06 March 2006
Doug:
The billiard table metaphor feels worth pursuing. It's complex enough to represent something like the multifaceted nature of what was happening with us at TCU. So the table was solid, but the game was rigged - that's about right. God lets the rain fall on the rich and poor alike, I forget who said that, but it's truth.
Part of what I do, have been doing for a long time, is a sort of obsessive reassessment of the past, woulda-coulda-shoulda, as a half-assed defense against the depression that started to intrude quite a few years ago. I'd start to despair, feeling like a loser, flailing about looking for positives to hang onto: yeah, their game was fucked so I walked away, fuck them, but at the same time I'm telling myself, No, they're correct, They saw the real me and decided they didn't want me there, I wasn't good enough for them, I failed again. That's how it felt, and gradually that feeling, plus time, pushed completely out of my mind a lot of the detail of that year, details of the way that I, we, acted and reacted in response to the environment and its various stimuli.
(Same thing happened in the wake of the magazine company blow-up, even knowing how much of that was completely out of my hands and truly the responsibility of other people, the worst consequences were the direct result of actions and decisions over which I had little influence and no control - and what a fucked-up helpless feeling that is - blaming myself and beating myself up for getting myself, my family, into that situation, and the very sick feeling that, there I was, rubbing shoulders with heavy-hitters in the computer software and hardware, and magazine industries -- I was doing business with United Features Syndicate, Ally Oop, Ann Landers, Dear Abby, that's the kind of scale we're talking, they were going to pick up and syndicate the comic strips I had developed for Morph's Outpost and Blaster magazines, we were discussing having me write a weekly (to start out, then increase frequency in steps to daily) column about this exciting new world of interactive multimedia computing for newspapers in the US and around the world, the Interactive Superhighway, Cyberspace, I was interviewed on the radio, the big time was just around the corner, I was already developing a line of books to publish, a TV channel, in fact I did design an online version of the magazine for Apple's ill-fated eWorld, the first really cool online environment, in my humble opinion, which crashed and burned far too soon...in other words, major mass media exposure was within my grasp for the last half of 1993 and 1994 until just before Christmas when it all came crashing down, and I watched that big media career evaporate, smoke on the water, to coin a phrase -- a, and they saw me for what I really was, a loser, and as quickly as they had showered my partner and I with millions of dollars because they thought my ideas were smart, they just as quickly pulled the rug out from underneath us.
If I could hold more of that in my mind - more of the evidence that I wasn't completely out of control and fucked up, more evidence that I was, to some degree at least, following a conscious program, maybe not hitting my intended objectives, but at least somewhat proactive, not a completely passive puppet of fate - maybe I could feel better about myself. Or something like that. Twisted thinking, I know, but that's where I've been for a long time.
The good news is that I've managed to emerge from the worst of that morass and have been feeling increasingly energetic, positive, able to do things. As a result, I've been doing more things, keeping busier, less time to mope and second-guess myself. Steadily, since the beginning of the year, the depression that has been kicking my ass for too long, has been lifting, and I'm feeling pretty human again. A welcome development.
