out of whack

After three days of performance all I have to show for it is an aggravated tendon injury and my right thumb currently wrapped up. To have to choose between putting a cast or going for a steroid jab seems like a foregone conclusion - but the decision now stands as doing neither and just waiting the pain out. It seems to have made me a bit more cranky and off tangent and moody, almost as if I were contemplating end of life issues.

So I was flipping through a reading on gerotranscendence and some of the descriptions I felt were particularly apt descriptions of my current state of mind. Some defining characteristics of gero-transcendence include 'a decrease in the interest in superfluous social interaction' and 'a decrease in the interest of material things'. Now, all the free time I have I try to spend at home, and I'd most gladly welcome more time rather than have money.

In a recent conversation with a friend, she asked, 'So what are you going to do after you graduate?'.

"Retire", I said.

She laughed, probably because the reply seems incongruous, given how it is expected that I should engage in this thing called A Proper Job - where one of the defining characteristics includes CPF. But that's lame. (Or so I say, for now).

One of the conversations with quartet this past weekend, while holed up in the dressing room backstage, was that regarding friends. Someone (I forget who, maybe DT or oxy) mentioned it is difficult to go out with friends who are not from the music circle, because half of the nights we spend on rehearsals, the other half we just want to not do anything and rot at home or catch up on heaps of work while trying not to fall sick, and not to get fat from all the late night dinners/suppers.

And I suddenly recalled what one of my friends said about himself, in the past, not wanting to make friends with those people who are not on drugs because they inhabit a different world and it occurred to me that how I felt was not that different from his situation. We gravitate to those most like ourselves, not because of some narcissistic streak, but because of the shared experience - talking about so-and-so's weird behavior at rehearsal, keeping the similar night/no-life schedules, and simple things like not having to explain what is 'desk partner', and the difference between a good desk partner and a not-so-good one.

You know how sometimes artistes say that they hang out with their friends not from the circle so they can 'remain grounded'? I never really understood what they meant but I think I'm starting to get it. Maybe I'm elevating the music circle beyond its deserved attention, but the more I answer questions about what I'm doing now, the more I see how people take a while to grasp things that we take for granted, I realise it's like a different world - different times (mostly at night), at different (secluded/restricted access) places. And after disappearing from Above Ground into a small enclosed sunlight-less double locked heavy metal door room for a period of time, meeting other people again in places of sunshine, meeting family again - it's not that difficult from, say, getting out of prison and trying to reintegrate into society.

Ok so maybe I over-dramatise a bit. Maybe everyone inhabits their own version of Above Ground and belowGround - the places or situations that make them feel so out of whack with the rest of the world, it's just whether they share it with other people or not. Everyone has their own dark place, I presume.

And somehow in the course of all the interviewing I've been doing, I think I'm starting to understand the life of drug users, and how maybe it's not that much different from mine, at least.