high anxiety

I'm having another one of those weird sourceless anxiety-ridden moments. Why ever for? Probably someone just said something negative to me and I started to doubt myself.

I feel at these times a desire for immolation. Or spontaneous combustion. Or something. There's a line in a Radiohead song that says, "I wish, I wish for something to happen - to blow me sky high". That's a bit of what I'm saying. I hate how everything I do leaves me a tinge unsatisfied. Is it just that it's designed that way so I don't get satisfied and I shouldn't dwell on it? Probably.

Still, I hate how all my effort leaves me incomplete. I hate how the lust for money weasels its way into my interstitial tissues and makes me ungrateful for bounty... but I don't want to asceticize myself. In my heart I believe it won't work.

Grace, you say? Accept grace? Fine, then. I accept. Hum dee dum dum dum. Nah, not really working. No warm glow. I keep thinking that if I could just work harder and master my art and produce more and acheive recognition then somehow I'd be satiated. Then I tell myself, "no, Josh. That's not how it works. The only thing that can ever fully satisfy you is (barring the success of a Snickers) melting into God, and you can't have that until you're dead." Then I tell myself that I'm just saying that because I need a good excuse to avoid hard work and the metaphysical emptiness of soul that attends the striving after hollow status-markers is a pretty darn good one.

Then I pop back on up to the need for self-denial and I equate that with an acceptance of lifelong artistic anonymity and poverty and call it good, since I know that there are many better artists in poorer places who have even less chance of "making it" than I - so what right do I have to peer adulation?

Garsh. If you read my regular entries here, you probably think I wander around all day beating myself in the forehead with a piece of plywood. The truth is, I don't. I spent forty-five minutes this morning shoveling chicken-poo laden shavings and I'm pretty well certain that not once in that entire time did I contemplate with anguish my tragic isolation in the universe. And I also danced around the kitchen in my boxers to some idiotic song I had stuck in my head. And they were polka-dotted.

With that mental image, then, I'll leave.