Rewritten

This is exhausting. First of all, I’ve got my whole career to think about. I write the music and record some of it, then get together with sound engineers and producers to bring it all together into albums. I go on tour. The sort of nice thing is, they don’t expect a whole lot of responsibility out of me on that front. Rock stars do get loads of leeway on a lot of questionable behavior. Plus, I’m not that badly behaved.

People who can’t handle their reality need to turn to drugs. Me? I tried something someone handed me at a party one time. Spent the whole rest of the night hiding under a bed upstairs on the phone with my older brother. Ike was supposed to talk me down. He’s crazy smart, like four PhDs before he was thirty smart, and they’re all in truly science-y kinds of stuff. I know he knows enough chemistry to at least talk to me about the chemical reactions causing the huge purple rhinoceros to come snuffling after me while I held onto the carpet for dear life. I don’t understand a word he’s saying when he does it. But, more importantly, it’s boring to me. Stone cold dull. That carries me to the point of drowsiness, which beats chemically altered to the point I feel a need to test gravity to make sure I’m really on the floor.

Now, I will admit, I’m not good about keeping sleep schedules or meal schedules. That’s what I have people for, which is honestly the real advantage of having money. I can pay folks to do stuff. Like the adult, responsible bits and bobs I really don’t think about or consider. Turns out, I can actually sleep pretty well in a bunk in a tour bus. Not only that, if you hand me the right food, then I will pretty much eat whatever is handed to me.

I have a decent grasp of the PR games I’m supposed to play. It tends to boil down to being a decent sort of person. They ask you questions. You answer them with a smile and pretend you haven’t heard them loads of times prior. The answers get revised into whatever format the place publishing wants them in, and, if you’ve been a reasonable bloke, they’ll do right by you. If not, prepare to explain yourself to every media person for the next decade and a half.

So, this whole thing sounds as if it’s all roses and chocolate and little fluffy bunnies. I will tell you immediately, no, because I have the great misfortune of knowing my maker. I have a personal god, and let me tell you, that woman is a sadistic witch. I show up to be sort of happy and provide a bit of good comic relief, because Ike is so deadly serious about everything. What do I get for making the appearance? Hell. Utter hell. Supposedly, she likes me, and if this is the sort of thing she does to the ones she likes, I’ve nothing but complete sympathy for any of the ones she doesn’t.

The first thing she decides to do is completely destroy my brother. She didn’t kill him, and I feel I should state at this moment I am grateful she didn’t. As stodgy as he is, he is still my brother and I love him. No one had better see this, I won’t have my reputation cocked up because I’ve admitted that I care for my family, or at least the one member of it I still speak to because he’s not an utter knob. All the same, though, the things she put him through were wholly unreasonable. I need him to be the rational sort of chap I can call in any given emergency to sort everything. Look, if one has a very science inclined person beholden to them through shared genetics, one should be able to rely on them to explain how the pool filter comes apart so one can fish out the four bags of Doritos that somehow ended up in there last night.

Here I am, trying to go on about my business, and she first of all takes away my brother for a full five months and then, when she decides perhaps it might be time to give him back, well, she’s practically ruined him. He hardly knows which end is topside. To make matters worse, while he was never really social, he’d become jittery and nervous. He got jumpy and wanted to hide even more from the world than he already did. There weren’t enough books, much less any large or thick enough to conceal him.

We end up trapped in a confined space together driving because, of course, reasons. And she’s going to sit there and claim over and over again how it was all necessary for pacing and characterization and making the whole mess believable. She’s just mean. That’s all. She’s in control of us and making us all move around on her warped little board of twisted chess. She could choose to do anything. Anything at all. I could be in some delightful romp of a slice-of-life comedy, but no. No. I am stuck with her and she sends me on the godforsaken road trip from hell.

Did I mention the fact that I don’t particularly enjoy responsibility? It bears repeating. I. Don’t. Like. Responsibility. It is why I have people to manage things for me. And I am at least self-aware enough to recognize if I’m going to expend the resources to put such people on the payroll, I really ought to listen to them. But in her fantastic little book I’m forced to co-star in, I don’t get to avail myself of any of those wonderful resources typically at my disposal. Once again, she reasons them away so I have to deal with all of her consequences. It’s infuriating.

As if subjecting me to the breakdown of my brother, who is one of the most important figures in my life, wasn’t enough, she decides things need to get even worse. So then what happens? A monster. A whole, entire, actual, real, life monster. And it wants my brother. But then it also realizes I exist, so, yes, of course, it would like me too. So, I have to drive across an enormous country in a rental car with my deeply psychologically wounded brother who is also not in any kind of physical shape to handle the trip, as fast as we can manage because we don’t want the monster to get us both.

Finally, though, finally, this story reaches a conclusion. Not a particularly happy one, I might add. And in between all of these years of putting this story together, she tortures both me and my brother with glimpses from other times. There are to be later tales, I’ve discovered. These stories contain moments of immense joy. There’s humor. I get to eat things besides gas station food. I resume my career. A giraffe even shows up in my timeline.

But first, because this horrible woman, of course, has conditions upon my happiness and Ike’s, the awful story must be edited. After years of enduring her brutality, I’m to be subjected to this whole mess all over again, for the sake of polish. She wants to improve it and I already know her improvements will have nothing to do with adding more happy things to the story. Oh no, I will be made to relive the worst week and a half of my life while she makes it more horrific. I will not. I’ve been through more than enough. Ike has been through more than enough. The two of us deserve peace.

So, as soon as she announced those editing plans, I took action. I am currently on strike, where I will remain until that woman learns to be nicer. I never did anything to her, and I know Ike certainly didn’t do anything to her. We are being treated unfairly and I will not stand for it. From now until she decides to behave, I shall be in my practice room with my guitar and amp playing every song I know as loudly as I possibly can, drowning out all the evil thoughts she has towards me and Ike. Let’s see what she does about that.