It's been a bad week. Things have begun piling on top of things, and thoughts on top of thoughts, until whole stretches of time seem to fold in on themselves like layer cake. Moist. Writing is a way of linearising, like extruding play-doh through a pipe. It lets things happen one after the other, which helps me think. Otherwise the parallel processing that makes me so good at almost everything I do starts to turn into voices.

I AM good at everything I do. I am a guitarist and improviser of uncommon clarity and brilliance. I have cultivated a stillness which I consider a healing presence in my music. I hope that it will someday be a healing presence for other people. The problem I have now is things that I cannot begin to do. I cannot convince people to help me. I cannot ask them for help. I cannot "hang out". I cannot become part of a social world. I'm not sure why this is, but believe me when I say I am not one of those people who thinks these skills are somehow uncool. I hope I am never that hip. If I could I would throw every ounce of effort I could muster at fitting in, being in a scene, hanging out, networking, making connections, friends and business associates, marketing, branding, advertising. I have in fact done that, and the only reason my complete and abject failure to achieve anything in this quadrant is surprising is because it stands in such stark contrast to my usual success rate. It irks me because I don't think it should be this difficult.

I usually ignore these problems with some success. Moving to Queens has helped. Grace and I have put up some walls. We make bread. But now that graduate school applications are bearing down on me I am daily face to face with the fact that someone is going to have to evaluate my work who isn't me. I am going to have to convince them that I am worth time and money. I have no idea how to do this.

So it's been a bad week, and my self-confidence is flagging not because I have begun to suspect that I'm not brilliant, which I certainly haven't, but because I'm staring failure of a different sort in the face every day. This constant inability to get with the program isn't just a professional impediment. It is a cause for serious loneliness, even though I have plenty of cause to be otherwise happy. I can't fix it the way I fix everything else.