PatrickG
12-28-2007, 03:00 PM
I suppose 'tis the season for the blues, looking around.
If you'll pardon me, I'd just like to reflect.
The last three years have put me in a rut.
My grandparents died; they were the first people I was really close to who died. But given that they both had heart conditions and made it into their eighties, it was understandable.
It was still a shock for me when my grandmother died, as she'd been so close so many times and pulled through. I have a yellow rose preserved in a glass case from the funeral and it was a sweet goodbye. Still, I felt like I was going to snap when my grandfather died. I got sick. I cried for three weeks. I couldn't bring myself to go to the funeral and sent a eulogy in my place.
Not long after that, on my birthday, word broke that one of my favorite writer's sons had died. This writer had done a lot for me. He'd pushed me on his editors, opened doors for me, offered help in getting me out to San Diego. His son had been there for the craziest pitching experience I'd ever had. That was the end of our regular correspondences.
The same day, one of my friends from high school died in Iraq. I'd had several friends disabled and known several people who were psychologically traumatized but this was strange and different. His funeral was basically a state funeral with yellow ribbons that stretched for twenty miles down the highway. His mother -- a bit of a hippie once upon a time -- turned the funeral into an endorsement of the Iraq war. I only decided to go at the last minute but when I saw our high school theater teacher there, I had to stay and talk with her. We talked for a long time about death and the future.
That was the last time I saw her alive.
She was only around fifty but she was a woman who shaped people's lives more than she taught theater and in her brief battle with cancer, took on a mythic persona in the community as the "black veiled lady" after she lost her hair. Her funeral drew in probably four hundred people at the largest church in the small town. It was very strange as we left and fifteen years worth of her students formed circles and started doing the old warm-ups and songs she'd taught us. I saw people there I knew from elsewhere, people I didn't even know had met her.
I got cast as the lead in this wonderfully complex play. I was so excited when I found out about all the great actors who had played the role before, how it was always a breakout role. I was going to be playing the younger version of the head of the college theatre program, a man who was my advisor and friend, with a visiting director in charge of the production.. My character was a raving lunatic, homosexual, Irish, aristocratic and a bloodthirsty soldier. And he was the male lead. Tell me that isn't the greatest role ever for a whitebread straight white male dork...
But I couldn't keep up with the memorization. And the visiting director was ruthless on the pace of memorization. We had a week and a half to get off book.
I quit my job and still couldn't keep up and was replaced. The one thing I did right was accept the decision with some grace and eagerly endorse my replacement to the cast. There were some hard feelings in the department that I was replaced but I stuck with the director and offered to help anyone who needed it in any way. Still, I didn't actually see the finished play; even saints have limits. :D
I did go on to play a bumbling pedophile English professor (great fun) and direct a play but it was like theater wasn't quite in my blood after that.
I was stressed and a bit rudderless. I had some awkward dating efforts. And I got digging both into my own past and my family's history of mental illness and discovered things I wasn't supposed to know.
Institutionalizations on both sides. And everybody had a nervous break down, an ulcer, a heart condition or all three in spite of remarkable longevity on the whole. And then there were the murderers and attempted I discovered spaced out through the family. One of my ancestors had a hit put on his wife because he didn't want children. She ran and hid. The two later reconciled and raised four kids together. I understand he spent the latter years of his life trying to cure baldness and build a perpetual motion machine, at least as his hobbies.
For awhile, things seemed to settle down. I had developed a very tight circle of friends and was starting to make a go of things.
And then my roommate died. Shot six times in the back and left naked in the woods. The killer is out on bond and I just keep trying to imagine what it's like to have Thanksgiving dinner or go to McDonald's drive-thru or pick up a pack of paper towels at the grocery store as an accused murderer out on bond, running around free for a year before the arraignment. Perhaps I wouldn't harp on these mundane things except that I understand that after the murderer massacred his victims, he went and gave blood to the Red Cross like it was an ordinary Friday morning.
And then money got tight with my parents. They'd helped out here and there. They had approval for massive expansions to their business. And the housing market crashed. And the bank canceled its agreement to extend their line of credit midway through their expansion, before the expansion could become profitable.
Then I started having trouble with work. I was edgy. I nearly got into a fight with a sixteen year old kid. I stepped down from serving to hosting and still had trouble. So I quit to focus on my last semester of school.
And I just broke down at the finish line. Got writer's block. Got depressed. Couldn't finish. Got a medical leave.
With that, the only conclusion was for me to go home to my parents for a few months and regroup as much as I hated losing my roommates and leaving friends and neighbors behind. It started eating at me.
Along the way, my best friend from high school found out that his wife cheated on him, moved out briefly to stay at random friends' houses and now isn't answering his phone or returning calls. The twice I did get ahold of him, he couldn't talk. I think he's back with her but I don't even know where he's living now for certain.
Yesterday, I was supposed to be taking my mother to the doctor. She's diabetic, forced into semi-retirement, constantly facing amputation; naturally she sees doctors a lot. I overslept and was running late. My father beat me there by literally less than ten seconds (I was behind him the last stretch of road).
We got into an argument. He demanded my car keys because he wanted to talk later after taking my mother to her appointment and I just snapped right back into being a teenager as easily as he snapped back into being the authoritarian parent. I threw the keys at him.
And then I wrote an angry, confused letter, tracked down a spare set of keys and stole my own car to avoid a fight.
I was angry. Confused. I haven't answered any phone calls. My father figured out how to send text messages and got a message through to me. I know I hurt my parents pretty badly and that I need to say something today, especially since I have nowhere else to live in three days.
Here I am, the end of 2007: the year I just about lost everything.
I find that I just hate so much of life. I'm so tired of seeing good people suffer. I'm tired of seeing good people suffer cheerfully -- I almost wish they were as angry as I am and I feel disconnected because they aren't. And I'm tired of falling short and hurting people. I'm tired of being relied upon and tired of everything falling apart because I'm fifteen minutes late or have trouble with my memory. I'm losing track of entire days sometimes. I'm tired of not knowing what to say or how to express myself and I'm perhaps even more tired of those few times in my life when I DID say the right thing and nobody listened. A lot of this was stuff I was worried about, stuff I warned people about, stuff that tore me up.
And I couldn't do a damn thing about most of it... and nobody listened to me when I warned them that I was going to crash, that there might be risks in a particular relationship, that certain things like going to war will get you killed for no good reason. And I feel small. And then there's the things I couldn't warn anybody about or hope to stop like cancer or old age. And I feel even smaller.
Well, here's to 2008.
Anything I have in one year beyond my health and the clothes on my back will be a gain.
If you'll pardon me, I'd just like to reflect.
The last three years have put me in a rut.
My grandparents died; they were the first people I was really close to who died. But given that they both had heart conditions and made it into their eighties, it was understandable.
It was still a shock for me when my grandmother died, as she'd been so close so many times and pulled through. I have a yellow rose preserved in a glass case from the funeral and it was a sweet goodbye. Still, I felt like I was going to snap when my grandfather died. I got sick. I cried for three weeks. I couldn't bring myself to go to the funeral and sent a eulogy in my place.
Not long after that, on my birthday, word broke that one of my favorite writer's sons had died. This writer had done a lot for me. He'd pushed me on his editors, opened doors for me, offered help in getting me out to San Diego. His son had been there for the craziest pitching experience I'd ever had. That was the end of our regular correspondences.
The same day, one of my friends from high school died in Iraq. I'd had several friends disabled and known several people who were psychologically traumatized but this was strange and different. His funeral was basically a state funeral with yellow ribbons that stretched for twenty miles down the highway. His mother -- a bit of a hippie once upon a time -- turned the funeral into an endorsement of the Iraq war. I only decided to go at the last minute but when I saw our high school theater teacher there, I had to stay and talk with her. We talked for a long time about death and the future.
That was the last time I saw her alive.
She was only around fifty but she was a woman who shaped people's lives more than she taught theater and in her brief battle with cancer, took on a mythic persona in the community as the "black veiled lady" after she lost her hair. Her funeral drew in probably four hundred people at the largest church in the small town. It was very strange as we left and fifteen years worth of her students formed circles and started doing the old warm-ups and songs she'd taught us. I saw people there I knew from elsewhere, people I didn't even know had met her.
I got cast as the lead in this wonderfully complex play. I was so excited when I found out about all the great actors who had played the role before, how it was always a breakout role. I was going to be playing the younger version of the head of the college theatre program, a man who was my advisor and friend, with a visiting director in charge of the production.. My character was a raving lunatic, homosexual, Irish, aristocratic and a bloodthirsty soldier. And he was the male lead. Tell me that isn't the greatest role ever for a whitebread straight white male dork...
But I couldn't keep up with the memorization. And the visiting director was ruthless on the pace of memorization. We had a week and a half to get off book.
I quit my job and still couldn't keep up and was replaced. The one thing I did right was accept the decision with some grace and eagerly endorse my replacement to the cast. There were some hard feelings in the department that I was replaced but I stuck with the director and offered to help anyone who needed it in any way. Still, I didn't actually see the finished play; even saints have limits. :D
I did go on to play a bumbling pedophile English professor (great fun) and direct a play but it was like theater wasn't quite in my blood after that.
I was stressed and a bit rudderless. I had some awkward dating efforts. And I got digging both into my own past and my family's history of mental illness and discovered things I wasn't supposed to know.
Institutionalizations on both sides. And everybody had a nervous break down, an ulcer, a heart condition or all three in spite of remarkable longevity on the whole. And then there were the murderers and attempted I discovered spaced out through the family. One of my ancestors had a hit put on his wife because he didn't want children. She ran and hid. The two later reconciled and raised four kids together. I understand he spent the latter years of his life trying to cure baldness and build a perpetual motion machine, at least as his hobbies.
For awhile, things seemed to settle down. I had developed a very tight circle of friends and was starting to make a go of things.
And then my roommate died. Shot six times in the back and left naked in the woods. The killer is out on bond and I just keep trying to imagine what it's like to have Thanksgiving dinner or go to McDonald's drive-thru or pick up a pack of paper towels at the grocery store as an accused murderer out on bond, running around free for a year before the arraignment. Perhaps I wouldn't harp on these mundane things except that I understand that after the murderer massacred his victims, he went and gave blood to the Red Cross like it was an ordinary Friday morning.
And then money got tight with my parents. They'd helped out here and there. They had approval for massive expansions to their business. And the housing market crashed. And the bank canceled its agreement to extend their line of credit midway through their expansion, before the expansion could become profitable.
Then I started having trouble with work. I was edgy. I nearly got into a fight with a sixteen year old kid. I stepped down from serving to hosting and still had trouble. So I quit to focus on my last semester of school.
And I just broke down at the finish line. Got writer's block. Got depressed. Couldn't finish. Got a medical leave.
With that, the only conclusion was for me to go home to my parents for a few months and regroup as much as I hated losing my roommates and leaving friends and neighbors behind. It started eating at me.
Along the way, my best friend from high school found out that his wife cheated on him, moved out briefly to stay at random friends' houses and now isn't answering his phone or returning calls. The twice I did get ahold of him, he couldn't talk. I think he's back with her but I don't even know where he's living now for certain.
Yesterday, I was supposed to be taking my mother to the doctor. She's diabetic, forced into semi-retirement, constantly facing amputation; naturally she sees doctors a lot. I overslept and was running late. My father beat me there by literally less than ten seconds (I was behind him the last stretch of road).
We got into an argument. He demanded my car keys because he wanted to talk later after taking my mother to her appointment and I just snapped right back into being a teenager as easily as he snapped back into being the authoritarian parent. I threw the keys at him.
And then I wrote an angry, confused letter, tracked down a spare set of keys and stole my own car to avoid a fight.
I was angry. Confused. I haven't answered any phone calls. My father figured out how to send text messages and got a message through to me. I know I hurt my parents pretty badly and that I need to say something today, especially since I have nowhere else to live in three days.
Here I am, the end of 2007: the year I just about lost everything.
I find that I just hate so much of life. I'm so tired of seeing good people suffer. I'm tired of seeing good people suffer cheerfully -- I almost wish they were as angry as I am and I feel disconnected because they aren't. And I'm tired of falling short and hurting people. I'm tired of being relied upon and tired of everything falling apart because I'm fifteen minutes late or have trouble with my memory. I'm losing track of entire days sometimes. I'm tired of not knowing what to say or how to express myself and I'm perhaps even more tired of those few times in my life when I DID say the right thing and nobody listened. A lot of this was stuff I was worried about, stuff I warned people about, stuff that tore me up.
And I couldn't do a damn thing about most of it... and nobody listened to me when I warned them that I was going to crash, that there might be risks in a particular relationship, that certain things like going to war will get you killed for no good reason. And I feel small. And then there's the things I couldn't warn anybody about or hope to stop like cancer or old age. And I feel even smaller.
Well, here's to 2008.
Anything I have in one year beyond my health and the clothes on my back will be a gain.