My Birthday present to myself this year is indulging in feeling sorry for myself. For a change.
I learned weeks ago that a Karaoke From Hell performance would, for maybe the only time ever, be happening on my actual Birthday. I have been trying to psych myself up mentally and physically for actually going, but... mostly due to anxiety I have had very little sleep. I already felt a little overshadowed by other very publicly promoted Birthdays near this date, some related directly to Karaoke From Hell, and then I find out that tonight's performance is "JJ's Karaoke From Hell Birthday Party". I don't even know who "JJ" is.
This goes to the heart of the problem. There is a core group of KFH "regulars", but I haven't been regularly a part of that for longer than I was. Back in the early days, I was so omnipresent at their shows I may have even been an annoyance, but it has been much longer since then than my return and my second absence combined.
There has to come a time when I realize that I am no longer meaningfully part of something. That something is a thing with or without me. That is as it should be and it is petty of me to be hurt by it.
Consider also, that I seldom feel the stirring of the urge to sing, even though it had once been, for better or worse, right or wrong, the most important thing to me, especially with an audience, and that when I now do attempt to sing, I am horrified at how much worse I am now than I indulgently remember myself to have once been. Awkward run-on sentence win!
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
"Enough" for what?
I sleep as much as possible lately. Two things I have come to like about dreams are that I don't feel physical pain and I don't feel fear. I just awoke from a dream where I learned that my dreams are not an escape from sadness or self-pity.
I just had this dream where every job, every friendship, every project, every relationship from my whole life, everything in which I had ever invested any part of myself, were mashed up, mixed with fictional or allegorical stuff and represented as two jobs I held simultaneously. I had returned from some sort of self-indulgent money-wasting "business trip" and found that both workplaces had been re-imagined, re-shuffled, lots of new people were there, and I couldn't find my desk any more. At each place, someone tried to fire me without firing me, telling me I could "work at home". In both cases I just broke down and admitted that I knew I no longer had anything to contribute and had been faking it for years. I liked to believe that in the early years I had something to contribute, if only because back then everything was as disorganized as I was, and just putting in an effort to prop up the fallacy that things were better was enough. I admitted I had been faking my way though everything for years and that I realized this day of reckoning had to come. Everything had outgrown me. I was still this unreliable fake who sometimes worked really hard at things that didn't really work and sometimes just goofed-off. I had never really been good at anything, and never will be.
I had trouble finding the exit. I would head down towards the basement on staircases that just kept getting shorter, narrower, smaller, until I couldn't move any more. I went back up and kept trying doors to the outside. They all opened to strange places, mixes of the familiar and unfamiliar, and people told me I was in the wrong place.
I didn't fit and I couldn't get out and I was utterly humiliated.
The only thing I am good at is feeling sorry for myself.
This is not a suicide note. I will never commit suicide. It requires a conviction, a sense of purpose and righteousness that I will never have. I know that sounds contradictory and weird. That's me.
But I am sick of half-assed bullshit meant to prevent suicide. What good is a suicide hotline if it talks you off the edge? Will they be there tomorrow and every other day after telling whatever lies it takes to keep the same person from taking the final step? A suicide hotline is there to make the people answering the phone feel good about themselves in the moment, not to save lives, not to change lives that are beyond hope of changing, beyond imagining anything better being possible. Charity is a dark and selfish business.
"You are enough". Enough what, for what? Congratulations, now the word "Enough" looks weird and meaningless.
Again this is not a suicide note. So if anyone reads it, just let me go back to sleep and hopefully dream something more abstract without the psychic agony of this dream I just had.
I just had this dream where every job, every friendship, every project, every relationship from my whole life, everything in which I had ever invested any part of myself, were mashed up, mixed with fictional or allegorical stuff and represented as two jobs I held simultaneously. I had returned from some sort of self-indulgent money-wasting "business trip" and found that both workplaces had been re-imagined, re-shuffled, lots of new people were there, and I couldn't find my desk any more. At each place, someone tried to fire me without firing me, telling me I could "work at home". In both cases I just broke down and admitted that I knew I no longer had anything to contribute and had been faking it for years. I liked to believe that in the early years I had something to contribute, if only because back then everything was as disorganized as I was, and just putting in an effort to prop up the fallacy that things were better was enough. I admitted I had been faking my way though everything for years and that I realized this day of reckoning had to come. Everything had outgrown me. I was still this unreliable fake who sometimes worked really hard at things that didn't really work and sometimes just goofed-off. I had never really been good at anything, and never will be.
I had trouble finding the exit. I would head down towards the basement on staircases that just kept getting shorter, narrower, smaller, until I couldn't move any more. I went back up and kept trying doors to the outside. They all opened to strange places, mixes of the familiar and unfamiliar, and people told me I was in the wrong place.
I didn't fit and I couldn't get out and I was utterly humiliated.
The only thing I am good at is feeling sorry for myself.
This is not a suicide note. I will never commit suicide. It requires a conviction, a sense of purpose and righteousness that I will never have. I know that sounds contradictory and weird. That's me.
But I am sick of half-assed bullshit meant to prevent suicide. What good is a suicide hotline if it talks you off the edge? Will they be there tomorrow and every other day after telling whatever lies it takes to keep the same person from taking the final step? A suicide hotline is there to make the people answering the phone feel good about themselves in the moment, not to save lives, not to change lives that are beyond hope of changing, beyond imagining anything better being possible. Charity is a dark and selfish business.
"You are enough". Enough what, for what? Congratulations, now the word "Enough" looks weird and meaningless.
Again this is not a suicide note. So if anyone reads it, just let me go back to sleep and hopefully dream something more abstract without the psychic agony of this dream I just had.
Friday, January 3, 2020
No Lunaria Calendar for 2020
A minor "boo hoo" for me. There is no Lunaria calendar for 2020. Despite being handed off to various publishers and designers over the years, it was always beautiful and had lots of interesting lunar lore, and I liked the way it had a page for each lunar cycle rather than each month. Fortunately, my other favorite calendar, the glow-in-the-dark LUNAR calendar which has been put out by Universe Press for over a decade, is still being made. It is a traditional page-a-month calendar, but does show the lunar phase for each day. I'm no astrologer, but I've always been fascinated by Earth's moon.
I first wrote this as a Facebook post, but then thought it was too trivial and self-involved, so here it is, safely tucked away in my blog that doesn't get in anybody's face.
Usually my blog bog is full of grim grime and hyperbolic self pity. I don't often bother with that any more because it doesn't change and it doesn't help to keep writing the same gloomy shit over and over again. Rest assured, I am thoroughly miserable, so the world must be functioning normally.
I first wrote this as a Facebook post, but then thought it was too trivial and self-involved, so here it is, safely tucked away in my blog that doesn't get in anybody's face.
Usually my blog bog is full of grim grime and hyperbolic self pity. I don't often bother with that any more because it doesn't change and it doesn't help to keep writing the same gloomy shit over and over again. Rest assured, I am thoroughly miserable, so the world must be functioning normally.
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