Amalgam.

The last few posts have been a discussion of last minute lethargy, fighting a cold and depression, a recurring fantasy plan for when I become disillusioned and hope for the next stage. My present mood is an amalgam of all these different issues, except the urge to purchase a gun and wild west it through the USA.

The cold is subsiding, but the last dregs are hanging on. The sad thing is that now my wife is sick so that I've gone from feeling crappy and mopey to spending my time with someone who feels crappy. It feels a bit as though the hits keep coming, none of them big enough to really give me an excuse to give up, just enough to keep knocking me down. The weather has been perfect for all of this, grey and wintry, we even had snow over the weekend.

The lessening of the grippe of the cold has meant (as I expected) a certain lightening of mood. This is excellent, a far more important aspect than fatigue and a sore throat. The death of the band that came about last week has resulted in me having no social interaction upon which I can depend (other than my wife, and she wants to lie under blankets with a book). I shall have to start again from scratch on my social life.

The new era is approaching rapidly. We close on the house on Thursday, and get the keys for Sunday. I will get to experience the totally surreal moment of having a piece of paper worth tens of thousands of dollars in my hand. The times that these have happened have always felt ludicrous, as though people must realize that all I have is a piece of paper with some words and numbers written on it. exchanging that for a house is extremely silly. As the close approaches the Lethargy intensifies, today's job was to switch over the utilities, a task requiring half-an-hour of phone calls that felt similar to the labours of Hercules.

Ah, but next week my major task will have been completed. I will have bought us a house. All that remains after that will be all the chores from one house, doubled, with the need to transport all the stuff from one house to the other.

A Cold

I have a cold. I am very lucky with my colds in that I rarely get much more in the way of symptoms than fatigue, and a tendency to get cold. This means that I feel just fine when lying under warm blankets. Having an excuse to lie under warm blankets for extended periods is a good thing.

The problem I have with colds is that the fatigue reduces my energy level, and my energy level is related to my mood. I become prone to depression. In fact, the beginning of this blog post was going to be that great lyric from Paul Simon's Sound of Silence,

Hello Darkness my old friend,
I've come to talk to you again.

However, I find myself looking at this from a distance. While I can feel almost an urge for sadness, a tendency towards tears, I can also see exactly why it is and designate this as "Unreal." It's as if I'm sitting in a room reading a nice book and there's someone sobbing in the next room. I know that in a couple of days these feelings will be gone and I'll feel better, it's just a cold.

Overall, what I am dealing with is the realization that I am in Texas for a semi-permanent period. We've signed papers to buy a house, there's no escaping this now. My reaction has been very interesting, I feel more like I felt when I was a teenager than I have in decades. I have a sense of powerlessness, but a knowledge that it is temporary. I have a sense of being very much alone, but I have reliable things to retreat into when alone. I fully expect that once we have moved into a our new home a new era will start, or at least an excuse to look for a new era.

Death of the Band

Today I made the decision to dissolve the band which I had started. The band had been an attempt to recreate the marvelous experience that I had with a Sam's Cross in Portland, Oregon. The music would be the same, the instruments similar, but within the understanding that a band is a construction made from the material of the people within it. I had hoped to gather together weekly with some nice people, play some music, and make some friends. After several months, most probably on St. Patrick's Day we could play our first show, and I could have that wonderful moment of making people happy by doing something I love.

So, what happened? Essentially what happened is that those who answered my ads could not sustain their interest or availability. A group of four of us had begun to play regularly on a Wednesday evening, and had got to the point where we could play a dozen songs, and were just beginning to be able to play two or three of them at a level that I would be happy for others to hear. Just at this point there started to be reasons for people to miss a practice, in fact a complete line-up has only been available once in the last two months. Then our whistle player announced she would be leaving town for several months in January (then December) for a job. Yesterday the guitar player decided that he didn't have the time for the band anymore.

A month ago I had put out an ad for more musicians, an attempt to fill out the sound of the band. A guy had answered, but he plays the guitar. In fact, only one person who did not play guitar or bass answered any of the ads. It seems as though music in Houston is formulaic, drums, bass and guitar, rock or country instruments. The chances of finding someone willing to learn something else, or playing something else with interest in this music seems slim. An Irish folk band with a bass and two guitars is not an Irish folk band.

The lack of knowledge of the music, the scarcity of musicians playing something not in the mainstream, the sheer distances that people have to drive in order to meet means the pickings are slim, and the rate at which people quit is high. Even in Portland I believe the band went through nearly twenty musicians before a steady group was formed. When faced with the choice of going through a series of people joining and quitting, playing the same songs with people learning them for the first time, for another year I decided that I simply wasn't adequately interested to do it.

Things might have been different if I had been making friends, but no great connection had been made. There hadn't been much discussion about anything other than the next song.

This doesn't mean that I am quitting music, I shall instead be concentrating on furthering my ability with the mandolin, pushing on through my book of Irish mandolin tunes, I'm about half way through. The plan is to be able to play all these tunes from memory, and then to take some lessons on theory and improvisation. Through this plan, at some point in the next two or three years I would hope to be someone who can walk into a pub and play a few tunes with irish folk musicians without embarrassment.

Perhaps next year I will try again with a band, but the way I feel at the moment I am emphasizing the temporary nature of my time in Texas. I have dreams and visions of living near a college town in the Carolinas sitting on a porch and playing wonderful folk music with good people.

Comfortable Grey.

Today is day for those things that can always be relied upon, the pleasure of a full stomach, the comfort of blankets, the distraction of a good book. The sky is low and leaden, and a wet wind blows. As a child I was fond of long walks in solitude, and the blustery conditions kept the Texans away.

The essence of days like this I always think of as a time I stood upon the summit of an iron age hill fort, the unbelievably lush grass bending beneath the force of an Atlantic gale. My anorak played a tattoo with raindrops, while I remained warm and musty in a sweater. There was no-one in sight and I felt so perfectly right, a full sense of belonging, time not passing and myself a thousand years old.

I have antipathy for people today, and I strongly suspect that people have antipathy for myself, not just now, but in general. A bed, a bath, a book and a blanket, all can be relied upon but people will always disappoint. People will also amaze, amuse and astonish, but they also always disappoint.

I have a whimsy of building with my own hands a tiny one room cottage of field stone and turf roof, out in the damp depths of nowhere. It is just a whimsy, I flutter from one mood to the next, but this mood is about hiding, and such a place seems a fitting place to hide.

Plan B.

1. Get a check for disposable income. Don't ask for anything that would require a lawyer but get some money. You can't live without it.
2. Purchase a used 9mm semi-automatic and a number of rounds of ammunition. In Houston this should be relatively cheap and will be much harder to get when you are poor and filthy-looking.
3. Get the Subaru included and don't take the dog.
4. Camping equipment. Costs will be dramatically decreased by sleeping in the back of the Subaru. I see no downside here.
5. Don't pick a destination. Trying for a future is what you got you here. Blow all your money. Shoot at people. Have sex with anyone. Why not?
6. Remember who your friends are. This may be tricky, but you can do it. There has to be one of them, right?
7. See what happens.
8. Remember 2.
   

The "Nearly There" Lethargy

I am a lazy person. But a practical lazy person. This means that while I strongly dislike doing things, I understand that things have to be done. Furthermore, often if you don't do something you will have to do more later. As a result I tend to get to things done quite quickly, I don't like the weight of things undone hanging around. I'd much rather be lying around, free as a bird. One of the modifiers on this is my mood. Since my mood changes quite a lot, or more accurately my energy level changes, there are times when I really don't want to do anything at all, and other times when I am extremely productive. I tend to do a weeks' worth of projects in a day.

The other modifier to this principle is when there is a sustained project, something that takes months or years, just when the end is in sight all motivation evaporates. This happens at the point where I become certain that I can fulfill the final tasks. Once the final portion of a long and difficult task becomes something which provides little challenge it becomes extraordinarily difficult for me to get over the finish line. I tend to waffle, prevaricate, procrastinate and avoid the last little bit. Well, the end of our Annus Difficilis is at hand and all that was needed was the collection of about twenty pieces of paper. Ten days went by with me wandering and waffling, but yesterday I spent a full eight hour day of mad scrambling to finish everything. Before closing on our house I need to send one e-mail and then wait for three weeks before the ridiculous signing event.

The "Nearly there lethargy" is a fascinating thing about myself that I don't really understand. I also don't really understand whether I like having things about myself that I don't understand, or not.

Dreams.

This week has been characterized for me by a series of extremely vivid dreams. Usually I awake with little or no memory of any dreams. This week I have had a number of dreams that I have remembered. Last night I remembered two dreams, the first with me in the role of a young boy who had joined the Liverpool Football Team. There was distance and distrust from the established stars of the team, but I felt confident in my abilities.

The second dream from last night seemed to be my own brain mocking my tendency for existentialist angst. In the role of a James Bond like spy I attempted to suavely wander through a series of high end back-drops (including the Grand Canal in Venice). As I attempted to flee from mysterious characters, who were going to find me out as a fraud, ridiculous problems would stop this. Traffic stopped me from crossing a street, the welds on a metal ladder would pop open one after the other, my beautiful white tuxedo was constantly being soaked in one way or other. But the entire feeling of the dream, which I think is really the essence of dreaming, was one of a slapstick comedy.

Earlier on in the week was the really good dream. This started off with myself and my friend Dade needing to get back to his apartment in an industrial area because I had left two sandwiches in the oven to warm. I became separated from him in attempting to get there and found myself running to try and get to the apartment, and then up through multiple security doors in a barren and depressing urban setting.
Once in the apartment there was a sudden change in which I was arrested because of mistaken identity, and then at the same time I assumed the persona of Michael Hasselhof within a film. With a large, black guard as my accomplice Hasselhof was transferred to a different section of the jail under the less than watchful eyes of a female guard. Changing into military fatigues he slides down a chute and out into the snow-draped industrial area in which ROTC students are marching. Assuming his best faux military posture he marches past them until he sees a group of school children on a field trip. One of the children sees him, the child who accused him of pedophilia, the child gives a wicked smile and goes to tell the teacher something. The dream ends with The Hoff desperately scrambling over the remains of a decrepit shed, fleeing in horror from the child.