in the face of odds that lean farther and farther against them with every passing fiscal year and every newly released set of statistics.

The funny part is I don't even know them that well, personally speaking, but I just think so highly of their commitment to one another and the way they present themselves publicly that I can't help but hope every good thing for them. It makes me happy to know that some people are still good for other people, and that even in such a jaded age we can still have something as neat as the concept of undying love.

I'm not sure I know what that is, empirically. Everybody thinks they know; everybody says when you know you just know, and that's all there is to it. Of course that isn't true: it's hard work, loving people. Humans are a vast tapestry and all that, but people seem to share certain characteristics in common with one another, and almost all of those fall under the category of weaknesses. Jealousy – God, that's a big one. Possessiveness has got to be the worst feeling in the world for a lot of reasons, but the most difficult part of possessiveness is the instability it introduces into your life. You can't control anything, not really – you can wish as hard as you can to the contrary, and even devote your whole life to working against it, but chances are the sun is going to rise and there's nothing you can do to stop it. So, not being able to control it can be frustrating, especially if you really, really don't want the sun to come up for some reason. In Alcoholics Anonymous they equate getting over that feeling with "serenity". That's an interesting idea.

Initially the word "serenity" calls to mind images of transcendence or at least elevation – you have to be above pettiness and insecurity in order to really let it go. I don't know how you go about elevating yourself that way, and honestly I don't know if I agree with the idea anyway. I don't like to think that you have to get out of your body or out of your head in order to accept the things you can't change. In fact, that sounds a lot like an excuse an alcoholic might offer for drinking: I have to get out of my body or out of my head to let it go, and alcohol is a vessel through which I can do that, albeit temporarily. The fact is they're only half-right, because you don't actually go anywhere – you just put blinders on for a while and convince yourself that if you squint real hard and turn the lights down you'll see something that isn't there, or more often, you won't see what is there.

So what do you do instead? Alcohol and drugs and exercise and sex and anything physical don't give you the ability to get out of your head, they just focus your energies elsewhere. And that's evasion. I have always been the kind of person that feels an intense need to meet problems head-on, but my characteristic risk-aversion makes it a formidable and sometimes seemingly-impossible task.

That's why serenity as I've imagined it here has always been so attractive to me. It's easier to cloud your vision or concentrate elsewhere than it is to face up to something unpleasant and "deal" with it, so to speak. In fact, I'm not sure I even know how to face up to certain things. I do know everything that the books say, everything shrinks tell you. I do know every tactic that has been turned into a cliché by the Doctor Phil generation.

I think the problem is that I, like most people, believe in their heart of hearts that there has to be a pain-free solution to a problem. That's where that nasty control habit comes back in to play. I figure if I can control enough elements of a situation I can make it turn out the way I want it to, and barring that, I believe if I can control enough elements of myself – particularly my subconscious and my emotions – then I can get better faster, skip the mourning process, hop over all the innate pain of that process, and get to the good part. If I can just shut myself off and stop self-analyzing to the point where I'm dissecting my own organs, if I can just shut myself off and stop feeling things – things I think about too much – then I'll get through just fine. Of course, that's all malarkey, because nobody can do that, least of all me with the way my brain works.

So serenity is out, control is out. I have no idea what that leaves. Except – maybe writing, and music. I've stopped counting clichés at this point, but I think it might have a kernel of truth to it. Unlike whiskey or mile-long runs, I am not focusing my energies elsewhere or hiding from anything when I write, or when I play. Last night when I played the wedding, the song I performed was a somewhat less saccharine love song than others I've heard at similar functions, and it was goddamn hard to get through because all I could do was think about how it has applied to my life. So I sure as hell wasn't avoiding by playing that song. In this particular situation I was giving someone a gift – expressing hope for their life together by playing a song that voices a lot of positive sentiments. It was no longer "my" song in that regard; the pain that I associate with it didn't matter anymore in the face of its importance to the two people for whom I played it. It became "their" song instead, and was imbued with all the strength of their feelings for each other. I'm not trying to be overly emotive or melodramatic, because if you think about it that's what songs do. They suggest tones but their true life is in what the listener invests.

When I listen to the music of my youth I am almost overwhelmed by very strong sensory memories because of the relation I have, personally, to that song. Wonderwall was a chart-topper in 1995, and every time I hear that song on the radio I am, in a very real sense, transported back to that time, nearly fifteen years ago, and I can smell stale cigarettes and taste the stickiness of Coke in my mouth and feel my stomach churn with familiar, pubescent anxiety. Other songs I relate to differently, and those relations change over time. Your Winter was a song I couldn't listen to for years because it brought back painful memories of a failed relationship that I had desperately wanted, at the time, to succeed. When I listened I could see her eyes and smell the detergent she used to clean her clothes and feel the roughness of the second-hand sheets on her bed, and it felt like somebody was stabbing me over and over again just like it did the day she broke it off. But time changes people. I listen to that song now, and I still really like it, but I no longer get the stabbing feeling, because I've since built other relations with that piece of music.

Can you do the same thing with people? Can you relegate your relations, the trappings of what feels like a totally different life, into a particular partitioned area, leave them there, and start fresh? Shit, I don't know. But I do know that I am starting to notice patterns of weakness in myself, and to reference AA again, the first step is admitting to it – seeing through the blown glass that you put up in front of your face to distort the world and yourself to your liking. I want to smash that glass so that I can see what's beyond it, what's actually there. I want to listen to people the way I listen to a song and impart my own meaning, get something out of it other than what was given. Above everything else, I want to feel this, not shut it out or hide. Congratulations to my friends on their marriage. I got something out of it too.

two years in pictures

(Written mid-January, 2008, front desk, Dave Wood Mazda)

Snapshot – let it go. Flutters, falls into the trash can. There are too many reminders floating around this room as it is, so it’s a damn good thing that most of my life is packed into boxes. One of these days, when I get settled somewhere, I’m going to have to take everything out of those boxes and figure out what to do with it. I guess I’ll have to let it go. I would love to leave everything in storage, but unfortunately I have to face it sooner or later. I think about the way her skin smells. I don’t want to remember these things but I have to, otherwise the last two years really were a waste of time, and I think that would make it even harder.

Snapshot – drinking coffee outside of Starbucks in the Target plaza, because she thought the coffee from the store inside was inferior. I took a picture of the Starbucks sign, jokingly trying to insert myself into another one of those things that she’s good at and I’m not. She held my hand and we took pictures of ourselves. Later I would tell her she looked like an angel when the pictures came out.

Looking out the big bay window at the car dealership, I am coming to the realization that, while the months from January to March are always hardest for me, this year might be the worst to date. The weather is up and down like a toilet seat; warm and rainy one day and freezing cold and snowing the next. It’s playing havoc with my health, I think. All the trees are brown and gray and they match the sky and the pavement. Snow falls like Styrofoam, some of it melting on the ground, the rest collecting in mushy half-water on the windshields of the display cars in the front lot. It looks like shit, and it does nothing to improve my mood.

Snapshot – lying in her bed despite the fact that my greater weight causes the mattress to slant almost imperceptibly. She calls herself the Princess and the Pea, and I laugh. She is so sensitive to everything, and I am so careful. We move the mattress, switch it around so the slant doesn’t bother her. We can make anything work, I tell her, if we can make this damn mattress comfortable. She says this is the best New Years ever.

Tonight I am leaving work directly to go see my best friend in the city. I don’t know what we’re going to do, since everyone else in the area has other plans. I’m bringing my guitar with me, not out of any real desire to play it, but more because I don’t want to be without it if our plans suddenly involve women and drinking and song. I realize that I have neglected my playing a lot lately; I’ll have to rectify that if I’m to play at that wedding next weekend. I’d like to make a good showing for the bride and groom, even though a wedding is probably the absolute last place on earth I’d like to be. I want to ask my friend for advice, but his track record makes him the wrong person to ask.

Snapshot – she’s screaming into the phone, long and loud, like she’s emptying out. She’s been sobbing for an hour, but she hasn’t hung up. I stay quiet while she screams, and in between I tell her everything is going to be okay, that I love her, that I’m not going anywhere, that I’ll always be there, on the other end of the phone, when she has to scream and no one else can bear to listen. She hangs up on me. Later, when she’s calm, she’ll apologize, and I’ll tell her again that there’s no reason to.

There’s something about this weather that makes everything feel vague. I’m vaguely tired, my stomach feels vaguely ill, my eyes are vaguely sore. I have only a vague idea of what I’m going to do next, now that my graduate applications have been mailed to two very different places. If I get accepted to York I guess I’ll move back to the city, but I don’t know how I’m going to afford it. It might make more fiscal sense for me to stay at my parents’ house while I go to school, but I don’t think I could deal with living in that little box, constantly surrounded by people who watch my every move. I’m starting to hope more, surprisingly, that I get accepted in Texas. The prospect of moving alone to live with strangers and attend school in what basically qualifies as a foreign country is starting to become more and more appealing. The weather is good there; every time I’ve visited the Fort Worth area the sun has been shining, even in the wintertime. It gets a little hot for my taste in the summer, but I’d gladly deal with the cost of air conditioning if it means my world isn’t white on gray on brown for nine months out of the year.

Snapshot – we’ve been fighting again and I tell her to take me to the airport, that I’ve had enough. We face each other from a few feet away, my coat already on and my bag in my hand, her eyes denoting a solid wall of anger and indifference. But I know better. It takes me only a second to drop my bag and pull her to me, and when I do she collapses into tears, and so do I. We whisper I love you over and over, mingled with I’m sorry and I’m scared. For once I am totally honest with myself and another human being. That kind of honesty is liberating, like a crushing weight you didn’t even know was there is suddenly removed. I feel stronger than I have ever felt. I hold her to me and we promise that we will hang onto that honesty, that finally, things are going our way. We reaffirm forever to one another. Two weeks later, she will end our relationship via an email.

I consider myself something of an expert on fear. I’m scared of all sorts of things, mostly people and my own emotions. I’m not very good at expressing myself in an everyday way. I am very good at talking, even better than I am on the page, but I never say anything. I can talk for hours and say nothing, because I am afraid of what might come out if I actually said something real. But since you never get very far if you aren’t willing to face up to your fears, I’m trying it out. As it happens, saying real things is both the hardest and the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Fear paralyzes some people and it catalyzes others. It will freeze me in place if I let it, and it jolts other people into a dead run. But understanding a situation doesn’t count for anything if you can’t come to terms with it.

So what do I have to show for it? Two years’ worth of snapshots, a lot of wasted time and effort, a “sadder but wiser” mentality? No. I just understand fear even better now than I did two weeks ago, and I know what I have to do. Snapshot – let it go.