I am learning to just plain accept that I am going to feel like ancient shit every afternoon.

Dunno why, and at this point, I don’t really care. Sleep issues? Psychological issues? Invisible demon that doesn’t do mornings? Whatever.

But like clockwork, I feel like shit in the afternoons, and often the only solution is more sleep. Maybe my body need a certain amount of sleep outside the influence of Zopiclone, I don’t know. Maybe the sleep apnea is making it so that I need extra sleep just to survive.

Or maybe the effects of the lowering of my Paxil dose are catching up with me and I am stuck having that super-intense dream-filled sweaty sleep every day purely from my mind’s need for dreamtime in order to deal with the psychological changes within me.

I do feel like change is occurring within me. I am starting to see my feeling sad and weak and lonely lately as a good thing because it means I am processing a lot of deeply suppressed emotion and that is always a good thing.

Still not good at just letting the emotions happen and riding the wave wherever it leads, though. Like I talked about yesterday, I have trouble staying with negative emotions. I am in then out again.

I have had the vast majority of my 40 years on Earth to practice avoidance via distraction. It will take some time to learn the opposite.

There is enormous power in the ability to choose pain.

I want that power.

Also on the psychological front, I find myself less and less interesting in video games lately. And that’s a good thing, assuming I can find something more useful to do with my time that satisfies me more.

But it’s a big change. Video games have consumed me for a long long time and the idea of living my life without them seems alien and bizarre, no matter how beneficial it might be or how much it might lead to further personal growth and expansion.

Often it is our sense of identity that is the biggest barrier to change, and I am not immune to that. One of the hardest things to do is go from your known identity to a new and unknown realm, even if it’s just something as simple and stupid as not playing video games any more.

It’s not like being a person who plays a lot of games is a vitally important part of my identity. But it is still change, and change is never easy.

The hardest part for the likes of me is letting go. I don’t let go of anything easily, not if it truly means anything to me. I instinctively cling to things, no matter what, and it doesn’t matter if those are things I would be a lot better off without.

It’s not like playing video games is going to improve my life. I am way better off playing around with music like I have been doing. It’s fun and it actually leads to a finished product.

Like today’s little musical interlude.

I am pretty happy with it. It is not at all what I set out to make, and yet it’s very cool in its own way. I enjoy that kind of serendipity.

What I sent out to do was fulfill my lifelong dream of making my own classical music. Ever since I was a wee tot marching around the living room to Colonel Bogey’s March or thrilling and chilling to Night On Bald Mountain, I want to be able to make that kind of music.

In fact, in all my dabbling with sample based music, my one overwhelming desire has been to make music that sounds “real”, like real musicians with real instruments were playing it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the electronic sound and synths are fine by me. It’s this ineffable, undefinable quality of “realness” that I seek. Music that sounds totally professional and that, in effect, conceals the fact that it was made by some fat dude on a computer.

And I know that it will be a long time before I get there, especially because a lot of what I need to know is the more technical aspects of music production, the sort of stuff a studio engineer knows.

But I am patient. Making music is fun, and I will take whatever I happen to learn along the way as a bonus to the fun of just playing around.

That’s how I feel art should work in general. It should be play and fun before it is ever harnesses to the yoke of making a living or making a name for yourself.

That way, the intrinsic reward of playing around will keep you doing it, and doing it a lot will make you better at it, and all without the need for a deadline or a paycheck.

After all, nobody has to pay you to have fun, right? Nobody has to pay you to eat a chocolate bar.

So anyhow, the idea was to try to do a piece of classical music but I just don’t have the instruments I need in order to do it properly. I have lots of loops that might apply, but I am bored with loops now and I honestly do not want to be working with something premade and hence unwieldy any more.

My innate bias towards creative control has kicked in and I just don’t want to play with other people’s toys any more. I want it all to come right from my own creativity and talent.

And collage just will not cut it any more. I need to paint!

And perhaps when music isn’t enough to fill my time, I will start spending more and more time on my writing or my video productions, instead of segmenting my time into short bursts of productivity followed by long periods of just fucking around distracting myself.

But that’s for the future. Maybe it will happen, maybe not.

Right now, I just want to have fun.