3/9/04 2:38 AM: So it's almost 3AM again, and I'm up, tapping away at my Powerbook keyboard.

I spent much of the weekend sick in bed, and moving in and out of various levels of depression. I found that hilarious, because I'm happier now -- in general -- than I may have ever been, possibly since I was a very young child. I have freedom to do virtually anything I want. I have time to sort through the various and often fragmented files in my mental hard drive. I have no shortage of affection and comfort in the arms of a beautiful Black woman. I surely have enough side projects and theories I'd like to work out that could keep me occupied well into the next century if I applied myself to them.

It's a kind of ... well, I suppose I'd have to call it the malaise of the western mind. Like so many people with average to high IQs who live in what we so often call the western world (the one of materialism, of scientific determinism, of money and power), the free time I have often leads me to desires for a future tense that I can never really claim. When I got to, say, walking out of college (which I sought with less than enthused vigor, I'll admit, but vigor nonetheless), I was left adrift without prospects or possibility. After arriving at marriage and mortgages (which I chased with singleminded and remarkable focus), it was more horrible than I could have ever dreamed, a living prison of polite smiles and death by compromise.

I was up late last night as well, and I caught some of Roger Guenveur Smith's A Huey P. Newton Story. I thought about how close the world was to real change in the sixties, a time before I was even born, and how easy (and I say that from the comfort of history and hindsight, I can in no way begin to grasp the struggles those people went through) it was for the engineers of that change to get distracted by drugs and sex and fear and guns and everything that ultimately forestalled a second American revolution.

I like to think I'd have done better, in their place, but that's an arrogant and wholly erroneous statement based on my comfort and my frustration with these times. I tried the "student activist" route and found my road considerably more difficult than Huey's. They were ready for me. Whereas Huey had a nation of disaffected youth -- with fairly distraction free idle time and fairly unimpressive institutional machinery arrayed against them -- ready to do something, anything, I stood at the center of what so many are calling "generation X," a variable age with a variable attitude, driven stupid by cathode ray bombardment and educational anaesthesia ...

You know what? I sit here typing this stuff, which is either easily confirmable facts or wholly delusional fantasy or something in between, depending on your personal point of view, and I felt myself sliding into a rhythm. A kind of preachy rhythm of being "right," and knowing it, and feeling the need to show it. It's not even freaking worth it. I had to stop myself before I lapsed into the same sermons I've been running in my head for more than a decade.

(Side note: I stopped, in even my fiction and poetry, trying to "preach" anything to anybody. I have developed an almost Zen-like disinterest in the affairs of mortals, as none of it will matter for almost any of us, given about seven or eight decades, and since everyone has the same basic spirit-given right to think for themselves -- whether or not they were supplied with the equipment or desire to use it -- I figgered people are gonna whatever they think is best, and that's gotta be okay for them, and as much as I'd hate anybody coming down on me, I surely have no room to do the same. If I do have a message -- personal responsibility, loyalty rewarding loyalty, logic overriding emotion -- I bury it within personal narratives in an almost subliminal way, because I don't wanna be "that guy" ranting on a soapbox when I get so old I'll seem a joke even to myself)

I'm sitting here watching the Oscar-nominated Lost in Translation, and reflecting on what Roger Ebert said about it (my thoughts about his interpretation of Biker Boyz notwithstanding, I normally think he's pretty on the ball), about how it so thoroughly explores the notion of loneliness.

We are all so dangerously alone. There is no cure for it.

I've gone over the fears in my head -- that we don't want to die alone, that we want someone to grow old with us. It's so godlessly selfish. I mean, best case scenario, you fall madly in love with someone and they are dumb enough to stay with you through incontenence and loss of function and what have you. Then they stand by your side as your shuffle off this mortal coil, or whatever you wanna call it, and they're stuck with the one thing you didn't want. To die alone. Unless they're fast enough to sucker some other moron into the same hustle and hope for a speedy demise afterwards. This is the best case scenario.

Screw that.

Now, I'm not saying I'm never gonna commit again, and I'm not saying I'm against committed relationships. Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the (sudden) validation of my personal sense of attractiveness for the first time in my entire life, being single is an endless series of tedious reruns, a slow dissolve into a deja vu scene I didn't like the first time it played.

What I'm saying is that if these are the only choices, it's a pretty rigged game from the start. I also acknowledge that the cultural and biological programming to seek either one may be too strong to overcome. Too strong for me, anyway, given all the other intellectual fronts I'm fighting on.

I almost never promise anyone anything because I don't want to set myself up to let them down. They can't be disappointed if I don't give them room to expect much from me. I can't fail if I don't try. Again, in seven decades or so, it'll be considerably less relevant no matter how you slice it.

As futile and grim as this sounds, it's given me an almost giddy approach to, well everything. Oops, somebody dropped my expensive microphone! Ah well, nothing lasts forever. "Hey, Hannibal, I know we were supposed to go do that thing you've been wanting to do, but something came up and I can't make it." Okay, whatever, do your thing. What's that? The comic book proposal I worked for nine months on sits ignored and unattended on the desk of a man who doesn't even work there anymore? Whadda ya gonna do, you know?

To quote the great modern thinker Hosun S. Lee, as I have so many times, "It's okay, I have such low expectations of you anyway that you couldn't possibly disappoint me anymore." Moving on. It's the only choice I really have.

So I sit, whimsically embittered (apologies to Bronwyn Jones), in my hot little apartment (the recent heat wave reminded me of the sticky summer I spent here last year, which I rather enjoyed but which several friends found stifling), I sit and watch and contemplate the day I will die. Alone, regardless of who is at my side, or if anyone is there at all. I think of that among other strange thoughts. Often chuckling madly about it. I consider stories I'm willing to tell (after 9/11, I had an amazing short story in my head about a group of Montana militia types who end up driving gas trucks into seven city hall buildings at the same time ... but it's never seemed like the sort of thing I could do without Ashcroft banging down my door, and I'm sure even typing this sentence will end badly for me), poems I'm willing to write (I used to write poems about what I wanted to happen, but I don't really want anything to happen anymore, I just want to kind of get through things without being bothered too much, which is easier when you don't care, which -- I believe -- is probably awfully close to the sentiments of my great uncle than he'd have ever admitted to me), the people I tolerate in my life. Laughing during almost each and every waking hour of my days, finding simple joys in the kids playing in the courtyard or the goofy tilt of my fedora.

Thinking.

ADDENDUM, 3/10/04 12:25 AM: I'm sitting in a bar called The Shack in Santa Monica. I'm in a very good mood for no good reason.

There wasn't any good reason for the bad mood that started all of this. Like real life, moods happen every day. I was coming out of a Monday, which are traditionally the most depressing time of my week, but that's probably less a cause and more a coincidence.

So today I go to my singing class, and I'm not in the best of shape. I'd been sick all weekend. I swear, I feel like I blew thirty pounds of snot out of my nose. I was still a little mucus-y, and my voice was not at its peak.

I decided to play all the cards I had, since I normally would soldier through. I told the teacher (who, honestly, I don't think knows her ass from a handbag, despite being able to hit almost every single note on the piano), and tell her, "yeah, didn't really do much homework, I was in a car accident and I got sick." I sang a lot of "Some Enchanted Evening" anyway (I "found" an Andy Williams version of it, which I've been listening to). My voice still sounded pretty solid, and she gave me some phrasing hints. People look at me like I'm a freaking star in there, which I find amusing.

In another of her mercurial choices, she assigned me a new note ("A" I found out later) to start off with in our group song, "Oklahoma" (which, oh, I hate). As I stood there, a girl named Daphne stood nearby. I'd seen her since the class started -- about five seven, cute enough (in the same way I figure I'm "cute enough," as I'm largely convinced the likes of Denzel Washington or Shemar Moore are "fine"), her hair in twists. I'd seen her looking at me, and of course I'd glanced at her a time or two. Nothing serious. I'd laughed to myself several times that her name was "Daphne," because my friend McGowan and I had always joked about our other friend Eliot, "See, he's always tryin' to get with Daphne when he ain't even got no Velma yet!"

She was thumbing through her book, and she was studying "My Funny Valentine," a song I like a great deal. I'd gotten a chance to hear Daphne's voice that night, so I said ...

"You'd sound good, singing that. It's a great song."

She looked up at me and smiled shyly. "Yeah, I like it a lot better than the song I'm doing now."

I groaned. "I absolutely hate my song. Say, what kinda songs do the altos have? I've barely got any songs made after 1953."

She laughed at that, and leaned over to show me the book. I was right -- way more interesting songs for higher voices.

"I think I'm gonna ask if I can change my song, I'd like this one much better."

The teacher's attention turned our way, so Daphne asked if she could change. "No." Daphne said she was gonna move out of town in three weeks, and that she'd really rather do "My Funny Valentine." "You can do that as your second song. You'll have to learn three songs in the next few weeks, so that can be one of 'em."

Daphne frowned. I noticed she was a skinny little thing. "Can I just take an 'incomplete?'" "No."

She frowned, and I said, "I'll walk you out," which she kind of brightened to. "Okay."

I quickly asked the teacher what was the new note she started me on, she played an "A" (which led me to believe I need to buy one of those little Casio keyboards or something) and I followed Daphne out.

She's a physical therapist. Her gig is paying to relocate her and have her do traveling assignments. She's moving to Texas. She doesn't know how to find the songs.

Everybody who knows me knows that I abide very firmly by Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #285: "no good deed goes unpunished." Still, I sigh and say, "I'm a karaoke host. I help people learn songs fast, all the time. And as for that one, you can download it." I handed her a card, and she was happy.

I walked her to her car and then hot-footed it back down the hill to my own. I don't really have any real interest in what happened, but somehow it made me happy anyway.

I had to come out to the Shack, where I'd almost never be, to meet a guy named Manny (who will always be "Mr. Cellophane" to me, which he finds amusing ... long story) to find out about a karaoke contest I'm helping run, and a lot of people who don't know me are really nice to me for no real reason, and I was singing pretty happily in the car. Music, it seems, can affect me very powerfully. Which is why I've started singing a lot fewer "broken hearted" songs at karaoke, as it was ruining my pretty-constant buzz.

Nothing has changed. My awe-inspiring disappointment over how tedious and doomed humanity is remains, crystalline and unaltered. My sadness and loneliness loom as large as they ever did. I guess I just walked over into a better-heated part of my brain right now. To be honest, I'd have a hard time believing anybody really grasping all of this, because as similar as it may be to someone else's experience, we all are so idiosyncratic and so individualized that me asking "can you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?" may as well be spoken in Tagalog. I've given up being understood. Nowadays I'm happy enough if people can managed not to irritate me.

So there you have it. One mood swing, completed.