Don Mann: Focusing on my Craft

Sunday, October 29, 2006 - 4:10 p.m.

Who is Don Mann really?

This is the longest night of the year. I can think of no better occasion to lay it all on the table, to spill everything out and see who soaks it up. There are no lies between the keyboard and I, never have been, though there's been plenty of fiction.

This is the first Halloween I've spent alone in many years, and I can't help but think it's an indicator of what I am now, what I was always sure I'd never be. Somewhere between halcyon youth and biting cold loneliness I lost sight of that golden world I thought I'd have created for myself. I used to tell myself that I was born a few centuries too late, that the whole world moved at an entirely different pace and that I'd never catch up. Somehow, while I sprinted desperately forward to become a part of the race, something took my legs from beneath me, something broke my stride and I realized that I'd stopped entirely.

What a strange sight I must be, this creature frozen perpetually in time, this 'would-be' turned into little more than a 'wasn't.' I stumble from day to day appraising each for some kind of abstract value until I fall asleep, exasperated and emptier than when I awoke. My mind feels heavier, full of useless odds and ends that fit no where, laughable trivia that serves only to confound me, distress me, sidetrack me, and yet I can't stop learning more.

To this world I am useless. No real job, no money, no friends, no aspiration, no love, no "life" despite my vitality. I play my guitar in my cluttered, dank basement imagining all the people who I wish could hear me, imagining a world where this was an acceptable way to live. I sink away into my own reality, where my face is not my own, where my responsibility is to my own integrity and no one else's.

How can I get away with this? Why haven't any of those 'normal people' problems caught up to me? Why don't I struggle to pay bills, to make a woman happy, to 'succeed'? The answer is simple; I am little more than a parasite. I leech my lifestyle of about fifty dollars a week from tax-free income, I survive on free meals and free housing from my widowed mother and her boyfriend. I drink a gallon of tap water a day, I spend half my week's money on cigarettes, anything extra I spend on drugs. I never go anywhere, since I can't afford to pay for my own gas more than once every three weeks. The most important part of this lifestyle, however, is to make sure no one ever knows how deep in the hole I am, how hard I worked for the twenty bucks you needed for that extra 16th of grass, how I won't drive for the rest of my week because you needed a ride to your friend's house someplace, how every deal I cut here and there comes directly out of my empty pockets. If I were like any other person, none of it would even be a mentionable matter, and if I could be any other person for you I would.

I can't come home from work after a long day of shilling someone else's products to people who don't even appreciate it and smile at myself in the mirror. I can't sign over 40 hours of my life a week to help someone in a CEO's office grind extra money out of the pockets of my peers. The money is just that...it's money. It's fucking paper and I know it everytime I see it handled with care, doled out to strangers and tucked away cautiously into reinforced cash registers. I just can't see how handling more paper than someone else can make me a better person. I just can't understand the phrase "productive member of society." I must be a fool...but this fool believes there are enough geniuses in the world to ever need to become one.

I used to have steady income. I used to have a real job, a few in fact. I didn't save my money, I spent it on meaningless trifles and senseless parties that I thought would bring me closer to the people I cared about. All my kindness and my giving drew them close; and exactly as I'd feared when it was gone, they were too. I lived for two months in an apartment without electricity or running water wondering when someone would give a shit. No one ever did, and I think that was one of the key events that tipped me off to who I'd be today. It was around that time that I forgot about suicide. I knew no one would learn a goddamn thing from my being dead, that if I died the most it would do is give everyone another excuse to drink and be morons in my honor. It was then that I knew that if I were to be dead, it'd be for my own exploration of what lay beyond this world, not for someone else, and definitely not because I needed someone to understand me. You see, I can already be treated as dead, I committed suicide a long time ago when I sacrificed who I was to my friends for my own world, the world I live in now. Feel free to consider me as such.

The dead take no lovers. If you can judge a man by the loves he's had, the love he carries, and the love he can give, then I remain a dead man. All the memories I've shared were all a lie, my mind bloating them out of proportion to what they really meant; nothing. Everyone I've ever held on to has slipped away, and it was always because of me. I hold no grudges anymore, if I've ever loved you, you can rest assured you probably never noticed me. If you've ever loved me, then you never really knew me. Kiss kiss, my darling, if we were really in love, we'd still be now.

I'm weak. I know all the answers without any of the guts to tell anyone who could make a difference. I can take any problem you've got and apply it directly into my own world; there are no problems here. That's why it's always been so easy for me to figure other people's bullshit out for them; because deep down I knew I'd never have to deal with it the way that I live. I'm done with blowing things out of proportion, I'm done with exaggerations and sensationalism. From now on, if it doesn't have strings on it, I just don't fucking know. I'd like to believe for just a second that a piece of advice I've ever given actually helped anyone...but I know that everything I touch outside of my world doesn't survive the trip back home. Having no friends protects me from the greatest pain of all; not being who they want me to be.

It's all make-believe. Even now I'm pretending this record will serve someone other than myself, that someone could enjoy knowing this about me. Truth is, I just wrote it so that people would know Dean was right about me in all his comment-mockery. He's right, I don't have a life. I haven't grown up into the world of profit and emotionless materialism. I've leeched everything I've got. I don't have a woman to tally onto my self-worth calculator. I don't have anyone who'd take a blank for me, let alone a bullet. I don't know my mother's favorite color, I learned more about my father after his death than in the time he spent raising me. I don't have anyone to appreciate anything I do. I give my confidence to no one. It doesn't change the things I've done or said, no matter how people try to pretend it does. Don't try and punish me for telling you how I really felt, Dean. Don't try and embarass me in front of this crowd of strangers that call me a friend. That's a battle that no one will ever win, and I'm loser enough for both of us. Somewhere in my world, though, this is everything, this has meaning. That's all I need, and if acting in my own interests like this is so evil, then I'm in Hell as well as dead.

Feel free to tear me apart, I'll consider it an autopsy.

-Don

Delve Into The Past - Onward Into The Future