I must make a grave confession

I confess that I am no longer at home in my skin. I confess that I fear I have let my talent dwindle for the sake of material concerns. I confess that what I have achieved is a tiny slice of what I have conceived. I confess that I am unable to discern what matters from what simply pours out of me. I confess that I thought myself so much better than all of this. I confess that I hardly thought I'd get this far. I confess that I fear I may never get any further.

I have striven to live as a normal man in a normal world for some years now. I have endeavoured to find peace with that. But there is no peace for me. Truly.

Blood boils in my veins. Fire leaps in my heart. You may know me as a loud, rude Ontario joker with a love for trains and trees. I guess that's what I am. But I play the guitar because my soul feels like a hurricane. I write songs because my mind is a maelstrom. My mouth moves, in words in songs in stammers in shouts because I am a puppet of every god and demon that would speak in earthly tones.

My mother and father raised a good modest churchboy with a flair for conversation and some rather odd predilections. At age 17 I turned myself out of the house and started turning myself into someone, possibly my true self, by wandering around the world like an innocent fool.

Is this the result? I see before me now a thirty-something middle class boob with a soft belly and bags under his eyes, stiff fingers that will never find virtuosity, choked words that would have raged the hypocrites out of the land if I could only have spoken them, bent at the shoulders by the weight of a mediocre life that most folks would call pretty good. What a travesty.

I have not delivered my essential message: that to live as oneself, and then beyond oneself, might be a divine thing. I don't even know if it's true. I have not found my real place, I have not offered a real vision.

I haven't even taken my new CD to the factory.

I work in a factory where they make television programs.

I hate factories. Factories were the death of craft, and art will be next.

I feel unworthy to say the word "art" out loud.

I must make a grave confession. I have wasted a lot of precious time on this pathetically short journey to the grave.