Don’t Remind Me

It’s hard to enjoy others’ great works when you oughta be making your own…unless you can’t!

I have trouble going to see theatre productions, because it reminds me of the work I want to be doing. What I ought to be doing. I want to be on that stage or directing the action, not just watching. Watching is what other people do, what the normals do.

I often feel the same way about music, though to a somewhat lesser extent. Listening to great music too often reminds me of the music I’m not making, the songs I’m not writing or recording or performing. Experiences with the arts that ought to, by all other accounts, be sublime, are all too frequently for me of alienation and regret.

Shit, even listening to podcasts makes me feel like a slug.

The same can also be said for my experience of great writing, particularly novels, though I suppose a part of me. that I’m not cut out to be a fiction writer (I deeply hope this is not so), and am therefore not really failing any kind of personal expectation. Movies and TV rarely bring this kind of anxiety on, as they feel so out of reach as to be akin to wishing to be a professional basketball player as a 5-foot-5 sedentary dude in his 40s. A couple decades ago I harbored illusions of future movie stardom, but now I can watch Avengers: Endgame…