Thursday, September 25, 2014

I'm pretty sure this is killing me, or I am at least.

Morning Party People,
            I'll be honest, I've had a rough couple of weeks. Not that anything horrible has happened, it hasn't. However I've been feeling like shit deep down in my everyday life. I don't think it's depression yet I have been pretty depressed. So why have I been feeling this way? What's changed?
            That's the big question isn't it? That's fairly simple to answer, what's changed? In short, it's me. I've changed , and I'm sure there's a big part of me that's not happy about it. There's a certain comfort in being self-destructive. You always know what to expect from yourself. There's no change, no matter what happinees there will be a comfort in the depressive muck that I used  as a reason to run away and self medicate with various vices. Sure those vices kept me from really living a life worth of any meaning, but I could trust that depression far more than any happiness,
             Happy is tricky, happy is difficult , happy is very hard for me trust. I don't know happy as well as I think I should. I'm used to being fat, I'm used to being scared, I'm used to being alone and isolated. At least I had been for many years. A lot of you know that I've been changing those things over the years.
             I learned how to love and how to be loved in a meaningful relationship. I learned how to show myself that I care by building up the courage to live life as a performer, as an artist, not just as someone who has the potential to do those things. I've learned that I can care for my body in the same way. I learned that I still like to feel good about the way I look, and that with love ,will, and patience I can work for a healthier life.
             That's what I want to focus on in this post. I've been trying to quit smoking for awhile now and I've always failed. Tonight before I went out to the mics, I confessed to Jennie that I probably was going to smoke tonight. I hadn't felt good since I've tried to quit. I've been bumming smokes from co-workers or buying a prime time single. So I never really quit, just cut down to one or two a day. Tonight I bough a pack and was chain smoking the hell out them.
             With each drag I felt I was betraying not just Jennie but everything I had been working so hard for. To a certain extent I feel I was. I was hopping that I would be filled with some sort of happy but all I felt was a lie. A lie to myself, a lie to Jennie, and a lie to the body I'm supposed to be trying to fix.
             Want to hear something funny? I heard this from the Joe Rogan podcast so I'm paraphrasing here," People think when they smoke they're relieving tension and stress, in fact the only stress you're relieving is the stress caused by not smoking" I didn't want to hear that, because it rang true. I knew this about half way through the evening. I wanted to stop, but then I wondered if stopping at that moment was a way to avoid the truth. Keep in mind that over the years I've become really good at lying to myself. I felt if I quit then I could sy, I made a good choice, knowing full well I was just avoiding the truth.
               I wanted to think that I really wanted those smokes, I had to let that part of me get what it wanted. It thought they would make me feel better, when it didn't I forced another one,"How about now?" "What about now?"
              Tonight I had to accept the truth, they don't make me feel better, in fact they never helped me at all. You ever realized that there was something in your life that you thought made you happy but then realized it was all a lie? That's what tonight feels like.
              I know I'll have withdrawals over the next few days, I've been through that before. I think that now I have a reason, a truth if you will in my heart that can finally help me stop smoking.

Till next time Party People
Keep on a Chooglin!

Thursday, September 11, 2014

On this day...

Morning Party People,
            It's September 11th and as I woke up this morning and looked on my facebook feed I see the sad images of what used to be the twin towers. With those images come the feeling s of sadness, rage, and vengeance as I'm sure a lot of us share. I remember seeing on the news children in the Middle East dancing in the streets, cheering for our pain. My first thought was I wanted to kill as many of those fuckers as I could for what they did. I was planning on going to the recruiter the next day but then I remembered I don't speak Arabic and I had no idea where that footage of those kids even came from. I had felt blind rage on many occasions before then and I knew of the fallout of acting of those feelings and I knew where that rage would take me, to a place I'd never be able to come back from.
             This blog isn't about any anti or pro war sentiment based in fact or conspiracy. I just saw the slogan "Never Forget" many times since that day and I wondered what specifically do they not want us to forget? Is it the anger that made us all thirst for blood? Is it the fear that let us place so much power in our government? Is it the sadness of all of our friends and family who went to serve and came back both physically and emotionally wounded? Is it the loss of privacy? Or is it "Never Forget" that feeling of not having to worry about terrorism?
             I think in my own life I've learned the most when I failed at something. Whether is was me career, my act, my marriage. When I bombed at any of those thing I was forced to learn from what I did. When I see the September 11th slogan I remember all the people we lost, but I also remember that's the era when humanity failed. From the hijackers who thought their only action that would make this world a better place was to start a war. To all of us who thought the best way to protect our country was to take away a lot of the freedom that made us what we were.
              I know I said this blog wasn't about any anti war sentiment but the more I write the more I think I need to take that back, sorry for misleading anyone. I've always felt that the most destructive emotion that we as humans can feel is one of righteousness. Everyone of those hijackers felt what they were doing was the right thing to do, just like anyone after that on either side did when they committed a crime against humanity. Everyone killed is some one's child, husband,wife, brother or sister. How does the anger ever stop? How do we rid ourselves of this hate?
             I think is there is a goal for the future generations is to rise above the hate that humanity has held for centuries that had been held in silence behind a wall of non communication. We have the Internet now, we can talk, we can learn, we can see the futility of all the hate we've spread and we can rise above it. Perhaps what September 11th will become , long after any of us who were there or knew people who were effected by it (note:I wasn't there) will be the day when the old world ended and the new world began. One where we all had to start talking to each other , at first there were a bunch of people who spread hate through the internet but humanity quickly saw those people as one's who needed help. Who were in fact just crying out for someone to listen. We learned that being hateful and being interesting or worth listening to were in fact not the same thing. We started listening to history lessons and conversations through new mediums , and through those mediums we reawakened our desire to learn. A lot of people went back to school with a burning desire to make the world a better place through art and science. We found a new purpose in life after seeing the lack of purpose in the old world.
              I hope we make it for another century and if we do I hope the future us can look at this era as one where we lost and regained our humaity. Never forget how horrible we can be. Never Forget how great we can be.

Till next time Party People
Keep on a Chooglin