turning point

I don't remember paying that tab last night, I don't remember what I said to my ex-girlfriend that made her upset, but I remember her coming out to the car window to tell me so. It doesn't matter too much, I didn't drive and I saw the payment of the tab on my check card today, but I remember the ridiculous story I posted this morning.

Whether you read it or not, doesn't matter, it's been pulled down and tucket away in the digital memory of my computer (computers are so great like that, they never forget), but I took it away from public view because it didn't accurately articulate the revelation I had these past 24 hours. It was just a venting, and venting never serves it's intended purpose. Venting just explodes emotion and thought, but it's not art or even valid communication.

So I've been feeling these past few weeks that something had to give, I think that was obvious to everyone, as much so to the readers of this poor excuse for a blog as to my co-workers and "friends". The seemingly endless cycle or work-drink-sleep was grinding me down, I wasn't getting fed in the way I so needed to be. So for those of you who happened to read yesterday's now MIA post, you can start to understand how I got so far down a ridiculous extreme in exploring some strange part of me.

The best way for me to explain it, at least as far as I've wrapped my brain around these past 12 hours, is that I witnessed the kind of perversion and confusion that snapped me out of my spiritual coma. Like alcoholics, yeah I know I might be one, have a "moment of clarity"; I woke this morning and looked in the mirror at an unshaven and destroyed person. Since I didn't have to work today, I spent a lot of time sitting on my bed and listening to music, reading a bunch of psychology articles my brother had printed out for me to look at. During cigarettes on the porch I thought about what the last night had meant and how I felt about what happened without the mask of whiskey over my brain.

I'm not disgusted with myself for what I've done, but I did marvel at the... the... the means I was willing to go to just for attention. I have spent the last 6 years on vacation from myself. Growing up a nerd will make you intensely possesed by the idea that popularity will save you. I guess I actually let myself be convinced that I was flawed for not being accepted back then and ever since a reinvention of myself at 21, I felt I needed to be a lot cooler to everyone if I were ever going to find peace with me.

And that shit's just not true, that someone is going to save you, or that people are going to help you out by being your friend because you're awesome enough to deserve it. So my lows were as bad as my highs were good for all these years. People would be amazed at the transition when they witnessed both gregarious and hilarious Doug and when they happened upon silent and contemplative Doug (who I tried very hard to hide), they couldn't do the math on that, unless of course they were Geminis too.

So now the idea is to bring those two extremities together in a way that doesn't make me feel like a phony. I would say that writing may save me and this would be the perfect time to pound out my long-desired first book, but I think that it would just become a byproduct or confessional of my last 6 years of indiscretion and falsity, so I've got a different idea of how, but I know that going home to Art is definitely the answer. I'm going to give music a shot, the kind of shot it deserves, while at the same time returning to my roots as a visual artist. I'm cleaning out a misused corner of my kitchen and getting an easel, some canvas, paints and brushes with tomorrow's paycheck.

Words are just so... so very cheap right now. I mean, everybody's got them and they don't cost nothing.
 

:doug @ 3:28 AM