The Search for Fun

A warm, grey morning, early Spring in San Francisco. Oddly quiet for the Tenderloin, with only the lonely cry of the occasional seagull and an uncommonly rare Doppler siren of a police car speeding by a couple streets over.

I sit in bed & plan the day in my head, thinking of what the day holds & what I want to make it. As always these days, my thoughts circle around to how to grow my business. It’s been frighteningly slow these days, and as a result has been chipping away at the fun that this once brought me. When I sit down to make new pieces there’s a shadow that darkens my creativity, incessantly trying to figure out how to make my business grow. How to keep doing what I love. How to survive.

I suppose I should get my ass in gear, get what I need to get done here then get out, do a few things I’ve promised to do to help a friend, check in on the store that’s stocking my work, and if I get enough done before I leave for the day, try to get more wholesale accounts.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Like everyone, I just want to be able to do what I love and have it support me – create, and make people happy. It doesn’t matter if it’s chainmaille, a magazine, performing or any of the other options out there – but in order to do that, in order for this to be an actual business that lets me live the life I want, I need to put a LOT of work into the business part of it – and I’ll be the first to admit, that’s one of my weaknesses, and a big one.

So how do I turn what I don’t like – the business part of this, into something I love? I’ve already figured out why I don’t like it, which is simple. I’m not good at it – or at least I don’t think I am – and I’ve got a feeling that I’m not alone in this. How many incredibly talented people out there are creating amazing things that no one knows about because they’re just as fearful of doing the legwork to get known as I am?

Maybe I can turn this into something I love, and grow at the same time. Maybe I will create a blog, talking about my struggles & triumphs, and in sharing them, help others to find that they can turn what *they* love to do into something that supports them. I need to think about this…

But even more, I need to get my ass to work right now. It’s a beautiful, warm, grey day – and it’s time to make it count.

Advertisement

again

2.7.99

look again
to the artificial peace
look again
to where words don’t matter
look again
to erase it all for a time
to try and find an absence
of meaning
an absence of emotion
an absence of hope
an absence of tomorrow
look again to a full bottle
and the empty bodies
try to ease this mind
this desire for understanding
in the din
of vacant noise
and blank faces
and blank minds
to go beyond feeling.

Erase any thoughts of what’s to come
look to the emptiness
of now.

A shot of Jack
a shot of Cuervo
a couple of beers…

searching for the pen
to take control of my hand
searching for so much disgust
searching to bring the pain
and as I go through
enough shit of my own
why is it that I need the pain
why is it that I can’t find in myself
right now
the emotions that are so new
the torment that I want to feel
so that I might make these words wax
poetic –
I could write about the mother
That I’ve never known
I could write about nothing
And I’m drunk in the want
Of the self pity that I’m so familiar with

The alcohol releases the pain
brings it out
so I drink hard
and I know my mistake
because in the search for the erase
I fool myself, willingly
and I find that
in a strange way
this is where I want to be.

This pain is my comfort
this pain is what I’ve always known
this pain is what I don’t want
to let go

It makes me feel so alive
in my façade
in my imitation of what
I could be.
And the alcohol doesn’t work
I pretend to try to escape in it
but I know myself better.
I know that when I am this way
that it will only bring the pen to my hand
in such profound a need
to release
and I feel such an important part
is missing.

the child.
My child,
coiled around my soul.

I would call it dead
but the pain that it brings
is the only thing at times
that reminds me that I’m alive.

This pen, this paper right now
the only sanity that I have.

colorless

I look out at the grey sky, same as it is inside. I watch the rain as it runs down the windows and wish I could enjoy it, but only find a mirror as I again wipe what was once hope off of my face, taste the poison in this loneliness, the loss of what could have been.

I ask myself, try to find who I am anymore and wonder why I am. The messages left for my birth-mother have been returned in silence from her for over a year now, and I remember when I had nothing to remember, to feel ashamed of, to wonder why the person who gave me my life won’t be a part of it.
We began well, she smiled every time she saw my face – the only one if her children that looks so glaringly and perfectly like her…

What have I done wrong? Is it my honesty? Is it because in my desperation I choose not to hide what I feel? Are the questions too much? Does she feel pain for being forced to let me go the first time?

When I was younger – 22 – 24, I would stand at the door of my local bar in NYC and, at times, if I was especially horny that night, I would stand at the door at last call and, if I hadn’t already found a beautiful woman to take home, would call “Who want’s to fuck me tonight??!”

In the summer, in the ’90’s, in New York City, many people said I looked like Axl Rose. And that idiocy worked over half the time. The walls I had build around my heart were meticulous, and served their purpose. I heard rumors that I was a great fuck Inside – I pas perfectly empty. It was like trying to close your hand around light – all I got was darkness. Eventually, I realized that, as many women that came home with me, sex was only sex, and even in all the flesh, I was lonely.

I don’t even know what I’m writing anymore, and don’t give a fuck.

30 years later, I stumble on all I’ce known and done, and have no idea how to  actually “date”.

I’ve been alone for over five fucking years.
All I want is someone  to be better for. And I am horrible at the game. I don’t know the rules, so I make my own, say too much, and say goodbye, I”m sorry for my heart, but it’s insistent and I don’t know how to pushit back down and you’ll go away anyway so I’m going to say…

that I think we would be good together. I have never been wrong in the rare times I’ce seen something in someone, something that would make us both happy if you allow it. Never.

But you need to have time for me, for us. That is all I ask. is it that much?

The skies are dark now but I still hear the rain against my window. As usual, I don’t read this before posting.

And I taste the tears that have been shed over far too many lives.

vanishing

Someone new to help, something else to make someone happy each of the past few days. From being at the right place at the right time to help a stranger get her dig to the emergency room after an attack by another, to finding, just outside my apartment door on the morning I decide to bring a bag of warm clothes that has been sitting for months, the person who perhaps needed them more than any other – and just the right size so that they would fit her thin frame.

There is no altruism in my actions, in my need to help others. It is as vital to me as food, as breath. As the beat of my heart – but even, perhaps, more so than those things alone.

I need them to prove my existence. To remind myself that I’m someone, something. To help push away the constant doubt that I am a corporeal being, flesh, bone, blood, and not an illusion, an apparition, a phantom. A dream.

In my life I have been called all of those and more, always by those who knew me a bit more than the shallow toe-dip of most. Always by lovers. But then, it was them that made me believe I was real.

In this life I live now, days, sometimes weeks pass without talking or seeing someone who knows me, without touching another human, without the challenge of a good conversation, something that might make me think, question – and I feel myself vanishing again in the absence of those things…

No, the things I do for others, at least at this point in my life, isn’t even close to something just for them.

In many ways, I need  them much more than they need me.