The Inevitable Re-Evaluation

Posted by Wicasta on 20 Jan 2024.

Sometimes, right in the middle of everything, you just go, “What the fuck?” I do this quite a lot, actually. My general state at any particular moment is discombobulation. Thanks to being on the spectrum, if I think I understand what's going on, I'm almost invariably wrong. And if I think I know how to do something, or how to go about doing something, it rarely ends well. You can look around my studio at home and see just how fractured my brain is. I bounce from shiny object to shiny object, and nothing gets done, and I generally don't get anywhere. It's fucking frustrating.

By the way, here's a random demon. I made this during one of my obsessive A.I. noodlings and it occured to me... hey, that could be a self portrait. I'm fairly certain this is how some people see me. It is what it is.

So... What The Fuck?

My wife, my poor, long-suffering Victoria, has told me for years that I over-share. I think that's just part of being an artist. We're narcissists. We come up with all this crazy shit, and we want to put it in people's faces. Then we're heart-broken when they think it stinks. But we can't help ourselves. It's what artists do. You create, and you want people to know about it, even as you know, conceputally at least, that no one gives the slightest damn what you've done or are trying to do. They're got their own problems, and they're chasing their own shiny things.

But... that's not what it's about, is it?

When I was very young I had horrible nightmares. Horrible They were so bad that to this day I boggle when someone talks about their terrible nightmares like being naked in public, and I'm like, “That's it? You were naked in public? You're joking, right?” Well, I think that. You can't actually say it. Well, you can, but you won't be on their fun people's list after that. So, you quietly tuck away the memories of when you would wake up in the night screaming because you'd had the flesh ripped from your body in a dream, or your friends' heads had fallen off, or you'd been forced to listen to that Barry Manilow song - twice.

[echoes].. at the copa... copa...

Anyway, I realized early on that being a creative person comes with certain drawbacks. For some creative people their creativity is like a demanding demon that sits on their back and torments them. I realized, largely by accident, that there was this creative energy that built up inside of me, and it was going to come out one way or another. I discovered that if I burned off this energy, by drawing, or writing, or, eventually, making music, I stayed on a more even keel. But if I didn't, well, it would find me at night, and bad shit would happen in my head.

<yawn> The Point?

I've wrestled with these particular demons my entire life. I've tried to make good things with them, and have largely failed. I've done okay things here or there, some bordering on good. But I never could quite make them good enough. My reach always exceeded my grasp. I could believe it, but I could never achieve it. I was an undefinable flibbertigibbet in a world full of rocks that blink, and I never knew what or how I was supposed to be. It was like, “You can be whatever you want to be, if you want to be it bad enough.” But the subtext always was, “Here, pick something from this list.” But what I was and what I wanted to be was never on that list. How does one interface with analog when one thinks in binary? How does fire become water?

Did I mention autism?

Like all the other flibbertigibbets in the world, I realized early on that something was different about me. I don't mean that in the angsted teenager sense of “Nobody understands me,” but rather like “Wow, I'm really not getting the hang of this human stuff.” I always said the wrong thing. Did the wrong thing. I've made enemies and didn't know how I'd made them my enemies. I've been completely unaware when girls flirted with me, and thought girls were flirting with me when they were not. I once stood outside my junior high school during some kind of student assembly and joked around, not knowing what the hell was going on, only to slowly realize that it was about the two students who'd died in a fire the weekend before. Maybe the word is “oblivious”. But I've always cared deeply. Too deeply. It's just never been easy to figure what I should say or do and when.

I did eventually get good enough at faking it that I developed what I call The Fifteen Minute Rule. I could pass for “normal” for about 15 minutes before they saw through the mask and got uncomfortable. I've always been like an alien whose human suit does't quite fit, and a lot of times it's just been easier to avoid people altogether than to pretend I wasn't that alien (which is exhausting).

I did eventually realize, well into my 50s, that I was on the Autism spectrum. It was the only thing that made sense. That had never once occurred to me until I read an interview with the actor, Dan Aykroyd, in which he talked about being diagnosed with Asperger's as an adult and how so many of the things he'd struggled with in his life made sense then. A lot of what he talked about sounded familiar, and so I looked into it. It took some time, but eventually I was like, “There it is. There it all is.” I've never been officially diagnosed. It's hideously expensive to be diagosed as an adult, and it's hard to diagnose. By the time you're an adult on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum, you've long since developed coping mechanisms and survival strategies, and that makes it much harder to diagnose than with children, who are essentially open books.

What Does This Have To Do With Anything?

This is where the over-sharing starts. No, what I've blathered about up until now has not been it.

Maybe it's part of the spectrum thing, I've struggled with almost everything in my life, although creative stuff always seemed to come easy. But it's always been tied up with never-ending anxiety and depression. There's been an abyss that's hung over me my entire life, that I've only ever escaped on rare occasions. But in 2019 it all came to a head. I won't regale you with all the details here (that's a conversation for another day), but on December 11th, 2019, I decided to kill myself. I'd had enough. I'd lost all hope. I was done. This wasn't only on December 11th. That's just when it came to a head. When the decision was made. A lot had been leading up to that moment. A lot of anguish. A lot of suffering. We might talk about that another time. We might not. It probably depends on how much trouble I get into with my wife for sharing this much.

The point of mentioning all this is that it speaks directly to why I'm here now; to why I dusted off this web site; to my plans for staying above ground. See, the reason I'm still here is because I made a deal with myself. Believe it or not, despite the fact that I decided to kill myself, I really didn't (and don't) want to die. But, as I said, I'd lost all hope. If I couldn't be what I want to be, what I am, if I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life pretending to be someone and something I most definitely am not, then why play the fucking game at all? If there's no hope and no chance, why bother?

The Deal

Me, myself, and I made a deal which was sort of rigged, but which I knew was rigged. I mean, I am the one who rigged it. But I decided my life had to have been for something. There had to have been a reason. So if I wanted to kill myself, I could only do so once I had left behind something to speak for me when I was gone, a marker to hold a space for my memory, even if only a handful of people would ever notice it. Otherwise I might as well have never been here at all.

I decided to record an album. More than that, I decided to also write a book, or complete a collection of short stories, in which each story corresponded to a song on the album. I won't get into the minutiae of it all, not here, but that's essentially what I've been doing ever since. My weekends have been spent either writing or recording or mixing, all with that one goal in mind. While I feel like I have a long way to go, which I do, I have made progress. So much so that I was recently comfortable enough with my work to release the song “Billy Ray Montgomery” as a single.

I made a plan to finish this all up in 2024, by releasing a song, and maybe a video, on the first Monday of every month. Maybe by the end of 2024 I could assemble all this stuff into a CD release and a book. That could serve as my marker, and I could rest easy after that, considering it all a job well done.

What I didn't count on was how much it would hurt when “Billy Ray Montgomery” made little to no impression on anyone. However much I had told myself, conceptually, that I didn't care if anyone noticed and that wasn't what it was all about, the inescapable fact is that a part of me hoped someone would notice. But, of course, no one did. Well, my wife did. But she's a captive audience. She's had no choice. My oldest, dearest friend in North Carolina gave it a listen and gave me some good feedback. Another friend and a relative listened to it and gave me the thumbs up. My sister-in-law seemed to like it, but my brother never said a word, so I don't know if he liked it or not. And that's the full width and breadth of responses and feedback. I told my wife at point, when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself, that I would much rather people hate it than completely ignore it.

But, of course, no one ignored it. That would suggest intent. It's not that. It's just not important. That's not good or bad. It just is. Everyone has their own lives to live and their own focus. This just didn't figure in. I guess maybe despite my actual expectations (which were limited) some part of me hoped to be pleasantly surprised. It's like buying a lottery ticket. You know how infinitesimal the chances are that you'll actually win the lottery, but there's still some part of you that feels a deep, if temporary, pang of sadness when the numbers are chosen and you didn't win (again). Humans are just delusional that way, I guess.

I was kind of down about it for part of one afternoon. And then I came to my senses. I was reminded that it was never supposed to be about anyone noticing. It's about moving that stone. It's about staying upright and in the fight. And, honestly, on the other side of it I found that it was quite liberating. If you think about it, if no one else gives a fuck, you don't have to give a fuck, either. That relieves a lot of pressure. That's where I am today.

What Does This All Mean?

I've been amusing myself while writing this. It's something I've done in the background at work between taking reports. I'm so free with writing all this and blathering on and on about it because I know no one else will ever read it. I can do and say whatever the fuck I want to. Even my loving wife never visits my web site. So this is a place I can literally dump whatever I want to, and no one will ever notice. That's what I'm doing here, now.

More importantly, I've embraced that same realization where my “work” is concerned. I honestly don't give a fuck what anyone thinks about my work anymore. That's not what it's about. I would much rather break it all down to the bare essentials and be true to myself than to constantly obsess about views and streams and interactions. I know artists and creatives are expected to grovel before the masses for validation, but the masses are, generally speaking, rocks that blink. Creatives should not bow before them. Quite the opposite. Creatives have a sliver of the old gods in them, ancient passions which flow throw all human beings, but which only some can tap into. Don't bow or grovel before lesser beings, those who will be offended to realize they mean so little in the overall scheme of things. You cannot allow them to diminish your flame because their own spark never grew beyond embers.

I guess none of this makes any sense at this point. That's okay. This isn't about you. It isn't for you. This is between me and the Universe, and I've just flipped It off. I am, at my most basic and pure, the son of seven sisters. I'll be exploring that moving forward, and I'll be trying to figure out where all this goes. I might be on the spectrum. I might just be crazy. If nothing else, how does the visiting alien not see where that goes?

It'll Be What It'll Be

I've basically thrown my plan for 2024 out the window. I'm just not putting up with it. I ain't taking any more of my shit. What I'm going to do is let things come as they may, and work only on stuff that I'm passionate about. I'm going to find more reasons to stay above ground. But one thing is for damned sure, giving myself a rigid schedule isn't going to work. Not when you're mind is a sparkler which keeps getting worse and worse as you get older. Christ, for all I know I'm in the early stages of dementia. I sure can't remember shit anymore. But hey, any day you wake up and know who you are, that's a win, right?

Right now I'm going to concentrate on the next shiny thing, which is finishing a song called “Ten Feet Tall”. That one's been simmering for a decade and I think it's high time I finished it. So that's the next thing. We'll see where it all goes from here, wherever that may be. Really, I just don't give a fuck anymore.