On The Road gave me an optimistic reminder. I’m gonna die some day, and so are you. How often do you think about that when you’re afraid of doing something, or when you decide to sit around and do nothing, or when you’re looking at the world like it’s some big huge scary mess?

Death puts all your bullshit day-to-day waste of time troubles into perspective. Why is it pessimistic to think that every day is one day closer to death? I think that’s a very optimistic way to look at life, because it reminds you all the more to make something of that day. It’s a reminder to make every day the greatest day. Can you get any more optimistic than that?

• Move into the house I’m renting (FINALLY)
• Finish the script for the film project my friend and I are working on (see next post)
• Hold auditions and forge on with the project
• Start my second-to-last semester at community college
• …
• Profit!

All right, so there’s only a few things happening, but that’s a lot for me. Despite the fact that I’ve barely packed, and that I have about 1/4th of the first run through to finish on the script, I’ve pretty much got it together. Oh, and I’m actually going out and running three times a week. It’s been two weeks and I haven’t skipped out. That’s something, eh? EH?

What am I really even connected to anymore? Was I more plugged in when I would often jot down fragmented pieces of writing in my notebooks, or does it just seem that way now that I can read it all back? Writing has no time to it. It could take me a half hour to assemble all these random and disconnected thoughts, but that moment is forever encapsulated in the short amount of time it takes for me to read it back. A work of art that took months or years to create can be digested in minutes, hours. Our small lives are minutes in hindsight.

This is probably the first time I’ve felt connected to my writing in a while. I haven’t had much to say otherwise, but now it feels like I do. I base so much on how things feel, as if there’s some sort of physical component to everything. If I don’t feel a particular way, my actions and behavior have to be based around that, otherwise I will feel like I’m being fake, a phony. It’s ridiculous, yes, because often times I don’t feel like doing fuck all, so I don’t; I sit there and stare, retreat into my wasteland mind, I burn minutes and hours out of the day and tally up more time that I will one day regret wasting. I neglect writing, I neglect social contact, I neglect life. The sad thing is, I’d much rather vent about it than actually do anything to fix it.

Maybe I just create problems for myself so I can have something to strive towards fixing, or so I create some sort of self-journey to work though this and that and get to point X and all will be better. Maybe I like bitching. No, not maybe; yes, I like to complain about problems. Yes, I like to feel like a victim. It’s the only time people actually care, or so it seems. I have this constant burning inside of me to be significant, to be something, yet I do nothing constructive to further this. All right, I take that back; I don’t spend enough time on the constructive ventures. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I have been recording the songs that I’ve been kicking around for too-fucking-long, I’ve been working on signing so that I can lay down some good vocals. I could be doing more, but I don’t. Again, I’d rather complain than fix.

When I am going to finally grow the fuck up and take charge of my station in life? When am I going to stop feeling like I’m permanently fifteen years old, permanently awkward, permanently hated by my peers? When will I feel some real, actual, sustaining self-worth, not these bullshit fleeting moments when I listen back to a song I recorded with a smile and a chuckle and think, “Damn, this is really good,” or when I look at myself in the mirror and think, “You know, you’re not such a bad looking guy?” When will I accept the fact that there are more talented, better looking people than me, and stop using that as a deterrent for building myself up and doing my own thing? I’m just one more meatbag trying to mark my place in the dirt just like everyone else, for better or for worse. When will I not only write that, but actually believe it?

When will I ever have faith?

I plan on performing as much as possible. Performing at the Inferno on Sundays is easiest for me due to my work schedule. I will still try to get into other venues in the area during the week and just request the days off from work. It’ll be good to get back into the game after being out for so long. I’ll post dates/times/locations to this site and my MySpace page whenever they become available.

Why the hell am I talking about the Michigan Left? I had somewhere to be today which I had never gone to before, and I needed Google directions. I could not, for the life of me, figure out why the last direction was telling me to turn right (south) on a north-south running road when I needed to go north. Then it hit me…Google was telling me to make a Michigan Left! Upon closer inspection, the criptic previous step made complete sense. Here’s Google’s example of a Michigan Left:

Something just happened there. If you were part of the Michigan group, you thought “….ooooooooh…” The rest of you are thinking “what the fuck?” To sum it all up, the Michigan Left is the act of making what would normally be a simple left turn by turning left, then left again, then right down the road you would have normally turned left down. A number of roads in Michigan require such a feat.

OK, so I’m desperate for blog material. I know I’m not the only one! I was just fascinated to see this in Google’s own terms.

In some imaginary black and white world, there’s one way to live and then there’s another. The concept of denial, in my world, seems to be only one thing: homosexuality. This is not what this is about. I don’t believe I am gay, but my mind might tell me otherwise. When your mind is easily manipulated by something out of your control, past emotions could be clouded, situations could be molded. As confident as you are one minute, some slight degree of change, a stupid remark, a gesture, might send everything out of wack.

Let’s establish one thing. I’m not well, mentally. Who is, really? Is this really such a bold statement? There’s one thing I’d like established. I am, or have been for the past several years, focused on psychology…not professionally or scholastically…more on a casual level. I’ve been interested in the inner workings of peoples’ minds, watching how they work, and most importantly, spending way too much time in my own head.

What happens if one day you might discover that everything you’ve been telling yourself or you’ve been believing is unreliable, that you’ve been following a very unstable source. It’s both a blessing and a curse, because on that day you were able to give it a name: obsessive compulsive disorder.

It’s partly exciting, and party frightening. The symptoms are all there. Yeah, most people would read some article by a psychologist and start to believe “hey, this is me,” but it’s a different story when what you’re reading has already been written in your own journal for some time. It never had a name before. Well, it did, loosely…I called it “perfectionism.”

I remember exactly when I named it. I remember exactly what I wrote, because I’m looking at it right now. Written on the back cardstock piece to my pocket-sized notepad are the words Perfectionism controls my life, with – 6/8/04 written underneath. I was sitting on the steps to The Crowbar in State College, PA, a few hours before I would perform as a member of the improv troupe The Comedy Whorehouse.

My pet has always been around…as I search for examples, I have difficulties coming up with solid evidence, because it was all routine. To me, it would be as normal as breathing. For me to feel like this was an abnormality would be, well, abnormal, because this was my reality. Other pieces of evidence are in the differences between my philosophy and actions. While I would spend an absurd amount of time paying attention to detail in, say, a piece of work, the signs are more apparent in my overall thought process and behavior.

Once you name it, a few of your thought patterns come to the surface. You get that lightbulb and realize it’s a problem. I guess a lot of the evidence is clear in my many projects started and abandoned, mostly due to my extreme attention to detail, self-pressure, and realization at one point that if it doesn’t come out perfect, it’s not worth continuing. This is why I never finished those songs, this is why stories start and abruptly end, this is why I don’t try, because for one, there’s probably a thousand other people already doing it and better than I ever could, and two, I might fail.

That’s a huge part of my problem: fear of failure. This comes in many flavors. When you think of fear of failure, the most common examples are pretty much true. That’s a very straight forward statement. The more abstract ideas behind these would involve such concepts as being made to look foolish, such as making a stupid face, performing a foolish physical act, being lied to. Not having control over circumstances which I literally have no control over, such as the way somebody perceives me. I attempt to control that by censoring myself, by hiding things, by judging my every move to try and gauge what other people are thinking about me.

By this point, I’m somewhat proud of myself. I’m still typing, I haven’t stopped and decided to go back and delete everything I’ve written. At times I would censor what I would say online on such a page like this for fear that my family might read it and…well, I don’t know. I don’t really have an answer as far as what they would do. In my mind, it would be some sort of something negative. Negative in the sense that they would be concerned or upset or think I’m completely insane. Enough hiding that.

In my head, there’s this belief that people would think I’m insane. There’s this belief that people would be afraid of me. There’s this belief that if someone I know read this, they would think I’m completely fucked up and not want to deal with me. There’s this belief that people that don’t really know me and are passing through or perhaps considering knowing me would think twice about continuing.

And then there’s me. I’m fascinated and intrigued by people who embrace psychology. I relate better to those who are depressed, to those who sit and think more than they talk, to those who don’t strive to be some extremely socially active becon. I think it makes people more interesting. All that fun inner turmoil. The realization, “wow, we’re fucking insane.”

So here I am…I’m coming out. No, not as a homosexual, but as an insane, depressed being who (believes he) suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder, or more specifically, obsessive compulsive personality disorder. There’s a great article on it here. I read that with wide-eyed awe, as it nearly line for line described me, and gave me a name for that voice in my head. It sucks to have a problem, but it’s great to have a name for it, because that’s the first step of fixing the problem.

The end.

Brian’s vocals were wonderful. I was amazed at how well he can sing these days, not to mention how long he can perform. The show seemed to last longer than two and a half hours.

This whole post seems very mismashed and without direction. My mind is still spinning, I wish I was reliving the performance right now, but I guess I’ll have to settle for the DVD.

I start my new job Monday. How fucking weird. I don’t even have a chance to let this all really sink in…I’m going to be working in Michigan again for the first time since 2001. I’m living back home with my parents after living away for four years. While time was passing, it seemed to go very quickly. Now I look back and think about it, and so much has happened in these past four years. I’ve gone to so many different places and met so many people and made so many friends. I’ve played and toured in a band, I had a long relationship which taught me a lot about myself and the world as a whole, I’ve done standup and improv comedy…

Here I am in Michigan; now what?

I can’t say I’m happy or excited to leave, because I’m leaving a lot of people I like and an environment which I enjoy and am very comfortable in. I’ve had conflicted feelings about State College for the longest time. Right now I’m reaching far and trying to bundle all the positive feels I’ve had about the area because I’m leaving, but I know for the past year I’ve been vocalizing my disdain for this very place. I’m certainly no stranger to hating my surroundings, though, as I often use “Michigan” or “Detroit” and “shithole” in the same sentence.

This may be the best decision I’ve made. This may be a huge mistake. I do know that I haven’t been extremely happy with my position in life for some time, so that usually means something is either wrong or missing, and there’s only one way to prove that.