I'm sorry

This isn't going to be angry at all. I needed to vent at myself but it isn't working so I will share. I have just finished doing a show with some really good friends and some lovely people. Last night was the cast party. I went with the expectation of having a good time. By the end i was uncomfortable angry and full of hatred.

In my past I have had issues with tolerance. their is a certain way of living that is foreign to me. I don't know how to let go. Suffice to say that I didn't start drinking until I was 23. not because I was a good boy who never did wrong...but because i had spent a few years previously watching my friends in high school get fucked up every night. They weren't doing it to piss me off. Nor had they waited to keep me around so I could watch over them. They just wanted to have a good time. Yet I couldn't. It made me uncomfortable and I was angry because I felt that they had no regard for my feelings. And whether they did or not that was the crux of my problem.

I am afraid of not being accepted. So afraid that I will preemptively separate myself  and hurt myself so that you can't do it. My whole life I have felt like I never really belonged anywhere. I feel like my thoughts and feelings are invalid and don't mesh well with common society. I did theatre to try and fit in but the show ends and I am left with a feeling that I will never find that space again. And those friends will never show again without the common goal.

It happens still today. I have a friend who puts on concerts for bands in the local area and they really need support but I don't go. Because as I stand there I feel like a fraud. these aren't people who like me. and the ones who do are busy working and playing the show. And talking to them would be absolute death for fear that i open my mouth and make them not care about me for a reason.

So I become more self centered because I feel like I need to insert myself even where it doesn't belong and I internalize everything. For instance this show had three reviews and despite the fact that i feel I put out a solid performance not one of them mentioned me and I was palpably hurt by that. The reviewers have no cause to write about me. I am a bit character who could have been written out. but I was still hurt.

I have felt this way since childhood. I would spend time looking in a mirror at the age of 8 wondering why I had to be me.

So a few years ago I did something about it. After feeling pushed around near the end of my marriage I decided that Gabriel wasn't gonna take any more shit. I was gonna give it. And since then I have become this character that will say exactly what he is feeling and not give a damn about what you say. He comes out in this blog and in uncomfortable situations and at parties and he says acerbic funny shit and everyone really likes him because he is alive and brilliant and fantastic.

But he isn't me.

I'm scared and alone in crowds and unsure of how to make it through this world and often just feel numb inside.

I need help.

even now as I type this I am holding back tears to be able to see the keys.

so I am at a party for the cast of this latest show and people are drinking and nude hot tubbing and letting go of all the shit that bothers them and there I stand alone drinking and hating myself. When a lovely friend of mine whom I care for dearly stands at the top of two steps drunk off her ass begging me to help her down so she doesn't fall. Behind her are people running around naked showing how little they care about what people think and there in that moment I went back to watching my friends get high and drunk and they are throwing up and laughing and crying and hoping that sober Gabe will keep them from harm. And I looked at this dear friend of mine and felt nothing but disdain.

I love her...but I hated her so purely in that moment.

And I actually had the audacity to think that these people didn't care about me. so I got out of there. And I went home and promptly got into a fight with my girlfriend. All she wanted to do was help but I wouldn't let her. I couldn't. I was being selfish and self hating and anyone who showed compassion for me was lying. And rather than having a good time and getting to spend quality time with the woman I love. I fell asleep bitter and full of apathy.

I awoke this morning crying. Feeling like I owed an explanation to people who knew nothing about what i had gone through. I know I am putting a lot out here and I am not sure why I even need to explain. There is nothing anyone can do for me. You can't make someone feel accepted. All you can do is create the environment and hope people get there on their own.

I guess I just needed to admit to someone that I had a problem before I intentionally destroy every relationship I have as proof that I don't belong.

I need help and I don't know what to do.

With deep and abiding affection
Gabriel

another interruption.

So now food has an opinion on current events. This blog should be so simple...but it isn't. You see I want things to be simple I wanna feel like there is a right and a wrong and that I tend to fall to what's right more than what is wrong. You know what makes it difficult? You people. The idea that a chicken restaurant hates gays makes you fucking salivate doesn't it. That a coffee company may not pay enough for coffee makes your eyes wider. That cookies show pride wakes an animal in you that you can't shake.

Let me dumb this down so you apes can get a clear picture. It's all marketing. It is all bullshit designed to make you buy shit or talk about shit. It is a distraction.

Let me spell it out another way. Companies are not people. they don't have opinions or political stances. they have business models and bottom lines. When you hear someone bad mouth starbucks it isn't because they care about farmers or people. It's usually from a person who works at an independent coffee retailer who has a superiority complex and would rather you walk through their doors than their competitors. When people yell about chick-fil-a  hating gays it sends masses of gay hating fuckwits into stores to buy cheap ass chicken. When oreos print a picture of rainbow colored cream do you think its because they really like gays or is it because they want the publicity of conservatives yelling and homos in droves buying doublestuffs to take home before they doublestuff.

Really which is more likely?

That a company of several thousand workers all feel the exact same way about an issue, or that they wanna sell to a demographic?

The whole issue is designed to distract you. Not from some vast conspiracy, but from the fact that you could probably think more clearly without so much information. Without considering political factions I just might be able to get a goddamned convenient cup of coffee.

The reason it works is because everything in this fucked world is designed to cause a reaction. everything we say and every action we take is designed at some level to spark a reaction from everyone who hears it. People get shot and the first thing people wanna talk about is gun control for or against? Elections are disgusting and more and more we hear about the discourse in Washington and the breakdown of our political system. I don't know where to turn. Corporations have opinions and are people. politics is a cesspool and people are killing each other and its all shoved down your throats on the news and we wonder why it has to be this way. Then I saw it.

One man on CNN had the balls to look at his audience and say it was our fault.

Our fault.

YES! Yes it is our fault.

Because we love it so damn much. We love the conflict and the hatred an the intolerance so much that it just oozes out of us. we may clarify it with reason and with cause but it's still hatred. You all feel it. every day. This whole demented nation was founded on a bunch of white guys who said fuck you to their mother country and then pulled out guns in support of it.

I spew out bullshit because I am full of hate and anger about shit that doesn't even concern me half the time. It's truly pathetic on a level that I really am unable to deal with.We are obsessed with the distraction that we ourselves created.

And yet most of us still go to work still love our families and the system doesn't collapse. Because deep down we know it is all an illusion. The control the hate the anger...it doesn't really exist. We create it to distract us from the real questions in life because at heart we are afraid we are to dumb to answer them.

I hope one day I can go back to the person I was before the world and certain people in it filled me full of fear. I wasn't a crusader for anything I didn't care about much. I simply existed. Some might say my ignorance fed the ongoing machine to bring some down while lifting others up but really, name a society that doesn't do that. Even dogs have alphas and betas. Its the fear that kills us.

It's fear that is killing me.

Slowly, more and more every day. And the fact that you want to throw your "cause" in my face to distract me from dismantling the very thing that is killing me is so goddamned unfair it's indescribable. You want me to not eat tuna or release monkeys from labs or not buy chicken sandwiches and cookies and coffee and hate politician A as opposed to B. You want me to save the whales the rain forest the homeless the endangered and the deprived. You want me to stop forest fires littering and the destruction of the environment. you want me to cure and be aware of cancer and aids and ms and cerebral palsy. You want all of this and more and not once are we ever told to stop and take a look at our fears.

I don't care anymore.

I can't.

Go be heroes on your own. Strive to be batman or al gore without me.

I will be over here getting what little I can of my life back together and hoping that my wisdom and my work and my observances can help me and maybe a few others learn to make it in this world with a little more understanding. A little less fear.

It's what we need. and we may never get there. But no one can ever say that your life was lived in vain if you spent it trying to be a better person.

With deep and abiding affection,
Gabriel