Where was I?

I have gotten lost lately, lost in the thick, foggy ME soup.

Forgotten how to have fun, how to write jokes with obvious punchlines (but no laugh tracks).

Is it something about getting older?

No.

Age is just a number.

I have to admit to myself that I have material I want to write down but don’t out of respect for people’s privacy and I am bothered that my artistic independence is making a sacrifice for others — how dare they impede readers who might improve or change their lives based on what I’ve written!  [Not that I have many readers, mind you, but potentially billions might entertain their eyeballs or ears for a few minutes at any time…]

And if I give myself permission to lose all the friends I have to share with quasianonymous readers the stories of my friends’ lives?

I shan’t.

I miss my friends.

I miss a regular job with daytime work hours, with weekends off to spend time with friends and family, temporarily prevented by a lack of self-esteem, no belief in self-worth, feeling like I have nothing to give this world but written words.

It’s time to create a new music video.

With my wife out of town this weekend, and my switching to evening work hours for the next few weeks, I have time to devote to my art, including shooting comic videos.

I have to admit to myself I have difficulty maintaining a thought set that allows me to honestly share myself with my friends, turning my thoughts into a narrative I can control and manage real people into.

Thus, I am an artistic outsider, with imaginary friends who appear on Facebook and occasionally show up in real life.

It seems weird but it’s true.

It’s almost a revelation of some sort, like the blue pill/red pill scene in The Matrix, showing me what my whole life has been, a real illusion, a real story overriding the interconnected sets of states of energy in motion which have no set labels or set boundaries.

When I stop watching television news, stop reading news headlines, stop paying attention to anything that appears to be product promotion or ad copy disguised as a science article, my illusions change…

I relax.

I forget subcultural clues, stop responding to cultural triggers.

I return to my life in the forest, the Wandering Wonderer becoming the stationary Meditative Monk again.

I lose all my friends, stop wanting to love, no longer share realtime observations.

I no longer care about making a viral video and just express me as artistically pure as nature is.

My friend, you said you no longer know what love is and I don’t know if you still feel that way.

I love you and I’m still figuring out how to make more of my time available to you, if you want it.

I want to write about you, about our friends, about the everyday struggles in case it might, like dance, help someone feel better or find a way out of a tough mental situation.

But I respect your privacy and I admit I’m stuck right now finding a way to balance my belief that you support my artistic independence against not writing down events in our lives that others (and probably we) don’t want to be written down, almost lying in the process.

Last time I was at this point in my artistic expression, I walked away from you.  This time, I’m just taking a couple of days to decide what to do next, willing to stand here and feel pain while I’m sorting myself out, rather than running away and hiding once again.

I’m moving forward, and even though I stop in my tracks sometimes, it’s still progress.

You gave me the strength this past week to look back 50 years in my life to see who I really am; in this case, I’ll only tell you in person and not write it down because I’m learning to respect my privacy at this point in my life while I assemble the pieces to build my new life offline; otherwise, it just becomes another short story that sort of ties in with the other stories in this blogosphere.

My life is not just a story.

Sometimes it’s real.

It’s time to practice dancing a WCS routine!