Spread too thin?

I always had high hopes for myself. I bought into the lie they tell you at school that “you can do anything if you set your mind to it”, and then sat around waiting for my mind to get set on something. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

For a while I thought it was music that would make me “special”, or at the very least, give me an excuse to slack off at university:

“Why bother getting a good night’s sleep before tomorrow’s 9am economic anthropology class, when instead I could stay up and help write a song that defines our generation? Now pass the red wine and the reefer and play me that second verse again...”

As attractive as that lifestyle was, when I turned from my late-teens to early-twenties, doubts set in. Despite talks with promoters and producers who’d say all the right things about how “relevant” they thought our sound was, the Dakar Rally fan-base never extended much beyond friends of friends with nothing better to do. There came a point when persuading people to come to the next gig was my main reason for wanting to go out and meet people, and I found myself keeping in contact with those I otherwise found uninspired and uninteresting just to chase an elusive half-promise they once made to “come see you guys play sometime”. I had, in the words of Vincent Vincent & the Villains, “turned into someone that I didn’t like- and that’s no fun”.

So it’s against this back-drop of having tried and failed at a grand plan for the future (and allowing myself to become a self-serving, sycophant-seeker in the process) that I’m left wondering: what next? What can I do to escape the quagmire of life as a bored paper-pushing public servant, who relieves his creative frustrations by sporadically updating a seldom-read blog?

Q. Is a bland picture better than no picture at all?

These seem like the options:

a) Accept life as a fed-up, paper-pushing public servant. Keep drinking too much, never get laid, and occasionally go to karaoke bars with other grumpy paper-pushing public servants to sing Hard-Fi’s “Living for the Weekend” or ”Working for a Cash Machine” or any other song that’s horrible but helps you to connect with everyone around you who’s also boring, bored and miserable.

b) Stop writing self-indulgent rubbish like this, and write something people might actually want to read. Start a new blog with a narrower focus, which is easy to update regularly. Take up those offers to write for the Worship Street Irregulars and Savy Gamer, and build up a decent portfolio of varied writing. Learn more about proper journalism.

c) Have a go at music again. Get back into the habit of playing the guitar for at least an hour a day. Learn the interesting scales, rhythms and licks you never got around to last time, and get better at improvising. Persuade the talented but nervous musicians around you to get involved, and do something genuinely interesting with it. Maybe start a band called “the Sycophant Seekers”.

d) Work to develop a popular application for the iPhone. Use that app as a springboard for establishing a profitable business, working alongside your friends on something you’re in control of and truly believe in. Get bought out by Google for $100,000,000,000 before the age of 30 and retire into the sunset, using the money to live a life of sophisticated but modest pleasures, while anonymously but informedly donating to worthy charities.

My instinct is to answer “e) all of the above”, but is that in any way realistic? How will I be able to keep scheduling four hours a day for playing videogames and watching tv while juggling those kind of ambitions?

Oh. Is that the answer?