I got to the show a bit early...

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I got to the show a bit early. They didn’t seem quite ready for me. Neither was I quite ready for them. What was going to happen? Most likely not very much. I didn’t know. Live music often took the edge off my depression. Often but not always. Or so I told myself. Maybe that is only the way it used to work. Did certain things really used to work? Lately I’ve been describing my mental state as some sort of nervous breakdown. Calling it a nervous breakdown sounds so dramatic, but I’m not quite sure what else to call it. Everything needs a name in order to exist. What else might I call it? The end of something and the start of something else, something unknown. The door is now open but I’m sitting just outside of it writing this. Sitting just on the other side of an open door feels like a kind of hope. That there is some opening and I will eventually find a way to go through it. When you’re going through hell, keep going. A nervous breakdown divided into four stages, like the four seasons, like four curses. The other day, when asked, I said I didn’t keep a diary. But I suppose these poems are a bit like a diary. A bit like therapy (that doesn’t work.) When I publish them (online) it is not because I think they are good. Automatic writing. A search for some kind of opening. Thinking aloud. The internet is filled with this stuff. As is my notebook. I realize that the door is still not open. The set up must be taking longer than previously planned. My experience is that everything takes considerably longer than planned. What does music do to me that nothing else quite seems to do. What do artists do when they hit a wall the way it seems I’ve currently hit a wall. On the other side of the door they’re still trying to figure out the soundcheck. This is only what I assume. My fear is a door will open and yet I will not know it’s open, and therefore not know how to go through. As if my nervous breakdown had a way out that might be either open or closed. If I had a bad cold I might stay home. But having a nervous breakdown I continue to go to work, as if work were both the cause and the solution. Can something really be both a cause and a solution? I wouldn’t publish these thoughts in a book or magazine, but it seems I have no problem putting them online, where they can easily be erased. Just one little click on the garbage can icon. And I haven’t even touched upon politics yet. I often think my despair has absolutely nothing to do with politics, even though politics gives much reason for despair. If I had an idea, we probably wouldn’t be able to do it for another four or five years, at which point I probably wouldn’t want to do it anymore. So there is no reason to have an idea now. But when is the right moment to have an idea? There never seems to be a specific moment set aside for just that task.



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