Such an existential day. I’m not quite sure what I mean by that but it seems appropriate nonetheless.
I slept in because I felt like it, and ate some sugary bakery goods for my lunch. It just wasn’t the day for me to really care. Passively I observed and prompted myself. I sort of realised I can, it doesn’t matter what I choose to accept I am – but aversely, I certainly failed to rise without having once again reverted to unfounded anxieties.
Each day I have to renew and reacquaint myself with the avenues of my analysis which takes me to a resolution I can then rest with. Every day is a journey. So although today I realised there was no desperate need to rise and fight for my business, and maybe that does suggest I’m finally growing into that realisation, at the same time I still sadly pondered my helplessness and where my fate would lead me.
Some girl from my high school came to get DVD’s done for her wedding, and somewhat passively I received the familiar emotion, this time almost outside myself, of lost days being young and stupid, innocent, it was in her smile, in her laugh, but also in that was buried a maturity I hadn’t seen then and it was testament to the fact those days are no more.
I couldn’t have run a business when I was a teenager, so I should be thankful I dawdle existentially and still make a good living in my own way, but so many mornings I wake having taken on once again, so many perceptions on that will take me half the day to undo.
It is all about time slipping away. That is one of the purest themes of my art, since before I even realised what it was, except in the aftertaste, in the afterthought, more layers of complexity are laid out as to what constitutes that theme.
I was obsessed with archiving at one point, like it had to be done. But the other night I couldn’t help but feel that part of the faded passion, the faded desperation, was in realising that to be obsessed with the past is to give up on the present, just in trying to understand why I’m not driven to archive any more. Is it because I’ve given up and no longer care that it’s important?
As kenny rogers says, there’ll be time enough for counting when the dealing is done. But I just felt somehow I would come to understand more fully what was going on, the trajectory I was on, that it would provide clarity and direction. I’d find what could be brought forward and enshrine that which could not.
I was relaxed in a somewhat passive way, I felt existential, I knew of my lingering anxieties as daily nuisances, insisting of me that I can’t relax because I’m hurtling towards dying alone and unfulfilled – and even though I have a slight chest infection, it didn’t seem enough to stop me, from just being okay. Time passes, it does, you can’t stop it, and in that movement lies emotive inspiration.
Except once again I think of the short circuit videos, it seems to make me so restless, and feel unresolved, and what does it mean, this unsettling emotion, like I’ve just dropped off the planet because I can’t find half an hour worth of tape?
This is the artistic resolution I arrive at these days, that this emotional struggle with time is a story itself, one that everyone must know in themselves. And thats the strands that make up the story as it now exists in the present. The story is about saying that it’s not just about the past or just about how we deal with the past or just about the present being a product of the past.
It may be painted as, or disguised as nostalgia, regret or whatever, but it’s just another dimension of the ultimate story.
What does not having evidence of the past really mean? That it never happened? In the context of the story I’m not sure thats the point. If what happened 5, 10, 15 years ago matters in the context of the narrative then I guess it matters, otherwise . . .
Perfect day by Lou Reed seems like such a melancholy song, that suggests how things can be perfect even when they really aren’t. It seems to represent some perverse kind of closure.
When I began taking orders this morning I was warmed in a tiny way by considering the role I play each week in helping people do their CD’s and their DVD duplication and tell their stories, their narratives, to make their story come alive. It made me think of Kurb TV and how I could do that as a “now” thing, as I slice of who and what I am now, the businessman who’s past calls him back. The story as it is today.
But then again to be pulled down by the thought of the short circuit material that may be lost, and then just to write through it until the feeling goes away.
I think what this all means is this, a change in how the tense of the story is represented.
Up until now it was all about what happened and then what happened next.
Now it’s about whats happening, it’s about now, now is the subject, and all that came before just feeds into what the story is now.
Now is what matters, now is now, now is the moment that exists, the past is just back story.
Me as internet star, me as a DJ/event promoter, me as an activist, me as criminal, they’re all stories from the past that I’ve got to build both ways, stories in the past, stories in the future.
Sadness and regret over lost footage and forgotten memories maybe a theme to explore in itself.
But what is so upsetting, is it having to feel as if all those experiences mean nothing? That having done all those things were just . . . man, I dunno. What an epic struggle with the narrative. All I know is the footage thing keeps getting me down, and maybe if there’s nothing that can be done about it, I just have to make that part of the story.
I was a internet sensation. But there’s no real evidence. I toured arund trying to be an internet sensation, it didn’t really work but I found little bits of magic. Was the magic in the video thats been lost, or in the fact that as it turns out I was never an internet sensation at all, I just had to believe it to make myself feel as if I was worthwhile, that I hadn’t wasted my life.
It’s funny because in looking back at what happened, it makes perfect sense, and maybe that’s the story to be told, not the story of how it was and if I can come back, when there really isn’t much to go back to, those are just early memories and they only play a supporting role, they aren’t the star.
I guess I just have to feel as if no songs I did, no videos I did are that important that they should stop me doing more songs and more videos. And if it is a story about a guy who doesn’t do any more good songs or end up doing the videos he wants to, then I guess thats what the story is.
