My 58th birthday passed without to much in the way of incident. With a half decent gig as one third of the Delta Ladies at the halfway house in barnes  the night before, so that was alright.  I seem to be doing less and less recently and I am a little perturbed as it feels like someone has hit my off switch and i can’t quite get going again. Last year at this time I was playing a lot of very big and possibly indulgent piano stuff.  I can’t seem to get my head around writing lyrics anymore and maybe I have simply just run out of ideas.  Perhaps one only has a limited amount of  ideas and once they are used up thats your lot sunshine.

For a Birthday present I got a SAD lamp as yet another tool in the ongoing battle against depression. It seems to have had some effect as I have got a bit more energy and the ability to concentrate for more than a millisecond. So maybe there is some hope left for me.  I do spend a lot of time playing the piano, but I really don’t feel inspired at all.

I made a list of all the skills I had accumulated since leaving School, as apart from learning to read I didn’t really pick too much in the way of formal education. Currently I spend a lot of time on the old internet thingy, I do read a lot of political blogs now. Funny thing but I never took much interest in Politics when I was a Civil Servant. Weird that. But hey I didn’t say I was any sort of intellectual 🙂 I am worried about the way things seem to be going. I come from what used to be called a working class background, and I didn’t really know what was going on around me most of the time. In fact I was pretty gormless. Often I wake up in the morning and think WTF did I do that. The interesting thing is that I never felt that it was any of my business to judge other people. I didn’t really understand the 80’s and somebody I worked with tried to explain things to me.  The message which I missed at the time was stop being a mug, but enlightenment did not arrive soon enough to save me.  I have often chosen to believe what people tell me, but this also has not been a brilliant strategy.  I have been very naive, and people have taken advantage.  Being prone to depression and having had some fairly long episodes you don’t always feel you can fight back. A consequence of this is that you don’t tend to stand up for you rights too much or eventually something pushes you over the edge and you go for the throat. Fun.

Now I see, and I don’t like what I see at all. You float through life in a dream, and whoosh its gone and you wake up just in time to see how far wrong you have actually gone.  Today I am feeling vaguely paranoid with a side order of useless. I am watching TV and I have not been out of the front door for two days.  Thats not good really, but London only works if you have the resources to enjoy it. I am an introvert, but a lonely introvert gathers no moss or quite often friends either.  I don’t like ring people on the phone as I think that they won’t want to hear from me, but I also can talk to much and that may well piss people off. Or folks think your being aloof because you can’t do small talk too well.

I did make the journey down to Kent to see a friend I had lost contact with and have not seen for 8 years. I must admit to feeling awkward before I arrived and not entirely sure how it would go. But actually it was fun and I have renewed a connection and its nice because I don’t know many people really. A friend that knows a little bit of your history and will still put up with you is always a good thing. My friend is an ex-civil servant but in most ways we are very different, but we do have a great love of music though my friend does not play any instruments, but has recently started singing with a choir which is great.

I forget that time passes quickly and you don’t get it back.

I have a slightly difficult week or two, and been stuck in a very negative frame of mind which has made getting on with things and my temper is now very short. Everything seems to irritate me and I think in part its the change of season. My mood dips when the clocks go back or shortly after but this year it seems to have affected me much more than usual.

Perhaps its just the passing of time but I do feel increasingly alienated, and I really can’t get with the modern notions of reasonable behaviour either.

Everybody seems to speak in cliched soundbites, and best of all if you disagree with someone in their interpretation of something then you may well be branded an idiot or stupid.

When I meet someone I try not to make often irrational assessments of who they are in terms of their knowledge, education wealth and so on. But now apparently we can be easily judged as we carry a brand like a pair of trainers.

O Brave New World that has such bankers in it to paraphase….

I am going to try a few things to get myself back into the swing of things as I am feeling a bit isolated and my self-esteem has been nose diving recently, with confidence just fading away, as i have not ever really had much of that at the best of times. I do find it very difficult to talk to people unless I have prepare for it in some way first so small talk is just hard for me. I do like company but can be a bit hard work for other people.

At the last couple of gigs I have found it difficult to cope with getting all the gear set up as there seems to be so much stuff now, and particularly in smaller venues there are often problems trying to get the balance right, whilst trying to avoid banshee howls breaking plus unfortunately a lot of musicians have zero idea of how sound actually works even at the most basic level. Normally it bounces of me like water off the proverbial duck but on the last few occasions I have found it a bit of a strain.
It’s been difficult not to lose the plot.

I am doing some re-arranging of the flat to make everything a little more comfortable and workable as I don’t think that making a move out of london at this point is quite the right thing and I need to sort the place out anyway before getting any chance of selling it. There is quite a lot of relatively minor stuff that needs sorting which I can cope with if I go about it sensibly in a systematic way. A few prized but slightly pointless items will have to go I think. I am a bit of a hoarder one way and another though which is not ideal. I suppose we take comfort in the familiar, but there are are a lot of things I am simply never going to use again.
One must be ruthless indeed. One reason to change things is to be able to get on with my personal music projects and other related stuff.
I need to build confidence and ones living environment can obviously affect mood quite considerably.

Enough for now I think.

The nature of things that interest me does tend towards introspection.Most folks involved in the arts(performing and otherwise) do seem to have IMHO a deeper interest in the way the world and society work and perhaps that is likely to make one dwell on the darker matters in life.

November is always a bit of a downer for me as I tend to associate it with my Father dying and his death was unexpected, painful and it was only shortly before that we had started to have any sort of resolution and begun talking again.

December has not been much different, but I have come to a conclusion that I have been focusing on the wrong things and really its now time to take a few positive steps, even though I do run the risk of falling flat on my face, so finally phase 1 of plan B. So full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes.