This seems to happen to periodically. I get really interested in health, ethics, science, philosophy, knowledge, spirituality, life, and everything related to it. I want to know more. I want to feel great. I want to be efficient. I want to do what’s right. I create theories and ideas and diagrams and lists and hunt for new stuff online and books and torrents and I immerse myself in everything life has to offer. I tell myself that I am not important. My life is not important. Nor is my art or anything I do except for the way it is related to the whole because I am part of the whole and only a servant of nature. I get deep into this way of thinking and living. I feel this responsibility to take care of myself and others and I get frustrated that nobody else I know seems to care about anything but themselves and I see the stupidity of modern society and I question it all and want to tear down the government. But I try to see the beauty and love instead of the misery and pain and even the beauty of misery and pain. I become better. I feel better. I start to think I am better although knowing that I am not because either everything gets better at the same time or everything gets worse. Maybe both.
But then I lose something. Or an idea pops in to my head. I feel like I am disappearing. And I lose interest for my music and even people. It’s hard to put into words. I start feeling horrible again no matter how healthy my body or mind becomes. There’s this deep inner sense that something is wrong. I can not live like this. I cannot live as a servant because that would make my existence meaningless. I could die right now in a forest and have just as much meaning for earthworms than now as a parasite of the society I live within sucking all life out of it. So why should I live for the world I start to ask? Why I should obsess about the ‘morality’ of my decisions?
And little by little that simple suggestion a zen buddhist monk friend told me a few years ago creeps back into my awareness: leave everything but music. Suddenly I am reeled back into the abyss of inspiration and wonder. This fierce attitude starts to come alive again that wants to say all there is to say and knows that he has what it takes to say it. Dressed in epic melodies and thundering rhythms and acoustic guitar delicacy. I come alive again. I know that there is really only one thing I know how to do. Everything else becomes an obstacle. I find myself in my element (whatever that means). The ego grabs me by the balls and throws me in the spotlight of adoration and acclaim although only in my fantasy. I encumber myself with wine, women, sex, drugs, rock n roll. I gravitate towards like-minded brethren in other artists who are just like me (the woody allens, george carlins, bukowskies, tchaikovksies, robert johnsons, elliott smiths, picassos, etc) and other lost souls who seem to find themselves by saying something/nothing through various means that only a few can say. It all comes from a place beyond knowledge, beyond the known. But these artists aren’t wishy washy earth savers but real men (for some reason most of the great artists have been men) who have been to the dark side and seen the face of the dragon and said fuck this, I’m gonna do what the fuck I want, fuck everybody else and everything else. They know EXACTLY what it’s all about for me.
Until there are only flowers left after the apocalypse. I embrace my madness. I turn everything else to a low humming in volume. I say my goodbyes and rid myself of the baggage. I take on the new. The unknown. The price may be great suffering. All I care about is me and my music. A true narcissist at heart. A defendeer of narcissism. Of nihilism. I see the other side now as pathetic. Weak. Surrendering to life and nature is jumping off a cliff. Surrendering to the self and to art and to inspiration, now that is the makings of the man I would like to be. Maybe they are the same thing… This conundrum overwhelms me so much that I can’t bear it and I need to soothe myself with drugs, porn, ice-cream and romantic affairs with women who I idealize but then hate when they don’t meet my standards. Nobody ever does…
So what is the right path? What is right? What does that even mean?
Fuck this. Fuck it all.
I’m making my next album and whatever else happens is done to support that and me so I can be an effective vehicle to get these songs out there and heard.
I don’t know what I am talking about. Don’t ever think I know. I am a distortion of reality.
This is what insanity is all about.
blabalbalbalbablalalaaa
I haven’t been depressed for awhile but now it’s coming back. Misery is returning! And to be honest, I have really missed you my old friend.
Woody Allen was asked in an interview recently about what drives him nuts and he said:
The human predicament: The fact that we’re living in a nightmare that everyone is making excuses for and having to find ways to sugarcoat. And the fact that life, at its best, is a pretty horrible proposition. But people’s behavior makes it much, much worse than it has to be.