Brave New World....

This is my first blog on this site.

It's so long since I've written a blog detailing what's going on in my life. This is ultimately because nothing at all is going on in my life. I have no 'crack'. It's now 6 months since I was made redundant from a well-known music and dvd retailer. I had such grand plans:


1. Become a music teacher
2. Make shit-loads of money
3. Buy a car
4. Write lots of amazing songs
5. Develop a small cult following
6. Be happy


After 6 months, however:

1. I have only one pupil on my books
2. My bank account is decidedly malnourished
3. I can't afford a car
4. I've only written about 5 songs
5. My small cult following consists exclusively of my friends and family
6. I am the most miserable I have been in a long time

I have tried applying for some other jobs to tide me over, with little success, due to being either over- or under-qualified. I regularly doubt my own abilities as a pianist and generally feel like a fraud in terms of teaching and performing. My self-confidence is pretty much shot to pieces and some days I can't get these feelings out of my head. I feel like I am being suspended over a precipice, where as long I stay perfectly still I won't fall, but nor is there any action that will grant me firm ground beneath my feet.

Some of this anxiety may be connected to my fast-approaching 29th birthday. Hurray!, Another year past of unfulfilled promises I made to myself. The last year (and indeed years) has been spent worrying about other people's problems. I now realise that this wasn't just because I'm a nice bloke who will always try to help out his friends, but because it was a welcome distraction from my own emotional instability: I've been riding on other people's emotional rollercoasters because my own is too big and scary.

I procrastinate too much about a 'certain issue' because I'm too fucking scared of rejection or ridicule, and I have no real network to guide me through it. Plus, it would require me to operate outside of my self-defined safety zone - God forbid. I'm well aware everbody in the known universe will harbour similar anxieties at various points in their lives, but I'm not everyone else. This isn't supposed to happen to someone like me! Being an emotional retard is meant to be the result of being brought up in a broken home or something, isn't it?

And I have a lot of cool friends. The problem is they know me as being the well-balanced, care-free, easy-going (anti-smoking rants aside!) member of the group, which means they don't really probe too deep if I seem a bit down. This is compounded by the fact that I too often dismiss their concerns with a deliberately vague 'I'm just a bit knackered', or something equally ambiguous. I hate pawning my problems onto others; it seems so selfish. Stupid, I know, particularly given the numerous occasions I've preached to friends about how important emotional honesty is in overcoming problems.

I sometimes wonder if people even see me as an emotional creature - I don't gesticulate wildly during conversation; I don't jump around shouting and whooping when something really excites me; I don't get into heated debates; I live my life to a fairly pragmatic ethos. One of my friends recently asked me how I manage to be so cool all the time! Funny how my idea of social ineptitude is another's idea of cool! Is that what 'cool' is?

The 'cool' word for social ineptitude, of course, is 'taciturn'.

I am 'taciturn'. I'm so fucking cool...

Perhaps the litmus test will come on sunday when I have to audition for a gig at a restaurant after brazenly painting myself as some sort of veteran jazz pianist. Hopefully the restaurant owner will know jackshit about jazz and will mistake all the bum notes as deliberate. Incidentally, that's a suggestion proferred to a young, nervy Miles Davis when he was fretting about fucking up -

"If you play a wrong note, just play the same phrase again and people will think you meant it the first time!"

Perhaps I should apply this maxim to my life generally and let myself be exposed to potential failure. Maybe it won't destroy me after all...