What? Why? How? Who?

I've started taking to life a bit like a hermit.

I've really not been interested in talking to people much in the last few days. I'd rather sit in my room with the lights off and think, strum and write. I've barely had a drink in the last couple of days, and I always find this kind of experience a strange one because it takes me back into myself. Usually it reminds me of why I do like - or maybe need - to drink. It has this time too.

I find myself collapsing into my psyche. Booze is a form of self-abuse (or so a friend of mine recently pointed out when comparing it to something else that they do). I don't drink to ease a depressed mindset, I drink because it washes away frustration, anger, and self-doubt. I have these things in bucket loads...I always have, right from being very very young. So, it gives me the chance to step outside of myself - I, like a lot of us perenial misfits am self-obsessive to the border point of delusion - to drink offers me an escape.

The other thing that gives me this is the feeling of being on a stage, leaping around, and windmilling with my guitar that the blood comes out of my cut up fingers (see the pictures earlier in this blog if you don't believe me!). And at the moment, I can't do that. It gets to the point sometimes when, I can't even stand to hear music (I've always had a big reservation about watching any live band that I'm not on the bill for). Certain tracks will come on my cd player, that in better times let me fly out of my head in a fantastical, dreamlike experience - and when I'm in this kind of mood that I am now, I will HAVE to turn them off and crave silence.

Seems then that I'm caught in a trap - too hung up on the stomach twisting pain of not doing what I know I can do with a rock n roll band to not drink, and ofcourse when I do drink all the real depth that makes me good is absorbed up in this seductive, boozy haze.

The other problem is this - and this will sound really self-important and deluded to the cynics out there - I feel that I've got a duty to stop the world destroying itself. Ofcourse, I also think that we have a duty to do that, I just happen to feel very deeply about playing my part...and how I can achieve this I can only figure out from what my life experiences, emotions and dreams have told me. And for the moment (which is where one should always be in this business) that contribution has to come from rock n roll. In the future it might be films, painting or something else from the arts (because the work of an Artist is after all the vocation that chose me.

Must sound a bit crazy. But when I consider this, in my dark little, isolated space I feel like the whole world is folding in around me and that I'm to blame because I can't establish myself in a position to do what I've got to do.

On another subject, got turned down for a job today. Bollocks. Come on, give the boy a break.

Tom.