November 23, 2003

I played my first gig with stomach flu last night. Fortunately it wasn't a pukey sort of virus, just the painful cramping type. I couldn't eat all day until a few bites just before we started, so I felt a little floaty and slow. Hard season for viruses, this. I just got over laryngitis. All the while I was trying not to wince or pass out, singing away on my mic, I was thinking, "Boy, I'm really in good voice tonight, listen to that note." Funny how we appreciate things more when other things are falling apart, eh?

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I glanced briefly at a few other diaries on this site and was alarmed. Seems some people come here to vent because they're depressed and suicidal. Well, lemme tellya, I think keeping a diary is a good thing. Hope it helps them. I thought a fair amount about death in my 20s. Also have dealt with some nasty depression. But I think if you let yourself live long enough, you come up with ways of turning it around. But writing about your dark side can either keep you mired in its depths or help lift you out -- and that's a choice you make, conciously or un.

I'm rereading my favorite book right now, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, and aside from being very funny and rather bawdy, it's the story of a couple out of prehistory who figure out the secret to perpetual youth and longevity. After several hundred years of travelling the world together, Kudra, the woman, crosses over to the "other side" where people who have died are processed in a warehouse where it's decided which ship they'll go out on. Robbins always does his research, and here he borrows an Egyptian myth wherein a person's heart is placed on a scale, and on the other side is placed a feather. If the heart is light as the feather, the person gets to go on the ship to heaven. It makes me think about all the buddhist monks I've ever seen pictures of. They look happy and kind of giggly, like there's a feather beating in their breasts. Something to be said, I think, for lightening up.