Another Perfect Day

I feel like shit this morning. Feels like my shoulder is connected to my neck with barbed wire. It’s left me with one of the dangerous headaches an a queasy stomach. I choked down a sandwich and took some Goody’s powders, but right now it could go either way.
At the moment I’m trying to decide what to do with myself. Victoria rightly pointed out last night that I’m going to have to do something, and soon. I came down here with 101 plans. But rather than implement any of them, I’ve spent my time finding ever more creative ways of distracting myself. The first couple of things were semi-legitimate. Organizing the stuff I’d brought down from North Carolina. Finishing the web site. But since then it’s gotten harder and harder to justify how I spend my days. I mean, come on. It might be nice that I’ve put all of my CDs on the hard drive so that we can just point and click our way through the entire collection, but was it really all that important?
I have to find a way to make money. Victoria says that she doesn’t care how I do it. Implying that it’s fine if I do that with writing or music. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how either one can be profitable any time soon. That’s crippling, because I just don’t feel like those things are worth my time, however I might want to do them. More than ever, the notion of writing or being a musician seems like childish fantasies.
I kept thinking yesterday that given our current financial situation, it would make the most sense to sell all of my guitars and recording equipment, get a job at a Home Depot somewhere, and just grind out the rest of my days. I’m living with a wonderful woman who loves me, in a great corner of the world. Why can’t I just be happy with that? Why does this ache just eat away at me?
I keep thinking about something someone said about Syd Barrett. Essentially that as long as he laid there on the bed and did nothing, he had all the potential in the world and could theoretically do anything. But the moment he chose something to do, he had already limited his possibilities. I can so identify with that. I’ve spent so many years of my life clinging to this notion that someday I might reach that mystical place where I can record and write and show the world what I’m capable of, that now that I’ve essentially arrived there, I’m terrified of it. I’ve been defined for so long by what I’m going to do “someday” that I don’t know how to be anything else.
Someone once gave me a parakeet that had lived for so long in his cage that he couldn’t exist outside of it. When I took him out of his cage he would panic. He would absolutely freak out. The only way you could calm him down was to put him back in his cage. Once there, he was perfectly happy again. God help me, but I understand that.
Sometimes I look at myself and just despair. I’m 42 years old. I’m 150 pounds overweight. I’m a high-school drop-out with no marketable skills, sitting around dreaming of being a writer or a musician. How fucking sad is that? I can’t bear what I am. I can’t bear what I’m not. I can’t find in my heart the faintest glimmer of that hope that I felt when I was young, when I just knew that the whole world would soon fall at my feet.
If not for Victoria and Mama, I know how I would deal with this. I’d sit quietly in my bathtub and open my veins. Close my eyes and drift away. I’m not trying to be melodramatic. That just makes sense to me. If I’m not to be what I was put here to be, even if that’s because of my own pathos, what’s the point in being here at all?
I know. I know. If you kill yourself the game’s over. No hope of regrouping. No living to fight another day. But it’s still damned appealing. If only because it would mean that I no longer had to deal in “what if”. I know in my heart that I could never kill myself. Not while Mama is alive. I couldn’t do that to her. Or to Victoria. Besides, I’m too fucking considerate. Dead people create such a mess. I could never slit my wrists or shoot myself because someone would have to clean up the mess. Hell, even if you take some pills and quietly check out, someone has to collect the remains. If I were to ever do it, it’d have to be something clean and final, like throwing myself into a volcano.
Of course, this is all theoretical. I’m not that courageous. The closest I’ll ever come to it is in song.
Here I will lay my head down
I will close my eyes
I will drift away.
And though I have come to this
I am not afraid
I will face the way
Of leaving now.
Maybe I should record that. A symbolic slashing of the wrists.
I wasn’t cut out for this world. I don’t know how to deal with it. I don’t seem to have the hunger or passion that it takes to make your own way. Most days I find that all I really want to do is take a nap. That’s what I’m best at. Lying there thinking about the wonderful things I’m going to do when I get up. Indeed, when I’m lying there, everything seems possible.