24 Nov 2009, Posted by jay rusovich in Jay Rusovich, 3 Comments

Psychotic in a Trance

Free associating on the couch:

The door swings open bleeding a crimson luminescence into a vacant hallway.

It appears to carve a passageway onto the opposing wall that, from where I stand, appears to be a passageway into another dimension.

It seems like a place Dante would spend a lot of down time.

I’m in the company of three hookers and a circus seal.

I don’t know which is which because everyone is performing. The colors and shapes have merged. Everything is a kind of soupy cacophony.

Am I dreaming, or is this what’s left at mid-century?

I don’t know.

It appears that my job in life has taken on new dimensions.

Am I now steward of its inhabitants?

What else is there?

Who’s taking care of me?

An accountant, a broker, an assistant and a shrink?  And occasionally, one of the aforementioned hookers who don’t go by that professional title.

So why can’t I allow myself to enjoy all of this?

What’s wrong with me?

Why do I feel guilty about doing things for other people who keep taking and taking and taking because I keep giving and giving and giving, spending tens of thousands…and for what?

Affirmation?

Love?

For more encouragement to do more, which leads to giving more, which leads to even more affirmation, more encouragement, and more love?

There comes a point in time when life feels reductive, condensed down to a few useful pieces, rather than the universe of possibilities I carried with me as a young man. This is what you never fully get when you’re in that blessed place because everything is a projection into the future.

For those who get it all too soon, there is rehab.

You wait and wait and wait until it arrives, and then the rest is suddenly gone.

Most people who read a lot of Nietzsche label this an existential nightmare.

They’re right.

Agents, publicists, dealers, dopers, derelicts all — sucking the life out of the golden boy – now man – who deserves to be happy, particularly when he’s doing things for them.

Don’t sabotage that happiness by not handing it over.

What’s wrong with you, Jay?

Gimme. Gimme. Gimme.

There is always more. Everyone is strung out on the highs. The entitlement. The lust. You think I’m imagining these things? That my view of the world is jaundiced?

Perhaps my eyes are wide open and what I see is a running dialogue of life in the noonday sun, outside the framework of the insulated, the delusional and the dead.

This is a backstage look at what makes the performance what it appears to be to those who don’t care to know how, or why.

If you just want the performance, look elsewhere.

Go ahead and barricade yourselves from a world that’s always shoving in the opposite direction.

Arm yourselves to the teeth because you’ll need it.

I’ll still be here, broadcasting from out on the edges of sanity.

That’s my job…and that’s what’s left.

I feel like a psychotic in a trance.

Note: You can expect to pay a therapist $175.00 for 50 minutes of this. Then you can get back behind the wheel of a 6000-pound SUV.

xoxo