So you remember in the original TRON when the Master Control Program threatens his lackey Sark by “slowing down his power cycles?” Yeah, I don’t really know exactly what that means either… but I think it just might be a pretty good description of what’s going on with my brain this afternoon. Like all my mental gears are… getting… gummy…

Man, I hate these days when the workflow is unrelenting, and everything is urgent… and then you have several of those in a row, and a long-range forecast of many more to come, and it all has a cumulative effect… somebody just de-rez me now, won’t you?

If you’ve been a fan of any of the sitcoms produced by Chuck Lorre over the past 15 years — Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, or Mike & Molly — you probably know about Lorre’s “vanity card,” i.e., the screen that comes up at the very end of the show’s closing credits. Most vanity cards are just a logo of some kind for the show’s production company, sometimes involving a little animation or brief film clip; think of MTM’s cute little kitty, or JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot, or “Sit, Ubu, Sit,” that sort of thing. But at some point, Lorre started doing something different, using his card almost as a sort of blog on which he posts little essays, makes observations on life, cracks jokes, or, most famously (and stupidly, from a legal standpoint), shot off his mouth about the troubles Charlie Sheen was giving him during Sheen’s infamous psychological disintegration. The cards aren’t on-screen long enough to actually read them, but that’s part of the fun. You have to record them (or watch the DVD) and freeze-frame them in order to catch the complete content. Back when Lorre first started doing this on Dharma & Greg in the late ’90s, it felt like an almost-underground “cool kids only” kind of thing that not many people even knew about; nowadays, of course, it’s a built-in part of Lorre’s brand, an expected schtick, and all his “postings” are easily available online. The cards have gone mainstream, man, so of course they’re not as cool anymore…

Anyhow, the Girlfriend and I have recently gotten hooked on The Big Bang Theory — that’s a development I probably ought to discuss in its own entry — and we’ve been binging the last few weeks on the DVD sets for the first four seasons. And after each and every episode, we pause the playback and read the vanity card. Most of them are ephemeral, a momentary amusement that’s forgotten within seconds as we forge ahead into the next episode. But there was one I spotted over the weekend that perfectly suited the mood I’ve been in lately, and some of the things I was getting in my previous entry on my semi-annual frustration. I thought I’d share it here, faithfully copied from Lorre’s own archive so I get it right:

Mornings are the worst. The mind seems undefended, easy prey for both memories and imagination. What happened. What should’ve happened. What might happen someday. Your fault, my fault, no one’s fault. The only way to relieve the torment is to get up, empty the bladder, drink the coffee, read the paper, run the treadmill, perform the animal sacrifice, paint the chicken blood on the groin and call upon the demonic spirits to bring you back.

 

Nights are bad too. Once again, exhaustion makes the mind vulnerable to obsessing over woulda, shoulda, coulda. The only thing to do is sit alone and eat the chicken which was senselessly murdered in the morning.

Mmm, murdered chicken. Pass the barbecue sauce, please…

Not that I’d blame you for assuming so, given the utter paucity of activity around here lately. Remember when this blog was a happening place and jasonbennion.com was on the verge of exploding into a world-dominating brand that would be spoken of in the farthest corners of the InterWebs for years to come? No? Me neither. Even so, I deeply regret that I’m no longer able to find the time or energy to blog regularly. It’s been long enough since my last entry, for example, that there are probably virtual tumbleweeds blowing down the main street of downtown Simple Tricks, or at least there would be if we experienced cyberspace as an actual environment with “buildings” and such, the way William Gibson first imagined it way back in the ’80s. Not to put too melodramatic a spin on the situation, but with the slow diminishing of my output here, I honestly feel like the last vestige of my self-identity as a writer — a notion I’ve carried around since the eighth grade, more or less — is finally slipping through my fingers. But then I’ve been thinking lately that a lot of things I used to take for granted are slipping away…

Eh, don’t mind me. I’ve just entered another one of those periodic phases when it feels like somebody’s cranked the treadmill up to 11 and my limbs are flopping around like the Wizard of Oz‘s Scarecrow doing a jig, and I’m about three steps away from losing my footing and going flat on my face. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed this happens every year around this time. The production cycle at my dayjob always picks up toward the end of summer, leading to days (and occasional late nights) of constant, urgent activity that leave me utterly drained. It’s just dumb, bad luck that this uptick coincides with my annual melancholy over my birthday and the changing of the season; the slightly frantic feeling I get as I try to cram in a last few summertime activities while the weather holds; the nagging disappointment in myself for things I should’ve done when I was young and now fear I never will; and of course that weird, rootless sensation I still experience, even after all two and a half decades away from it, because it’s time to be heading back to school and I’m not going. You stir all this together and you end up with a big old bowl of frustration and sadness.

Maybe I wouldn’t have such a hard time with all this stuff if it didn’t seem like so many of my friends and coworkers are privy to some secret that’s apparently been denied me. They all have jobs and commutes and obligations, too, and yet somehow they also manage to keep their houses clean and cook fabulous meals and host parties and exercise and enjoy hobbies and participate in causes. They find the time to go back to school and garden and make things, and some of them — many of them — create art or play a musical instrument or become highly skilled in some craft. Sometimes all of the above. They’re interesting people who appear to be living good lives. Oh, and some of them are even raising kids. And still they manage to pull it all together. Compared to them, I’m a tremendous failure at this life thing.

Hell, I can’t even keep the kitchen sink free of dirty dishes, let alone accomplish anything really worthwhile. I haven’t written fiction in longer than I care to admit. I haven’t yet sorted or posted the photographs from my Hawaiian cruise clear back in February… or any of my other trips for the last several years. The Girlfriend has been living with me for eight months and we still haven’t gotten all of her stuff out of the storage unit we rented in January. I have a list of half-finished projects as long as my forearm, some of them dating back to the mid-90s. Oh, and that movie I mentioned in the last entry, Son of Kong? That was the first feature-length DVD I’ve managed to get through in a single sitting in months. And it’s only 70 minutes long! So much for my hobby as the great film buff.

When I think about all these things, then consider how many of my days consist only of commuting to my dayjob, working my dayjob, traveling home from my dayjob, eating dinner, and collapsing for the night without managing to get a damn thing done for myself… well, I just can’t believe it’s like this for everyone. I’m doing something wrong, but I’m damned if I can figure out what it is. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not just plain damned.

So, yeah, not dead yet… but I’m not sure you can really call this living, either…