sigh.

[mountain_laurel]

just got a call from my friend Ron. he and the rest of the Boddingtons have had to boot Jeff (of whom some of you have heard me speak before) out of the band because his drinking is so totally out of hand. i used to have such a crush on Jeff, back in the day.

on the up side, Ron reports they're getting at least one gig a week now that they're not depending on Jeff to get stuff for them anymore.

it makes me so goddamn sad to see talented musicians falling by the wayside because of alcohol. it's hard to avoid when you're gigging regularly -- you work in bars, people are always buying you drinks, and you get into the habit of having a few with the guys after the show. i've seen it happen to a lot of people. i'm not surprised it's happening to Jeff, since he's had a problem for a long time.

but it still sucks. GRRRRR.

Comments

...a tale of two long-haired hippie freaks...

[shadowcaptain.livejournal.com]

back in the day, i went to college in southern maryland.

there was a guy who lived in my building. we were both five-year theatre majors, both came from the armpit of education that is catholic school in baltimore, both were long-haired hippie freaks, and both were really into the idea of writing and directing our own plays.

there was a not-quite-healthy bit of competition between us, since there was only a single student performance space and a finite amount of majors to draw from during auditions. and the thing was, he was a hell of a lot better than i was. i could never have admitted that at the time, but it's the simple truth. he was both more laid-back as a director and much, much more creative than i was as a playwright. his scripts were electrifying; mine were at best moderately unboring.

and i honestly couldn't say for sure whether or not i'd even have cared very much about being a director/playwright at all if we weren't in the same vicinity as one another.

but anyway, the thing about this guy was, he smoked a lot of pot. a LOT. it was the first thing he did when he woke up and the last thing he did before going to sleep, and there were any number of sessions in between. he was pretty much who you went to on campus if you wanted to burn, and a lot of people around me did. when i became an r.a., that was pretty much the end of our friendship, because being around each other was too much of a liability to our respective lifestyles.

and the thing was, after knowing this guy for five years, i was able to see the difference between how he was when he arrived and how he was when he left. and his tragedy was that he was at the very top of his game at the end of his reign at college. he'd lost a not inconsiderable amount of weight. he was one of the true forces of nature on campus, personality-wise. and after five years of genuine craftsmanship, he was an amazing writer.

of course, after five years of a steadily increasing marijuana habit, he had also quite literally forgotten more about theatre, by then, than i ever got around to learning. i got to watch the beginnings of a spiral which i knew was going to completely absorb the man i'd grown to both tremendously envy and tremendously respect, someone who could so out-do me on the stage it was to weep. the fact that it was a spiral i'd not get to see the end of, since we were sure to part ways after graduation, didn't make it better. it made it worse.

i hadn't heard from him in nearly ten years, until we found each other online and started e-mailing each other a while back. in the time between, i've only dabbled in creative writing. a sonnet here, a screenplay there. i directed shakespeare, once, and it nearly destroyed my creative soul. i've not gone back to theatre since and don't expect to anytime soon, if ever. but it did give me pause to realize what a difference he'd made in my desire to create. without a nearby amadeus to incite and enrage my inner salieri, without someone to compete against, i've done barely anything at all.

he seemed articulate enough in our correspondance, but i never got the sense that i was still speaking to the same creative fire which had so provoked me in college. i never had the heart to ask if he'd done anything with his talent, because the answer would not be good for me to hear, regardless of what it might be. [and that would inevitably result in the reciprocal question, one which i'm also not prepared to answer.]

i tend to understand and accept the moderate, and even extreme, alcohol and drug use of the people around me. my non-judgmental tendencies have gotten me into trouble more than once in the process.

but whenever i'm pushed by circumstance in the direction of such indulgences in my own life, all i can think of is all of the plays that the two of us never got around to writing.

at least he has an excuse.

kmh