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Solitude and Silence My world is a cold, damp, grey, bleak, loveless, joyless, empty, hollow, frozen, desolate, solitary place. That is all. r Okay, that is not all. REVISION / CLARIFICATION (16.30): It occurs to me that I should at least attempt to begin to explain the above, and that I should not just spew such darkness into the aether, as there are people out there (like this one -- Thank you, and I'll be alright; I really have no other option.) who will become at least a little unsettled by it, and perhaps even worry for my well-being. (Unfortunately, with the mood which I seem incapable of escaping today, that reality only makes me feel worse.) It's partly the weather. While I'm fond of wailing "I'm Only Happy When It Rains", the last few days have been overwhelmingly dark, chilly, and rainy, and this has most definitely taken a toll on my psyche. Spring's continued refusal to show her rosy countenance, particularly at this late date and in a town so fraught with neo-Gothic architecture, can only have a soul-suffocating effect. This wretched (Why, yes, that IS, in fact, one of my favourite words.) weather most certainly contributed to the car accident in which I was a participant the morning before last, which has also furthered my depression, as automobile repairs, even with the aid of insurance, are expensive, and as I'm grossly underpaid, I do not possess an excess of funds with which to pay for them. This financial malaise is exacerbated by the near-certainty that I will also have to write cheques both to the federal and state government within the next two weeks, when I finally sit down to face the monster and prepare my tax returns. My resultant incapacity to save any money at all only serves to further stifle me, as New York City is a very expensive place in which to live, and I want desperately to find a decent-paying job there and relocate to Manhattan sometime this summer, because Time continues his forward progression, aging me cruelly with each passing day and withering the dreams and ambitions which have both nourished and tormented me since my early childhood. (We can trace my desire to be a performer to two experiences that I can clearly remember. At age five, after my first few piano lessons, as I was making apparently rather good progress, I sat in my grandmother's (She was responsible for convincing my parents to take me to a piano teacher, as she'd observed the bad habits I was teaching myself as I began to learn to play "by ear", an expression which has always amused me.) kitchen and heard her say to other members of my family, "Maybe he'll grow up to be a musician." Being as young as I was, I recall that I confused "musician" and "magician" and told the assembled company that I had no real desire to learn to do magic tricks -- a rather strange error for a boy who taught himself to read before age three, but nonetheless true. The second experience actually happened first; when I first saw The Muppet Movie in the theatre, I was struck by two scenes. The first is in the opening sequence, when Dom DeLuise's character rows off through Kermit's swamp, headed back to Hollywood, and Kermit stares at the agent's card, musing to himself, "Millions of people happy." While I may sometimes come off as an arrogant, self-centred bastard, the truth is that this is mostly what I want: to make millions of people happy. That's why I spend countless hours rehearsing shows for which I'm not paid, sit through days of auditions and help cast a season at a theatre where I am no longer employed, etc. The second of the scenes falls at the end, when the inimitable Orson Welles orders his secretary to, "Draw up the standard rich and famous contract for Kermit the Frog and Company." Of course "rich and famous" is part of the dream, too; one has to have at least some sense of self-preservation in the pursuit of "millions of people happy", I think. Anyway, for me, that was the beginning of the end, I suppose.) I've covered the weather, the trauma, the financial woes, the career frustration. It's widely accepted that I'm a rather depressive sort, and I usually just leave it at that; it's not particularly well-known that I was diagnosed some years ago as being clinically depressed, and possibly bipolar, and that's something that I choose to fight on my own, as I've tried therapy and medication, and I didn't at all like the creature they made me. At the heart of everything, though, at least lately, I think the most painful thing is the overwhelming and inescapable sense I have of being utterly alone and the fact that I've been this way so long that I don't believe I know how to be otherwise. I've written numerous diatribes on how I don't believe romantic relationships are necessary or even natural, how I think they're for people too weak to face the world on their feet, how I believe most people only find themselves involved in them because society seems to apply the pressure that insists they should; the truth, though, is that I rail against that which I believe myself to want, which is most often that which I perceive myself as being denied. I could go on wallowing, here, about how it isn't my fault, and how the poor wittle hewpwess DJWainPuppy doesn't know how to fend for himself in the big bad scawy world of interpersonal dynamics and trust, and how he's afraid to show his vulnerability to anyone without covering it with humour and can never ask anyone for anything because he values his precious sense of superiority and independence far too highly and simply cannot abide the thought that someone might possibly think there was anything weak or needy about him, as well as whence all of this stems and why...But I think I've already indicted myself convincingly enough as the source of my own depression, so I think I'll stop here. After all, as Ms. O'Hara said, "Tomorrow is another day," and if I'm granted the privilege to see it, I see little choice but to fight my way through it, singing and screaming as seems fit. If my life be one of desperation, Mr. Thoreau, very well, but you may rest assured it will not be quiet. r
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