March 2003 Archives

It’s been a lot of fun writing daily and I am most appreciative to those of you who have been tuning in, but it seems that I have been siphoning off more than I have been able to replenish and I am reaching the bottom of my creative well. It is simply time for me to refresh my creative connection, and that means gathering new images, insights and experiences. I need to direct my focus outward for a while and refuel. Of course I will still be responding to emails and reading your journals but I will now take a break from writing and return when I am refreshed.

Thanks again to my daily readers. It’s been fun.

And so a new day begins…

I am surviving. I breathe in and breathe out, a woozy kind of feeling in my head. Fatigue, depression…winter and war undoing me. How much longer can this freeze last? How much longer? According to the weather report it looks as though we are headed for a thaw and not a millisecond to soon. I was about to splinter into a million pieces.

If I have to walk on ice just one more day I will lose it. I have always had a touch of seasonal depression, but this is more than a touch. I am being kicked in the mouth by it now. Yesterday and the day before I had absolutely nothing to say and to anyone who knows me, well, that just doesn’t happen very often.

The storm clouds of war are gathering…nothing has changed. We live in a world of crazy people. That fact alone is enough to cause any sensitive person a deep inner fatigue. I am not a pacifist when it comes to psychopaths. They will never be appeased, they will never be trustworthy, do not hold the other cheek, they will shoot a hole in it.

And so a new day begins…

I woke at 7:20am, immediately took my shower and wrote morning pages in the dining room. I wrote only two pages in an effort to save time since I woke so late.

I am sitting here realizing I simply don’t have any energy for this. The weekend was spent fixing things and doing the laundry. Ask me what I did for enjoyment over the weekend and I really couldn’t tell you. I seemed to go from one needed repair to the next, but I did manage to take a substantial chunk out of some of the annoyances around the house: A front door that wouldn’t shut easily, two living room lamps that no longer had switches that worked, a Chinese water torture drip in the shower off the master bedroom that was becoming life threatening.

I put up a couple of mini shelves and a place to hang up keys in the foyer since I never have any place to put my “stuff” when I come in the house. A new shower curtain to replace the one that behaved itself as though it were killer cellophane wrap. Each time I would try to take a shower this thing would try to shrink-wrap me to death.

Anyway, I am late so I had better call it a morning.

And so a new day begins…

Last week I printed out my entire web journal and started to read it from the beginning. It occurred to me that there are many entries that happened earlier on that are still relevant and I would like to repost from time to time.

I have not worked out regularly since I wrote this entry but I am about to get back to it because the only thing I hate more than working out, is rotting away. So it looks as if I have come full circle. Here is the entry from August 14, 2002 which let me off the hook, and I had been doing so well.

Forty Something Body

At my age my body simply doesn’t really care all that much about fitness, so it often becomes a struggle between me and it. My body says, “What do you want to workout for? Don’t you know it’s a losing battle? You will get old, and you will die…who are you kidding with this working out shit?” “Shut up!” I explain.

It seems that when I hit forty, I found myself in this conflict with my body. The eternally young part of me wants to workout and look good, the aging part of me wants to relax and call it a day. These past seven months have been about not listening to the resigned part of me. Resignation is such an unattractive quality.

I give up. It’s pointless. Hmmm…is it?

No. Not yet.

Whenever I think of getting older and rotting away, I try to keep Cornelius Reid in mind. Mr. Reid is arguably one of our times greatest voice teachers and authors. I was fortunate enough to have a few voice lessons with him at his New York, upper Westside studio in the early nineties. At the time he had just turned eighty and was at his teaching peak. David Dunbar, who was my voice teacher and friend at the time had arranged my classes with Cornelius and sat in during the lessons. In a break during one of the classes Cornelius and David spoke about Cornelius’ eightieth birthday party. This man could have passed for a sprightly sixty-something in a blink of an eye, and had the voice of a man in his thirties.

The advice and teachings that Mr. Reid imparted to me during those lessons still instruct me and guide me to this day, but perhaps the biggest lesson of all was that being eighty or ninety didn’t mean a person necessarily had to be “old”. Mr. Reid was definitely anything but old. Last I heard, he was still teaching and giving lectures around the world in his nineties! Thank you Cornelius Reid for teaching me all these things.

Some people have a profound influence on a person’s life. One day I will tell the story of exactly how Cornelius Reid changed the entire course of my life by having written a book called “The Free Voice”.

And so a new day begins…

It turns out that the new reading glasses I got in November may be the underlying cause of my current eye strain problem on the computer. The prescription is apparently perfect for reading but too strong for computer use; consequently I have been straining my eyes whenever I use the computer, which after all is constantly. So I now have a pair of “computer” glasses that are designed to bring things into focus at around 16 to 24 inches from my eyes. Very nice. Hopefully the eye strain problems will start to diminish.

I went from vocal cord strain to eye strain in a swift but not entirely whimsical 24 years. I need a decaf.

Lately, when people ask me how I am doing, I simply say, “I’m surviving”. Survival is a start, but in itself is not exactly the destination I had in mind. To survive so that you can die of old age is hardly what I considered a way to live. Living has to be much more than that. Right now I am just surviving. I eat, I sleep, I walk through my day, I talk, I think, I strain my eyes, but not much else. I have lost sight of something essential; I have lost sight of where I was going. I have forgotten how important a compass and a map are. I have forgotten where I was headed. Where was I going? What was the dream?

And so a new day begins, sleepwalking in a dreamless state.

I hate computers and what they are doing to my vision. I need to seriously re-evaluate my use of this contraption in my life. It seems that I can no longer sit at a computer for more than 15 minutes without developing an eye strain headache. I call this my computer allergy, but by the looks of it computer eye strain is in fact a well documented phenomenon. Stephen has been warning me about it for months, years… but I have not been listening. I resent the fact that I cannot work hour upon hour at the computer without incurring this strain. Alas, everything has a price, everything takes a toll.

So, in an effort to protect my eyes, a new day begins…

I wrote this article about the music industry several days ago and was keeping it for a rainy day…or should I say a snowy day. Let’s just say I was keeping it for a day like today, where my morning started out shoveling snow instead of writing. This is the perfect day for a rant. Here it is.

Last week I picked up Wired Magazine which is all about how the music industry may come to an end in the very near future. I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened yet. The industry has gathered its statistics and wants us to believe that it’s the wide spread practice of illegal downloading that is to blame. I would suggest it is more subtle than that. Does the word Karma mean anything at all?

For years now the music industry has almost entirely lost sight of the baby boom generation as an audience. This is the demographic with the greatest disposable income, yet the record companies have continued to target the youth market. Easy pickings they thought. I might add that the last ten years of popular music is perhaps the most banal, forgettable and regrettable period since Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Now the industry is reaping the rewards of its own greed. People over 35 yawn with boredom when exposed to new music because it is so tepidly derivative, and people under 35 don’t give a baboon’s red ass about stealing disposable overpriced twaddle.

In a time when we feed our youth a stream of gangsters and porno queen look-alikes as role models, how can we expect them to feel all warm and fuzzy about the protection of copyrighted work? The music industry signed its death warrant when it turned its back on responsible, ethical people as their primary target audience and decided to cater to the lowest common denominator emotions in its target audience; teenage rebellion, anti-societal rage, and virulent juvenile delinquency which has become an entire generation’s design for “cool”. The music industry only has itself to blame for having haphazardly cultivated an audience that prides itself on its rebellious, anti-corporate, digital pickpocketry.

The internet has supplied artists with a next to free distribution network, and those that are driven, gifted and resourceful will find innovative ways in which to use technology to create successful rewarding careers in music. Music will likely become more diverse and reinvigorated, driving out the stale, overly regurgitated sound we now find ourselves subjected to. It is unlikely that we will see the likes of another Michael Jackson any time soon. And is this a bad thing?

And so a new day begins…

I wake at 5:00 am. How tidy of me. Willi woke me up jumping off the bed. Help. Now I’ve been at my computer responding to emails since then. I’ve noticed that after sitting at my computer for a while my head starts to feel sort of blurry and headachy. Do any of you know what I am talking about? It’s not exactly a headache, but I feel it in my head…a kind of dizziness perhaps from staring at the screen.

Great…I’ve developed a computer allergy. This is perfect. “Man in his early forties succumbs to virulent and annoying computer allergy”

Actually, lately I’ve come to believe that on my tombstone it will read… THATMARK 1961-20__: FINALLY AND UTTERLY FRUSTRATED TO DEATH AFTER WHAT SEEMED LIKE AN ENDLESS SERIES OF STUPIDITIES.

Perhaps I am jaded. Perhaps my tombstone will read…JADED TO DEATH.

How grandiose of me to think that I will actually have such a thing as a tombstone.

Never mind. They shoot horses don’t they? For a minute I forgot how to spell the word “they”. How sad is that. I had better stop. Perhaps getting out of bed was my first mistake.

And so another day flops half-heartedly and tediously out of the frying pan with more than an ample supply of self-pity.

Yesterday morning I decided to treat myself so I put on a new pair of Donna Karan socks my mother gave me for Christmas. They were in fact so new that they still had the little tag on them that said Donna Karan, New York , as well as the little strip of black tissue paper inside one of the socks. I don’t know exactly what I had been saving them for, but I decided that now was as good a time as any to break them in. By lunch, the one on my right foot had a slight hole at my big toe. By dinner my big toe was practically sticking out of the hole.

At bed time I took the brand new Donna Karan socks off and threw them into the garbage. The price on the socks...sixteen dollars. I guess I should have read the fine print before I threw away the Donna Karan tag on which it would have likely stated: $16.00 or $1.00 per hour not to exceed 16 hours.

This little story serves as well as any to illustrate the themes that are currently ruining my life. Stephen has been saying it for as long as I’ve known him: “We can’t have nice things”. Thank you Donna Karan, New York!

It’s like my Jetta, a thirty thousand dollar annoyance since three hundred miles. I want to say fuck me down the highway, but I would never use such harsh language, now would I?

And if you are wondering if my strategic use of the words "Donna Karan" and the repeated use of the words "Donna Karan" has anything to do with me trying to get one of the search engines, say Google, to rank this page rather high in any search results involving Donna Karan or the words Donna Karan, New York then I would point out that you have become as cynical and jaded as I have and that I would of course never stoop to such degrading depths as to repeatedly use the words "Donna Karan" unless it was absolutely necessary to make my point.

Not.

And so another day comes unhinged at the threshold.

I wake at 7:45 am and for me, this would definitely be considered "sleeping in". And not only did I "sleep in" I also slept through the night, a rare and beautiful thing for a person with an ill pet.

Yesterday Willi's test result came back and not a moment too soon. Just as I thought things were going better he had yet another attack yesterday morning. When Willi's vet called around 10:00 am I was more than ready to hear that the biopsy had given us a diagnosis of Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

All this to say that Willi is finally getting treatment that will likely help him. The treatment involves a steroid that will bring down the inflammation in his bowels in an effort to manage his disease. He seems to be doing very well so far on the drug and having slept the entire night through I am filled with hope that he is finally going to get some relief from the agony he's been going through...and perhaps we are all going to get some sleep.

And so a new day begins...