Misery loves company
I was at a bar last week where they had a one man band. I sometimes think about how little decisions can make such a big difference down the road, especially for lazy people. A decision entered by default, such as taking the first job you get, staying with the same girl cause she's there, all don't even seem like choices. They seem like the opposite of choosing, in a way, but its a choice. More will come on this.
The band/one man was called R.J. something, since that was the guys name, or stage name. If you think about it, names are really just variables assigned to us somewhat randomly as a linguistic symbol to aid identification. He could have called himself Perogy or Nameman. R.J. has a nice ring to it I guess. But if was him I would have called myself Johnny Bye-Bye.
When he started playing, all the oxygen was vacuumed out of the room and exchanged for failure. The Tragically Hip has an especially desperate and ironic tone when sung by a man who must consider himself cursed like sysiphus to play "little bones" over and over into eternity.
I named a chord after that guy that night, the G-chord is now the infinite darkness chord.
On a concious level this guy can't even really be that unhappy. He seems to like the humans he plays for, he might have liked the songs once, and he is not a totally talentless musician(all musicians are talentless). Music was his choice, and he gets to live out some twisted german expressionist version of it for the rest of his life. He's playing the same 30 songs he never wrote. And the crowd couldn't care less about him, after he finished we would gladly if allowed bat his corpse around like a beach ball at a Brian Wilson show.
If you're beautiful, misery is a checkbook for sympathy with infinite overdraft.
But not for this man. However he got there, no one cares, he is sent by his own grim destiny to entertain us while we drink and play at billiards, darts, and foos-ball, table hockey's boring paternal grandfather.
Behind his labored smile is a totally consuming despair that even he can't feel in its totality. On the surface he is a bored, cynical, one man band. But beneath that, in what I can only assume is a layer of himself he rarely visits, are the memories of his dreams. Those dreams are dead, and the memory of them shelved away somewhere in the brain region next to the tablature for "Learning to Fly" by Tom Petty and "Waterloo" by Abba. Nearby is a region I'm sure he visits often, the part of his mind that houses a sawed off shotgun and a pair of wings. One day my friend, one day.
This isn't to say that things will never change, things always do. Tomorrow he may get a job offer with IBM to write jingles for their commercials, who knows. But although things change, people often don't. So this guy may be screwed either way. Because whether or not things change, its how he got there that makes him what he is and always will be.
I will tell you right now exactly how he got there, facing the million little decisions and always taking the default choices. If a decision looked tough he probably just shied away and tossed back a pint. So now, IBM jingles or not, this guy is stuck as himself, whoever that is.
Why do I care, let me tell you, cause I'm on the same road as that guy, I always just wait and let decisions make themselves. What the hell, I'll have no one to blame but me, but I can forgive myself for just about anything. Let the good times roll motherfuckers!!!