Decay

I don’t care who you are, if you’ve been unemployed for as long as I have been, you do gradually lose your initiative, your motivation, your self-starter nature, your edge. Despite your best efforts, you are weakened by your lack of immediate responsibilities, slowly but surely being conditioned for the life of a retired man. I’ve created routines for myself, just to have some semblance of discipline (like doing online stuff at the coffee shop every weekday from 10:00-12:30), but there comes a time when you wake up and realize how utterly horrid your time management skills have become, despite your best efforts. I suck at life.

This weekend, I’m leaving town again, this time to play the part of the groomsman who went to kindergarten with the groom. Since gas is so cheap, I feel pretty good about splurging on a few drinks at the bachelor party. Oh wait. Crap. That’s right, I forgot: gas costs more than whiskey now.

But I digress. When I get back, the Others are in Florida for a week, so I am house/dog-sitting for a week. That’s a week with the house to myself, so hopefully I can shutdown, retool, and jumpstart a real routine. I’m going to pick up and finish that offertory arrangement I said I’d do. I also just bought a membership to that gym I found, the one with a dojo/aerobics/dance studio. I’m also going to sharpen my mind with a variety of academic material, because I suck at life. Then I’m going to build a raft out of bamboo and snot.

I suck at life. Even if opportunity did knock, my eyes would just glaze over at the dawning realization of the ramifications of any task I undertook. I have no chops anymore, if I ever did. I discovered that when I began tooling around with this chamber piece, falling into the stupid and casual trap of writing at the computer, just because I was there. Screwing around on the computer at the coffee shop. Wondering why my voice-leading and harmonic language suck so much. Oh yeah, because I’m writing half-assed at the computer, giving it 82% of my attention. Bad composer! Dude, at this point, I couldn’t even tell you the transpositions of the various members of the saxophone family.

I’m not a composer. I’m a bum. Screw… things!

FAIL!

It could happen to you.