I have not learned certain things that most people learn.  I’m not making excuses, or blaming anyone, but I have somehow avoided learning a few key lessons, and these occasionally come back to bite me, like now, late at night when they propel me from my bed in horror that robs me of my rest.

My housekeeping, for example, is pretty bad.  I don’t know where this comes from, but it’s not good.  Chaos creeps across the desk, every table, up along the walls, on the floor, and among the chaos, a lot of dust.  It occasionally overwhelms me.   A normal person, coming into my apartment, must immediately feel something is very wrong, even though the place doesn’t stink or have vermin, since I keep the kitchen and bathroom relatively sanitary.  

I tell myself that I’m a creative person, that the disorder in here is no worse than in many a working artist’s studio, that it reflects a bohemian unconcern for conventionality, but I know as I tell myself this that I am full of it.  For some reason I never learned good housekeeping.

My disdain for business, and the kind of people who do business, who possess the competitive entrepreneurial drive that keeps them at work late into the night, wakes them early in the morning to get back to their consuming ambitions.  These kind of people give me the creeps.  I don’t know exactly why that is.  I think this disdain is a bad thing, just because somebody seems to think of little but money, fame and power, chases it all day and in their dreams, does not mean they are a bad person.  I have not learned to get over this feeling, which I realize is at least partially irrational and certainly is the kind of prejudice I try to avoid.

I am unlucky in this too: I find my spirit flipped in a moment sometimes, from a rational optimism and faith that things will work out to a deep and implacable pessimism that assures me everything will go badly.  I’m not sure what it was today, though it seems to have been when I sat down and recorded a one take acoustic version of  “Brokedown Palace” that I liked very much.  I sang it while playing the guitar, overdubbed another voice and another guitar and then put a simple bass line to it, panned left.  It had the kind of space and spontaneity I am always going for, and it was take one.  I was about to mix it down and go prepare dinner for Sekhnet.

Garageband crashed, “quit unexpectedly” is how the machine put it, and when it came up again there was nothing there.  Wiped away like it never existed.  Suddenly the metaphor for death was unmistakable, the futility and vanity of human endeavor stopped me in a way it never stops the driven businessman.  A pall was cast over the day and the miraculous fact that technology let me  be a one man band and record a nice song in five minutes was lost on me completely.  And even though my subsequent recreations of the track came pretty close to the original, the idea that I’d had that inspired track stolen by a stinking machine burned me, continues to burn me.  It reminded me of the delicate pencil drawings, unlike my usual work, that a friend borrowed years ago, promising to take good care of them and get them back to me.  He lost them, has no idea what happened to them.  It burns me like that, though there is no reason for either thing to burn me.

So I am unlucky in this even as I am lucky in other things.