Workity, work

I am so exhausted from working the past two weeks. I've been falling asleep at 9.

I definitely need to start working out more and eating better.

Resolutions:

As the new year comes upon us, I find myself becoming more and more creatively stuck. Well, no more. I recently picked up The Artists' Way, which gives me a series of exercises to do each morning and also one weekly duty. It's a 12 week course to help me break through my creative block. I know it's one small step, but I hope it gets me back on the right path to being positive about who I am as an artist (drawer, writer, photographer, whatever). I'm constantly surrounded by negativity and I'd like to start converting it into positive affirmations.

Here are some goals for the new year, in no particular order:

1. ) Work out more. Ideally I would like to weigh around 165-170. It would be about a 10 or 15 lb increase from where I'm at now. I'd like to do it for a variety of reasons. I definitely put running and weight lifting into this category.

2. ) Create the foundations or a series of pages for a graphic novel. The way graphic novels are taking off in this era is really inspiring. I'd love to try my hand at creating a unique base of characters and learning the techniques of drawing comic art. If applicable, I'd like to get the framework for a potential tattoo done as well.

3. ) Start a novel and write 100 pages or more by the end of the year. I have an idea floating around in my head that I want to flesh out.

4. ) Start a band for jam sessions. I've been pursuing all these different instruments, but I think I will thrive the most in an environment where I can learn from other artists. I'm hoping to set in stone a weekly practice session where I can sing, drum, or learn a little more on the guitar.

5. ) Take the three courses at MadCapz and audition for a potential spot in the improv group. I've been talking about this for a while but I really intend to fit it into my schedule next year.

6. ) Try out for musical theatre at the Arvada Center. With all my newfound singing knowledge, maybe I can couple it with acting and do something with it.

7. ) Record a voice demo. Voice acting, radio, or something along those lines (maybe even cartoon voice work) would be amazing to have as a career.

8. ) Stand up? There has to be somewhere I can go bomb as a standup comedian and see what it feels like to be in front of a crowd, all alone on stage, trying to make people laugh.

9. ) See my sister. Whether she comes out here or I go out there, I'd love to see her. It's been something like 9 years now. I still need to send her a birthday present, it's like three months over due. I'm terrible about mailing things.

Hmm. I think that's a decent list so far. Maybe I'll add more.

Chances, changes

I met a lady the other day named Susan Wolff. She was well-dressed and lonely. I only noticed that because she was sitting alone at my bar and seemed to ask me plenty of questions, even as I was attempting to walk away. We eventually started talking about things off the menu: a book she was writing, the fact she was 47 and the mother of twins, her constant travel (she recently moved to Colorado from Spain), and that her sister is married to Jeff Bridges (Big Lebowski; the bald, bad guy in Iron Man). She spoke very softly, elegantly even, but something about her was off. She would pause in the middle of a sentence, while elaborating on a family story, or one of her travels, taking a moment to reconnect her mind with the path her mouth started on. All the while her eyes seemed to be vacant, staring past me into something I could not see.

We briefly talked about how she was married to a billionaire who divorced her and left her barely anything. Apparently she wrote a book who she gave to Jeff Bridges to review. It is called "All I Wanted Was a Haircut." I don't know if any of this is true. I don't know who this woman is, other than what she told me on that brief encounter. I sort of chuckle at myself thinking back on how I felt knowing someone had a connection to a movie star. How could I verify the truth of her story? I had no reason not to believe her. She left me a $20 tip on $44, even after debating with herself on how much money she wanted to spend on dinner that night. I smirked when she complained that she had no man to buy her a meal.

For a moment, when this woman was telling me about her life, I felt like I had stepped into a new world of possibilities. I have been entering work lately feeling very confined behind the rails of my bar. Her stories of travel and of writing made me feel warm. It made me feel lost.

Jagerbomb

Getting into music this late in life is tricky. I'm meeting people who have been in band forever which means they are at least a decade ahead of me musically. It is a little discouraging, especially when you meet arrogant musicians. I'm pushing along though. I'd like to think I could be a lead singer someday with more practice, of course. The hard part is finding a good group of musicians to jam with but I might have found a few. I have a really close family friend who excels at guitar playing and I am sure with a little pressure he'd be down. I know a few drummers. I met a bassist the other day who is a friend of another guitar player. Also, if my roommate's boyfriend ever stops drinking long enough he could potentially play some guitar. If I had it my way, I'd be playing rhythm guitar or piano and singing. I have my work ahead of me that's for certain.

On the same note, I have been browsing iTunes again lately for single songs that interest me. I picked up a few, but the one I really enjoy right now is Willie Nelson's rendition of Unchained Melody. He has an amazing voice. I picture his voice working in the same fashion as a well-used, aged acoustic guitar; the way fresh strings belt out melodies against worn wood. If you get a chance, pick it up, or just preview it. My friend Nick gave me the new Kings of Leon CD and it's really great. In This Moment has been another favorite of mine lately. Otherwise, I've just been listening to bands I come across on Rock Band, oddly enough, which has been a great exposure for a variety of bands I'm sure. I was discussing this with another co-worker the other day, eventually bands will probably have to pay to reserve spots on these rock video games. It's great advertising.

It occurred to me last saturday around 2:15 p.m. that I am a dickhead sometimes. My roommate(s) and I pile trash bags on the porch for a day or two, sometimes longer if we are lazy, and a little squirrel comes to eat it. The last time he broke the bag open he ate some Old Chicago leftovers and the wind blew the box down my stairs. I literally stepped over it several times for a couple of days until my roommate picked it up. What the hell was that all about? I'm a big dick. I don't even know what happened there but something misfired in my brain.

On Wednesday both my ex's decided to drop in, at separate times, to the 'deaux. I got the night off otherwise I would've seen them both, but instead I came in later to meet Lisa on her last night in town. She headed off to return to teaching in Egypt and I headed to TimeOut to see my drunken 'deaux friends. I actually went because I really enjoy a particular girl was going but she is such a dirty girl. She confesses to me that she had twins when she was fifteen after the first time she had sex. She then gets married to her husband, pops out three more kids, and they live in (bliss?) for fourteen years until he cheats on her with her mother! That's one fucked up story I tell you. She also confesses that she has two sugar daddies who buy her everything. They come into the 'deaux and tip her hundreds of dollars and buy her whatever she wants, including a boob job for her upcoming birthday.

She is hilarious. She happens to be real close friends with another co-worker, April, who came over to my house once, with her husband, Mike, in a raging ball of Jagermeister fury. Apparently the night they dropped in they downed a decent sized bottle of Jager, hit the road, downed another at my place on top of various beers and glasses of wine. Long story short Mike pulls out his ass to moon his wife, we start talking about hairy asses, so she bends over and shows me hers, in front of her husband -- as you can imagine everything is out at this point. She then exposes her boobs nonchalantly while her husband tunes my guitar. They end up fighting with each other, breaking a chair, and then end up speeding off at like 3 in the morning. They have something like 3 or 4 kids as well. It has been revealed to me that the former girl (not April, who will remain nameless in this blog) was a stripper in Vegas briefly making thousands a night and used to have orgies with April who she met through the service industry. The non-April lady ended up leaving Vegas after scoring two DUI's in back-to-back nights.

She explained the second arrest to me. The cops pulled her over for obvious swerving. She stops the car, fails to put it in park, tosses a cigarette out the passenger window and begins to crawl out of the driver's seat to go get it for fear of a littering ticket. The car starts to move forward, rear ends one of the two cop cars present, and she stumbles out of the passenger side. "What the hell are you doing?!" the cops shout at her. She looks up at them and hurls everywhere. What a damn mess, no pun intended.

Clenched fist

Sometimes I wonder if I just walked away from everything if that would solve my creative hold up. Sometimes I wonder if I started smoking weed more if it would help me get out of my own way. I am my own worst critic. I never re-open any document I've ever written for fear that I will look back on it and think it's absolute trash. I passed along all my essays to other people to browse over when I was in school. It's like I am embarrassed at my own attempts to be creative. I feel like my writing is worthless. I knew my essays and research papers were because they were always thrown together last minute. My other interests are more rewarding when I reach a goal. If I draw something or someone, I will immediately know if it is going well. Even as I write all this, I know there is something deeper.

I have been stuck in this condo for about five years now. I met with a realtor today who is trying to help me stay updated on the market. Right now most of the condos in my area are foreclosing and going back on the market, bank-owned, for about $100,000. I owe $121,000. Needless to say there isn't anything I can do right now but be patient. My best option is to hire a property manager and move out. The problem there is, I can't quite rent this place out for my entire mortgage ($946/mo + $160/mo home owner's assurance fees). That's $1,100 I owe a month and chances are I won't be able to rent it for much more than $850. I'd still have to pay about $250 out of my own pocket, on top of whatever rent I will have. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth taking the 'leap of faith,' so to speak, of moving on a whim just to experience something else.

I'm afraid if I don't do it now, I never will. I get anxious whenever I think about my creative rut. I've had this problem all year. I used to write all the time in my teens. I used to draw all the time with ease. Now nothing. Everything is forced except when I am drawing to impress someone at work or writing to update my blog. I feel like I have to have an audience for everything; some immediate gratification for whatever creative work I put out. I'm not entirely sure I can fix that addiction.

My bi-weekly, sometimes monthly visits to my grandmother's makes me always feel more depressed about my rut. The moment I step onto her porch and ring her busted doorbell I feel it. She lets me in, as she always does, with a happy greeting and then it starts to creep in. My mind wraps itself around her barred windows. Security measures my grandfather took to protect themselves in their constantly changing neighborhood. Her rusted brown hair shows signs of aging, stray bangs float in the afternoon light like cobwebs, perhaps an external reflection of a fading memory and a tired spirit. The thought of my dead father and my dead grandfather still haunt me whenever she goes quiet. Is she thinking about them? As I sit in her kitchen, I can't help but wonder if this is where all Hildreth men go to die. The only one who didn't pass away in this place was my grandfather's father, but I found his obituary the other day. He died at 41. My grandfather passed at 64. My dad passed at 49. These things dwell on my mind passing through the sewers of depression in my brain. Fuck. I can't break it.

I stare with angst now at my grandmother. I grow irritated of her same old stories. The ones she told me the two weeks or a month prior. I want to yell at her to get the hell out of her asylum. "Come out to lunch with me grandmother," I've begged. Secretly I worry inside my heart that she isn't capable of being in public anymore. Maybe she'll have trouble using the restroom, or she will fall, or she might embarrass herself somehow. I can't get her to remove herself from her own quiet, depressing life locked away in her home of 40 years.

I can't get out of my head that I don't follow the same path. Everyone is different. I'm not like the men who passed before me. I can break their record of failed attempts at creative success. I just don't know if I can do this here, in Colorado. I don't know if I can do it in this damned condo. I know I certainly can't do it with the help of anyone else. I've learned that several times over in relationships. I have to do this on my own.

Eulogy

What do you say to a good friend who is drinking himself to death? I feel like I should write an eulogy and he isn't even close to dead. It is such a stubborn task to find a quest, a purpose, in the golden swill that is a 'High Energy 40' and a 750 ml bottle of Seagrams 7, especially at 10 in the morning. I know the feeling I get when I have a beer or a cocktail in the middle of the afternoon--maybe it's football Sunday, maybe I just graduated college--and I'm passed out by 5 p.m., ready to have at it again at 10 the same night. There are occasions, I'll admit, where drinking myself stupid is permissible, if not made enjoyable by my peers. I would never do this alone.

Somewhere in the abysmal pit that is my temporary roommate's darkness is a small glow of hope. Very small. So small, it might be lost in the piles of clothes and empty bottles that litter my former room's floor. The same place where I entered my own darkness, unrelated to alcohol, but connected through the same thread of anxiety that my friend harbors.

Let me catch you up.

Kit is my friend from the days of hanging out with Outback kids. Prior to that, I met him through his cousin, Sean, who is still one of my closest friends. As Sean entered married life shortly after I entered single freedom, I relied on Kit to keep me into the party scene where I could expand my acquaintances. It worked out for a few years. I met a few girls I eventually had one-night stands with, perhaps even a weekly fling or two. I met a handful of friends I still talk to even six years after, including my current roommate, Christine, who brought Kit with her when moving in.

I knew immediately accepting her bid to take over my second bedroom that I was trading a set of roommates with bad habits for another. The first week I thought nothing of how bad their drinking addiction had become. I ignored it, mostly. I shut myself up in my newly acquired master bedroom surrounded by plenty of fresh hobbies. Next door, though, a monster lingers - a monster I feel partly responsible for. You see, Christine has been providing money, alcohol, food and transportation for Kit--from what I can tell--for the last twelve months. She enables him. I provide a shelter for it. My responsibility for my own friend's demise is tied to this series of events.

What does a good friend do? I've always respected Kit. He was always a man's man, but charming nonetheless in his own right. His quick wit, love for guitar, and video games gives us enough in common to hang out and converse or interact for hours. Besides that, he is just a good friend. Now I sit ten feet from his bloated liver sleeping in the next room; a piss-drunk boy crashing after one final sip of his forty only to rise and continue the quest, skipping a beat to drunkenly dream of anything else. One good friend--shit, is it me?--has to have the ability to wake him from his world of ruin. To blow on his dimming ember of hope to keep him alive. Fuck, his mother is as messed up as he is. His extended family wants to get involved, but where are his brothers? His father? Have they left their poor brother and son, their service industry and college dropout, to suffer this terrible fate of alcoholism? Maybe somewhere someone feels that he deserves this, but I bet it's painful to bear in their heart, and only half as hard on their liver.

East of Eden

Monday was fun. I've been becoming better friends with a girl at work and we hung out the entire day practically. It's nice to just make quality friends with women while being single, rather than assuming every interaction has to be a hook-up. I think that comes with just being more comfortable with my alone time.

We went down to have sushi in Boulder because I sold her on tempura ice cream. She has a sweet-tooth that is unrivaled by anyone, well, except for me, perhaps. I love Sushi Tora and that was the intended destination, but for some reason their sign says "Gone Fishing" on Mondays. So we had to scoot over to sushi Zanmai off Pearl. I typically like that place, but they were a little sloppy that night. All of the fish on the sashimi platter had lemons surrounding it and looked sort of dingy, except for the tuna which was delicious. The fish tasted fine but it was over-powered by the flavor of lemon. It was her first encounter with sashimi, so I was hoping it was less safe than it was. She told me her favorite was octopus, and well, that's alright in my book. I also didn't really care for avocado randomly appearing in two of our spicy tuna rolls. It's like they were half committed to the preparation of the roll. Desert was great though: cookie-dough ice cream, wrapped in pound cake, flash tempura fried, over fresh fruit. Mmm. I love sushi.

No stop in Boulder is complete, for me, unless I can hit up the Boulder Book Store and buy a book I'll never read. This time though, I'm going to stick through it. My friend and I made a pact to read fifty pages a week (depending on how much time we have) and discuss chapters on Sundays when we work together. If we can get through a book we might make an official book club. Haha. We are reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I remember you were reading this Staci, did you finish it? I have never read anything by Steinbeck so I am excited. I am dually excited to have someone to keep me motivated in reading it since my addiction to electronic simulations has devoured my attention span.

After we picked up our books we went to Amante for coffee, which closed at 7 due to new winter hours. It was well past eight at this point so we headed over to the Med for cappucinos and ANOTHER dessert. Oh man. I was fully-loaded on sugar by the time I got home.

I had a great time though. It's nice hanging out from 2:00 on. It allows me to have a little time to myself late at night.