At the ripe old age of (almost) 56, I'm spending what feels like my remaining years doing little more than waiting to die. I don't feel driven by any desire to accomplish anything, I have no goals, I have no sense of a future to plan for. All I have is a sense of finality, that I've reached a point where I simply have nothing left to contribute and no one left who would care if I did. I shouldn't say "no one". There is a handful of people who would lament my passing, should it occur any time soon, but that's not the point. The point is that, for most of my life, I felt like I was at least "in the game" and there was some possibility of accomplishing something. In the past few years however, that feeling has slipped away into a dim memory.
What I see in the world around me is a civilization hurtling towards disaster; economic, social, political and environmental. I don't see any indication that humanity is evolving towards anything better than what we've had in the past. What I see is a general intellectual decline into a culture of ignorance and stupidity. The knuckle-dragging thugs are winning. The criminals have the edge. Nothing I find within my grasp seems to have any potential to counter that trend and, indeed, very little seems to be within reach at all.
Internally, I'm feeling stuck like a fly in amber. I feel paralyzed and impotent. I can no longer provide for myself in terms of earning a living. My health has failed me on many levels within the last 6 years. Where I was once gainfully employed in a rewarding career with a respectable title and ample remuneration, now I feel like no employer would ever consider taking a risk on investing in me. And beyond my inability to earn an income, there is the death of my creative spirit which lead me to conceive of myself as something of an "artist", an identity which provided a sense of purpose that took me through my adolescence and well into my middle age.
Creativity seems futile now. It's just shouting into a void. There's no one there to hear it and nothing that will come of it. People say I should keep creating just for my own satisfaction, but they don't seem to understand that self satisfaction is the most fleeting feeling of them all. It has no more substance than a fart. It has no more value than patting myself on the back. And the reason for that is because creative expression is, above all things, a means of communication and that process requires both a transmitter and a receiver and one cannot be both for a message to have any value. The whole purpose of communication is to transmit information from one place to another.
If all I'm doing within the process of creation is communicating with myself, then it is no more than a dream, without form or function. It is redundant to provide myself with information I already have. I cannot empathize with my own feelings when empathy, by its very nature, requires more than one entity to experience the same thing. I feel what I feel and I know what I know, but if there's no one else to share that with, then the creative process has no purpose.
So that brings me back to the hours I spend alone wondering how much longer I have and thinking that I have nothing to work towards and no hope of things getting better. My health will continue to decline, my financial situation will continue to become more dire and my ability to cope will become more strained. Everything is on a downward trend with nothing able to reverse the direction of any of those indicators. My only hope financially is to try to get classified as permanently disabled, which would increase my government income slightly and take the pressure off in terms of the expectation of looking for "work". For all practical purposes, I am unemployable. My condition means I could have a heart attack or stroke waiting around the corner at virtually any time. All those take to trigger is enough stress. If I do manage to get classified as "PwD" (persons with disability), then what? Continue to struggle to survive until I keel over? How many years will I have of that?
At this point, there is only one outlet that still offers me some satisfaction - the written word. I haven't tried to create new music for over 2 years. I haven't wanted to do any video, photography or graphics for nearly as long. I think I've managed to knock up a couple of stupid memes for posting on line, but who cares. They never go viral. Why that would be valuable doesn't even matter. But I keep writing things. Somehow what's left of my creative urge has settled into the medium of text and I keep writing things; opinions, reviews, commentary, critiques... etc. For some reason words keep coming from my fingertips and people keep telling me to write more, so here I am, trying to get these thoughts together in one place.
To that end, I'm starting this little blog. I don't know how this is supposed to work. I don't know what I'm supposed to do to get anyone to read this. I guess I'm just going to figure it out as I go along and see where it goes. They say, if I get enough traffic, I can monetize this thing and get paid something for it. Wouldn't THAT be a laugh! But it doesn't matter anyway. If I'm going to be compelled to write, I might as well stick these messages in this particular bottle and toss it out into the sea of the internet and maybe it'll drift onto someone's shore. Maybe they'll even read some of it. At this point, I have nothing to lose by putting this out there and seeing where it goes. I don't have any specific direction I plan to take this. It's just going to be whatever comes out of my fingers at any point in time until my fingers don't work anymore. That may be sooner than I'd like to admit these days, but that's another consideration.
So if you're finding this and feel like following along, well then you're welcome to and you're welcome to share your thoughts on whatever I write as long as you're nice about it. I'm not here to take anyone's abuse, so if that's all you've got to offer, no thanks. Otherwise, I'll always do my best to respond in kind and offer anything I can if you have a question or two.
Now, where do I go from here?
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