Welcome to the wall of masks.
At last count, there were almost 1,000 I could use which justifies my title well enough to let you know that I shall be retiring every single one of them. All except one - I think I will need some kind of face to go into the world with. It would be bizarre to go out with no face on at all - unless of course your name is Vic Sage, in which case it's cool in the absolute extreme!
Some of them may be harder to put out to pasture than others, but I have made a good start - with a bit of planning, the one that's left should be the same one I had on when my mother released me into the wild that fateful evening that she entered the hospital and screamed demonic names at nurses while she watched The Invaders... but that's another story.
Living a life in which you wake up wondering which mask to wear before you even get dressed is painful and I'm tired of it because it's not even that much of a conscious choice. Masks appear out of the chaosphere, randomly dispatched according to who the person standing in front of me needs or wants to see, but something has happened to me over the last few months. Something that I didn't see coming and the only solution is to live a life with no more fake in it.
Hard. Really hard.
Going back a while, I wrote a song once called er... shoot, I can't remember which one it was. It's unimportant anyway but there's a lyric in there that goes:
"Hail me, destroyer of worlds, unbringer of calm
I only wanted real love tattooed on my arm"
...which out of context sounds like utter crap, but it still makes sense to me - and the further I move away from that point in time, the more it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Truth of the matter is, there were nine songs that I wrote in that period of time and every single one of them is like that. I can't work out if I simply had an inordinate amount of foresight about myself or they are all self-fulfilling prophecies.
On the rare occasions that I'm able to stand far enough away from myself to see this picture, I can almost see what it's supposed to be - like one of those pictures that you have stare at for about an hour before you can see what it is... (note to self: what the hell is one of those called?).
The catalyst for some of this is freakish in the extreme. I went to see Marley & Me today (under duress I might add) and if, like me, you can handle a bit of emotion in your life, it's excellent. (Spoiler alert:) I expected carnage in the extreme but it's a really good movie, but I should have known even before I walked in the door that any film that's about a dog will see the dog die at the end. Cry like a girl? Maybe. Not so much as when Rose got left on the beach but yeah... it's a killer.
Maybe it was my state of mind. When you see a snapshot - fictional or not - of 15 years of a persons adult life and can grab hold of enough of it to map it on top of your own, you can get some kind of benchmark of all the time you've wasted putting effort into things you don't want anymore... and in some instances never wanted in the first place.
I'll continue this tomorrow... going public with it now though so there will be no escape from myself.
Currently reading: the stars (the ones in the sky not 'scopes)
Currently listening to: Rich Hall doing stand-up
Currently wondering: what the hell propels me to write this stuff here!
