failure

Posted 12:39 PM by sean
It's unfair to claim that fat people want to be fat. But it isn't totally untrue. Believe me, I know. The saddest day of my life was when I lost the weight I had aimed to lose and I looked at myself and realized that, even thin, I was no different, no happier. And I was somehow less significant, smaller. I couldn't feel my own weight, my frame was an indication of all the celebrations I had avoided, was a sign of how I had bought into the beauty myth and come out the other side merely thin, not beautiful.

But you can't really describe this to people who don't understand it on a cellular level. It's what made real punks punks back in the day. Sure, tons of kids had mohawks, even today there are more green haired kids than there were in the 80s, but the hair and the chains and all that isn't what made you punk. Being ugly, that was punk. Sleeping on the floor of your classroom during a final, that was punk. Being bisexual, spreading rumors about your friends worshipping satan, playing in a band that sucked and didn't want to get better, that was all punk.

And there is a way that being punk makes you feel. Strong. Stronger than anyone. There is playing by the rules and there is winning within the rules, but winning because you mock the game is just pure power. It's smart-ass power, sure, but the more people who shook their heads at you, the further outside the power structure you could find yourself, the more in control of your own life you are.

Anyway, that smart-ass thing is something I have in large doses. But lately, it has been occurring to me just how immature it is. I can still offend with the best of them, I can still be snarky and humiliating when the occassion demands it, but it has become apparent to me that it's a useless road to go down.

My failures as a professional are the punkest thing about my existence now, and it isn't right. I do two things very well. I am an excellent studio musician and an excellent actor. It has only dawned on me recently how actually good I am at these two things. And in both cases, I could be making money.

When did I get all punk about it? I don't remember. I don't remember when I started punking auditions, going in and telling the casting people they should use someone else, not preparing purposefully, mocking powerful people every time I got the chance. But I did it. For years. In LA, I hated every moment of everything I did.

Now, failure just feels like failure. Punks don't get to have homes and raise kids. They just don't. The recordings I begged for and was promised back in September are not going to happen. I haven't put together the Lucretia packet to get the possible tour together. Some of this is my fault, some isn't, but the pain reaches back and colors every missed opportunity over the past 15 years, since the day I found out I wasn't going to graduate and I thought it was funny.

So now, I have to succeed. I have to. I have to leave my bleach stained jean jacket at the house and make work happen for me. I will not ever find myself having lucked into money, and I want jordana's children and our home to *exist*.

She finally turned to me yesterday and said, as nicely as she could, "I just can't talk about it anymore. If you're gonna do it, then do it. Just do it, or don't, but don't talk about it anymore." Man, hearing her say that, I want to grab that punk by the throat and drown him.

Insomnia

Posted 12:56 PM by sean
It's my understanding that alcoholism doesn't have a foolproof set of criteria, that there are alcoholics who go long stretches without drinking or thinking of drinking, and it has occurred to me that insomnia is much the same way. You can go several days not only sleeping regularly, but sometime voluminously.

But man, when it hits, it's just indescribable. Insomniacs can't go without sleep, when you hear about Edison sleeping for three hours at a stretch his whole life, he wasn't an insomniac. You actually need the sleep, you just simply don't get it.

And it's the world that changes. You start wondering how people reach their conclusions, how their minds manages to travel from one reasonable set of assumptions to what seem to be completely foreign conclusions. But then, for a second, you understand, you see clearly what others see, and that's when you start to get worried. In that second of sharing a common reality with the rest of the world, it begins to be clear just how far afield your mind goes when the deprivation goes this long.

And now, in my fourth day of no more than three or so hours of uninterrupted sleep at a stretch, I've started to realize I'm lost in the middle of conversations. Last night I wasn't quite sure at any point how I had arrived at where I was. But it isn't a fever, it isn't incoherence, I can go back and draw the line of my actions that landed me, say, in a deli at Lincoln Center, but I have to bear down and focus, like a movie I haven't been paying attention to. I have to force my thoughts as if out of a sweaty constipation, grabbing the edge of my seat and holding my breath.

I find myself sweating all the time, when I'm not completely chilled. And I haven't completed a task in two days that didn't take three other half completed tasks to marry it to. And now the weather is in collusion, I'm walking around my 80 degree apartment from room to room, knowing it's 5 degrees outside, like a caged animal in a controlled environment. I feel like the angry snake at the zoo, the one that the handlers don't want to fuck with because he keeps biting people.

Pioneers

Posted 11:54 AM by sean
My family tree traces in two directions, but with one ideal. On my mom's side there are stories of massive personalities, money saved over years and years to buy a piano, only to be spent when the crops failed, and men landing in New York with nothing but pluck and determination carrying them to the couches of Arcadia. On my dad's side there are barn-raisers and fiddle players scrapping their way across the Tennessee valley and broads landing in New Orleans with only their wit and their strong backs lifting them over the Rockies and landing in Compton just in time to flee once black people started moving in.

We've allowed for very little weakness in our family. Man, when my first marriage fell apart, it was never more clear. Everyone was really upset that I was so torn apart, but, y'know, after a month or so it just started getting... old. Sure, we know, we know, but, y'know, she's gone now, she's got her own place, maybe it's time to put all this behind you. My ex and I were talking about reconciliations and living arrangements at the beginning of November when I discovered that she wasn't invited to Thanksgiving.

Which was fine and right, our marriage was over and people from the outside recognized that before either of us did. But no-one wanted to talk about it, no-one wanted to help lick my wounds. Again, that's fine, that how we're made, I'm not whining about it. I'm glad. I came out on the other side of that strong as hell.

The only person who was always willing to fight and help and take care of me was Michelle. Because she is already strong, she doesn't need to be hardened up. I feel like she was dropped into this family like a kitten in a pack of scarred old work dogs. And yet she has always picked up her load, shouldered her burden and tried as hard as she could not to talk about her problems.

So now she's thirty. She got the least parenting of any of us, my parents split up when she was 13, for chrissakes, leaving her in my retarded hands. She's had a series of horrible boyfriends, mostly because she probably thought she was supposed to. She chose about five different career paths, all of which have had built in dissapointments.

Her love life has been macabre, tragic. Look, that's just the way it is. We talk about it and she laughs it off. I try to talk to her about the way's she's hurting, first because I love her and second because I owe her a debt. I owe it to her to be there for her when she's gotten this sad.

You can buck up, you can put on a happy face, you can decide that you're fine. My brother Ian did this for years and years, harboring secret obsessions and ticks that he never trusted anyone with. Until he finally met a woman who loved him not in spite of these perceived weaknesses, but because of them, in a way.

Sometimes you need to howl. And, what is even more annoying, sometimes you need to howl for a few months. Sometimes for a year or two years. If you've always been told to stop howling, to stay quiet, to buck up and be strong, it could take years of tilting your head back and screaming and screaming about how unfair it has all been.

I use this blog so I don't have to leak all over the people who have been kind enough to put up with my howling all these years. The only reason I have happiness in my life now is because I spent all those years screaming when I needed to, and anyone who needs to scream, including Michelle, should just keep doing it.