ouch, every once in awhile it comes over me, especially in the middle of the winter. too many cold days. too much coffee. not enough conversations to take me out of myself. i find myself critical. especially of those i know best, impatient with other people's answers to the meaning of life. like now, i have to sit down and shake myself, give myself a conscious talking-to.
no stranger to all this, i still let myself slip into the doldrums. much of it comes from not having a 'project,' nothing to work on, nothing to create. i have been focused on the thought of finally becoming a street performer. lorraine, in australia, kept convincing me to give it a try. even in katoomba, though basically tourist town, she could pull in twenty dollars an hour playing the harmonica.
that's more than i've ever made. so i've acquired more harmonicas, a couple of american indian flutes, pulled my ukuleles out of storage, and read a lot of street busking diaries from new york city, winchester, england, and london, a couple of novels of folks on the road. amazing amount of information out there, and watched dozens of videos on youtube. and now i've decided it's too much work! still, i wouldn't have to be that good.
it would pay, at the very least, for trips around the world and i'd meet a lot of interesting people. the trouble is, playing music always throws me out of orbit. instead of becoming more gregarious, i become more solitary, self-contained. i stop looking closely around me the way i did taking photographs or writing plays. this is not a new problem. i've been an angry old man on and off my whole life.
music, though, why does it have such a deleterious effect? i remember putting on recordings and dancing alone around the house, in my father's churches. i tried to make a guitar out of a cigar box. in those days guitars not everywhere. i did take piano lessons, trumpet lessons, singing lessons. nothing lasted. i simply didn't have the patience for practice and repetition. i just liked to improvise.
that hasn't changed but has it's limitations. i know i've been improvising a whole life and i really wanted the artist's freedom. process has always been more important than product. alas, i, and maybe most of us, judge ourselves by results and can't help being envious of what others have to show for their endeavours: fame, fortune, kids, products of one sort or another. i've always known we leave with empty hands, birth giving us a return ticket.
transience is haunting, yet every time i look into buddhism i'm appalled at its denigration of the body. desire as a motivation has its faults, it comes and goes, yet while it's alive, i feel alive. my urologist just gave me some samples of viagra. maybe that will drive this crankiness out of me. or will it prove the buddha right and i'll even be more nasty...
