"That'll do, Pig...that'll do"

I'm writing this in between eating leftover chocolates from Easter (seriously, I'm currently typing one-handed, while the other gently feeds me the necessary medicine...) because I've just finished one of those gut-wrenching, all-out, going out of fashion, weeping-like-a-lost-and-desolate-soul crying sessions to end all crying sessions.  You know the ones, where you find yourself practically praying by the end of it, just begging through the sobs, "look, just help me or kill me, I don't mind which", except suddenly I find myself angrily bargaining with the universe that if it is going to kill me, it had better bloody sort out the lives of the people who might be a bit ticked off or even, maybe upset, about it, by bringing them lots of love and miraculous lives to make up for the grief they might otherwise experience a bit of.

That should actually go down as a significant improvement on previous sobbing sessions.  I never used to say that before.  I must have developed a modicum of self-worth.  Where the hell did that come from?  Don't tell me that working for a heartless, unappreciative director from the depths of all that is heartless and unappreciative, who treats me as though I could be replaced tomorrow (and yet still can't actually find another person to do the same job as me...) is actually a self-esteem booster?!  What cruel irony is that?  So, what, I only stand up for myself when someone treats me like dirt? 

Well it doesn't help much anyway.  No good having a remaining amount of self-esteem when the world couldn't give a damn that I exist.  I toil meaninglessly to survive one week to the next, contemplating stupid things like whether I can afford printer ink again. (Printer ink - seriously, isn't that just the most tragically pathetic part of all?)  And isn't it a sorry a state of affairs when you have to regularly get up at 6 am but the job you're getting up to do doesn't pay you enough to afford the decent coffee you need to actually stand a chance of being properly awake by the time you start work?

All humour aside, I wonder if this is some genetic defect that pre-disposes me to gargantuan amounts of depression hormones (or whatever causes this) or am I right that music has tortured me from beginning to end and just as I try to escape it, it comes back for another round of its own brand of 'water-boarding'?  Is it my fault?  Have I brought this on myself?  Have I made music my drug of choice and now become so addicted that I cannot live without it?  Or is that just the usual curse of being a creative person.? And I do mean curse.  I wanted to be normal so that I could just about live with this meaningless existence of working all the hours in the day to pay for the roof over my head that I so longed for, but have little time to enjoy, but somehow I still cannot come to terms with it.

This Catch 22 is the story of almost everyone's life - you do a job you hate for the majority of your time, to pay for the food you need to fuel doing that job you hate, and only get enough free time to just about stave off death so you can work another meaningless week.  Other people have learned to live with this.  But I can't.  I find this fact just about the most desperately hopeless, despair-filled, depressing thing about life that there is and I will NEVER get used to it or learn to accept it.  Even in the midst of my crying, I was still angrily threatening the universe that I would never accept it.  That I'd rather die than accept that this will be the way of things for the rest of my life.  And I know that even if I do have to carry on like this till the despair and meaningless work kill me, I will still be adamantly refusing to accept that this is the way it was meant to be.  Even if that defiance is the first stepping stone to my demise, I will never accept that this is simply the way life is.  I don't fucking care.  IT SHOULDN'T BE!.  

I worked hard to try to avoid it and to do something that had meaning for me.  I worked hard to build myself up from absolutely zero support, no 'pre-disposed to a musical education' for me.  I paid for every bit of that 'music education' myself.  And it may well have bankrupted me, but I had to do it.  There was just no way I was going to miss out on playing the piano just because I was born into a working class family that didn't know the difference between a casio keyboard and a Yamaha C3.

Wow.  I think the chocolate really kicked-in there, right?  Or else I really am that bitter and twisted.  Probably the latter.  But I can't be bitter and twisted if I'm still capable of appreciating those who might still succeed instead of me and can be pleased for them that they will/they have escaped the Catch 22.  Those I thought of today, the Russian Countess, the coffee and cake friend, the Faerie Godmother trainee.  All of them have or will succeed and rightly so.  I just still don't know what it is I have done to be the one who didn't and won't.  But I mustn't forget, Francis Bacon has the definitive word on this one: "Life is so meaningless, we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary."  I mustn't forget that life for some, really is meaningless (especially if ill-health robs you of opportunity) and maybe ultimately, with the way in which things can come to an end, it is meaningless for everyone, it's just a matter of time before you realise it.  Before you're forced to see it.

So I have thought all these thoughts today and cried till I had nothing left to express, and I've done my best by those thoughts and that crying, and all I could find to say after all that, was not some kind of solution or wise insight, but the words from a children's film:

 "That'll do Pig...that'll do."  

God bless you, James Cromwell, wherever you are.