Day 94: art lifts life.

Today I watched Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums for the second time. I am very enamoured of Wes Anderson's films, although not to an obsessive extent (I am far too lazy to be properly obsessive about anything), and his sense of humour in particular. I pretty much have to see everything I hear about that he's made (note that I didn't say everything he's made full stop. That would involve doing research on his filmic history. Too lazy.). Anyway. Watching this beautiful heap of tragic, painfully funny, quietly glamourous perfection, made me think. Art is cool because it makes life poetic. It takes real suffering and pain and misfortune and puts it in a place where it is okay to have gone through it. The suffering becomes useful, even beautiful, enviable and attractive. It is placed in a context, put at a distance from where it can be looked at with some detachment. By telling the story of it, or writing the song of it, or painting the picture of it, the themes become clear, the lessons become learnable, and the event itself becomes art; a thing of beauty. I apologise for the amateur art theorising, but I have of late been feeling quite a marked sense of emotional robustness, and an ability to distinguish in people's actions what is coming from their own sense of insuficiency. I have not been taking other people's rudeness or insensitivity personally, and I have felt entirely equipped to handle my own challenges. I think the fact that I am writing every day and that I write songs about how I feel about things, has something to do with this. My ability to create makes me stronger. It's a tool I have available to use when things start to bother me. What does any of this have to do with not drinking? Maybe not a lot. Except that alcohol used to be another tool I would use quite liberally to eradicate feelings of unease. So maybe the message is, if you want to drink less, try channelling your excess nervous energy into making art? Oh my. Now if I could only summon enough nervous energy to create something as deeply satisfying as The Royal Tenenbaums...

Day 93: rockin in the free world.

Today I am a free agent and it's awesome. Yesterday I did possibly my longest party stint without drinking yet, with two events back to back spanning a full 12 hours. It was totally cool. I drank quite a lot of water, because that many fizzy drinks would have made me sick, and I did have one moment of kind of really wanting to sample the nice white that everyone else was drinking (we were at the very pleasant Mille Vini wine bar, so it was hardly surprising). But all was fine. My resolve is such now that I can have a drinks pang, observe it and move on. I am in no way afraid that I will cave to the lures of the bottle. I have though found myself sort of planning how I will drink in the future: like a highly evolved, sophisticated creature of stylish restraint. Ha. I may very well be kidding myself. But in the cosy, safe zone of complete abstinence, I can allow myself pretty fantasies like these. Or maybe we should call it positive visualisation. (If you can see it, you can be it. Woo!) Another fantasy I am entertaining today is the idea of somehow being a free agent all the time. Working when it suits me on projects that I love, shopping when I wanna, lunching at leisure, travelling to far flung destinations with the regularity of Jet Girl. Dream on sister, cos dreams are for free.

Day 92: shipping out.

So I'm approximately 23 minutes away from leaving the building. Forever. 23 minutes from setting sail into the wide blue yonder, rolling free on the ocean waves. Okay so now I'm being ridiculous. But yes. The time has finally come to ship out. So there's only one thing left to do. Actually, let's make that three: delete my emails, rally the troops and head for the pub! To the pub my friends! To the pub!

Day 91: I feel weird.

I just packed up six and a half years worth of work crap. My shelves are empty, my wall is bare and I have two small boxes and a plastic bag containing everything worth taking anywhere else (except for a tiny fry pan with eggs in it, which I gave to Marcio in the next pod to remember me by). One of those boxes is filled entirely with toys (come work in advertising kids, it's a gas!). It's funny when you leave a place. For years you have been an apparently useful and important cog in the machine, but as you remove yourself and slip out the door, the brute keeps whirring on relentlessly and your relevance dissolves like you were never there in the first place. Such is the march of life I suppose. I have one more morning to spend in this giant, trendily (seven years ago) refurbed warehouse. Then we will lunch, and then I will be cut loose into the outer universe. Soon to be gulped up again, admittedly, into another carefully designed bubble of organised culture, but who knows what that bubble will feel like? Oh, I suppose we will find out. And I'll take weirdness over boringness any day.

Day 90: is my life a broken record?

Okay, so stopping drinking was a seemingly large life change. It was a head shift, a lifestyle shift, a social shift. But now that I'm 90 days in, my "new life" is starting to feel a bit samey. Yoga, healthy eating, getting up early and being productive, writing this blog, doing the music, socialising in a wholesome, under control kind of way. It's a pleasant and happy existence, and I have genuinely eradicated some of the evils that previously felt like incurable plagues in my life. But it's starting to feel like things might have gotten stuck on one track. And the impatient demon child in me is kind of howling for some action. Where are my crazy adventures? Where are my tales of started here, ended where?!!! Where are my encounters with insane people? On second thought, maybe they can all stay exactly wherever it is they are. I am not, after all, looking for trouble. What I am looking for is some new experiences, encounters, people; fuel to keep my insatiable boredom bug at bay. My new job will help (ARE WE THERE YET?). And I can easily swap some shit around for entertainment's sake, without sending the nice little equilibrium I've got going into violent and unnecessary see-saw convulsions. No need to smash the record to smithereens (love that word), when all that's required is a shift of the needle.

(And now I'd better go to yoga.)

Day 89: making music with computers.

Today I went round to Ben’s for a jam. It wasn’t a jam in the traditional sense, because the person who was playing drums happened to be a computer. So what. Computers are taking over the world. Big deal. And apart from the drums being spookily regular (gee that puter can sure hold a beat!) everything was trad jam anyway. Whatever. There are two things that 1. interest me and 2. bother me about computer rock. 1. It is very easy to create other tracks from tiny bits of random material with a computer. We did that today by cutting a tiny slice from an existing track, looping it, then recording a new vocal track over top. It’s nowhere near being a finished song, but as a source for new things to fiddle around with, the technique presents mildly to powerfully head-freaking enormous possibilities. (Of course remixers have known this since the first cut and paste of recorded time, but just how many ways you can chop a piece of music up and what this means for song-writing is only slowly dawning on my tiny mind.) 2. Computer jamming will never be a substitute for bashing shit out live with other people. Live drums, live guitars, live vocals. Boom.

Day 88: doing what I wanna.

Saturdays are great days, whether you drink or not. It’s okay to have a hangover on a Saturday because you have time to sleep it off. If you don’t have a hangover, you simply have time to do whatever the hell you want. Time these days is a delicious luxury. People are always trying to nick it off you with events, or errands or very important tasks, but on Saturdays I like to try and hold on to mine. I have always been of the pottering bent. I can easily and extremely happily while away hours on end with bits of activities; things like picking off my nail polish, flicking through magazines, tidying the piles of books beside my bed, trying on different combinations of rings/bangles/belts, fiddling around on my bass, drinking green tea. I adore having the space of say four or five hours to fill with this kind of stuff. I love the complete absence of demand on my time. Today was a day when the only demands made were my own, and man it was awesome. The most pressing thing I had to do all day was get to a 3.45 yoga class (it was radical! My concentration and backbendability was out of sight!), and make a dinner date at my favourite diner/burger joint with some of my favourite people. Coolness. All of this doing what I want though, got me thinking about a quite contradictory aspect to my personality. I really do not respond well to people telling me what to do. I have an instant buck reaction when others try to control me, and I have a hard time tolerating rules. Unless of course, it’s me who has set them down. Weirdly enough, while I generally disregard the rules enforced by others, I gravitate towards rule-based structures of my own choosing. For example, I don’t allow myself to drink. I am always enforcing special diets on myself. I do yoga, which involves very strict technique and very exact instruction. And some of my greatest satisfaction comes from successfully abiding by the rules I have laid down. (It’s nerdy, I know.) But now consider my former approach to drinking. For me a significant part of the appeal of alcohol has been the complete abandon it represents. It was always about letting loose and wiping yourself out to the extent that you physically couldn’t possibly live up to all those responsibilities weighing on you. It was like a conscious flouting of grown up “musts”. It could be construed as immaturity, or maybe as some futile attempt at claiming power and control in the face of the enormous and undefeatable force that is the chaos in which we exist. A pissy “you’re not the boss of me” yell, drowned out by claps of thunder and lightning and the promise of some unexpected doom. But what’s funny, is that while my current choice of lifestyle seems very well behaved, in fact it is quite rebellious. It’s another case of taking what is “done”, and not doing it. So it seems my approach to life is still quite teenage. Only this little round of petulant walking to my own beat is dressed up as an exercise in adult self-control.