How desperate am I?

I often wonder how desperate I am. And there’s absolutely no need. In truth I am a very lucky man. I live in a house I own,

I have two nice kids, a great wife and in the middle of the global pandemic I’m still employed, although who knows what

will happen now I’ve said that. I’ll probably get a note today saying my employment has been terminated and then I’ll have to

start job hunting. I’ll probably end up (if I’m lucky) as a supermarket delivery driver. And you can see how, even now,

even after saying how lucky I am, there’s elements of desperation creeping into the conversation.

My problem of late has been trying to fight off despair, or is it boredom? What is it? I’m trying to fight off something. Perhaps I’m just tired, perhaps I’m having too many late nights, sitting in front of the television watching news shows or a movie as the clock heads towards midnight. Perhaps I’m just putting off the moment of going to bed as late as possible because I don’t like going to bed. I used to love it, but now I hate it, mainly because when I get there my mind wanders and then I turn to look at the digital clock glowing on my bedside cabinet and I realise it’s gone one o’clock in the morning and I haven’t had a wink of sleep.

It can’t be despair so it has to be boredom. I’m trying to fight off boredom. Reading helps sometimes, it takes my mind off things, like work or whatever my latest fret might be, but I’ve noticed how I’ve kind of turned to retail therapy too. Perhaps it’s frustration as there’s a lot to be frustrated about, always is, and if you combine frustration with boredom, well it’s a heady cocktail, let’s just say that. Stress, there’s another ailment and one I’ve tried to sort out, but can’t. It’s not easy to stop thinking about work, for example, as there’s always miles too much going on, too much work to do, so much that whenever I take a day off, or a few days, I know the work is just piling up and that I’ll have twice as much to do when I go back, not that there’s anywhere to go back to at the moment, we’re all in lockdown because of the pandemic.

I think I need something when perhaps I don’t and that in itself is frustrating, but I also have this overriding need to be good at something, to be able to master something. And that’s led me to obsess over buying a bass guitar. It’s been going on for years. I remember 10 years ago walking into a music shop in Richmond. The store was closing down and inside it was dark and badly lit and the man in there showed me a Mexican Fender Precision bass, mine for just £180. It was a bargain back then, even more so today, but I didn’t grab the bull by the horns and just buy it, I walked out of the store empty-handed and probably fretted about it for a few days. I probably got a little angry about it too because while I was earning good money back then, I still didn’t have any spare cash floating about to justify the purchase, and that annoyed me. What, I often wondered, was the point in working if all I was doing was surviving, paying bills, buying food and putting petrol in the car? It’s the same today.

I’m not very good at anything. I don’t play a musical instrument, I can’t sing, I don’t want to sing, but there’s so much more that I can’t do. I can’t fix things, I’m a sloppy house painter (because I’m too impatient), I can’t fix cars or do anything mechanical and I figure I’m not a very impressive individual. So I thought, because I used to play the violin when I was a school (again, not very well, but at least I played it and was in the school orchestra) I could take up the bass guitar. The bass and the violin both have four strings, one’s EADG, the other’s GDAE, I figured there were similarities and that, in a sense, became my excuse for wanting a bass guitar. To be fair I’ve always wanted one. I remember watching Top of the Pops as a kid and it was either the Kinks or the Beatles, but one of them, or possibly both of them, for some reason got me fired up to want a bass guitar. I never got one and as with all things, life eventually gets in the way. I forgot about it for years, obsessing on other things, like buying property, decorating, bettering myself in the job department until, one day, a huge economic recession messed things up well and truly and ever since it’s been purely a case of survival and being thankful for having a job. I hate it when people say that. “I suppose we’ve got to be thankful for having a job”. No, I disagree with that, but whenever somebody says it I always agree with them, because what else can I say? 

Years went by and I never once thought about buying a bass guitar because there would have been uproar if I had suggested it, people around me would question why and, of course, try to dissuade me for going any further with the idea. And that’s something else I’ve noticed, there are far too many people around me who use the word ‘no’ on too many occasions. I ask a question, however trivial, and the answer is no or don’t or why followed by, well, if I were you I wouldn’t, just say no. Nobody ever says yes, good idea, why not? People are too risk averse and it’s very annoying because risk averse people bring me down, they want me to be like them. And when I really think long and hard about it, no has been the most uttered word in my world and everything that I do engage in, be it reading, writing, anything, is because I made a stand, I didn’t say no. There’s a bookcase in the sun lounge, that’s where it’s been relegated to, but it’s only there because I didn’t give in. I’m guessing that virtually every book on those shelves was at some stage contested with the word no, or a negative line of questioning, such as ‘why do you want that?’ as if to suggest that I might be some kind of idiot. ‘Leave it, think about it, buy it next month’, all delaying tactics designed to put me off. And it’s the same with the bass guitar. 

I used to own an expensive watch, but there was no point. For a start it never kept time and that was because it needed a service and that would cost me £400, I discovered. That’s a lot of money to have something serviced, not even my car costs me that much. It was also a very ostentatious-looking watch, the sort of thing somebody might attack me for if I flashed it around too much. In other words, it wasn’t worth having, other than to be able to say that I owned a Rolex, wasn’t I the smart guy? So eventually I sold it. I had to. I was in debt and the watch could sort things out. I sold it for over twice what I paid for it so in the end it ‘washed its face’ as crappy business people say of their failed projects. I hated the fact that I had to sell it. I hated the fact that I couldn’t afford to have it serviced, meaning the watch was out of my league in the first place and utterly pointless. The fact that it didn’t keep time was my public excuse for selling it, but even then I promised myself that bass guitar. I’d sell the watch and buy a guitar with some of the money, then learn how to play it and the whole exercise would have been worthwhile. But no, the money paid a debt and suddenly there I was without a watch, but no longer in debt. 

I forgot about the guitar for a few years and carried on surviving, getting by, not having any disposable income, worrying about how much I spent during the week on food or how much we were spending on the weekly shop, not going on holiday because we never really got round to putting money away because, ultimately, we couldn’t.

Things got slightly better. The job became more stable and soon I started thinking about the bass guitar again, but it was always going to be a troublesome purchase, because there was always something else that needed to be bought. I’d have to box clever, do some extra work and use that to justify the purchase. But there was something else in the way of buying it and that was do I really want it? Is there really any point? What the hell was my objective? What was I expecting? Would I be looking at forming a band? Gigging in pubs? Becoming a great session musician in great demand around the world? Would I even be any good? Or would I buy the thing, mess around on it for a few weeks and then leave it propped up in the corner of the sun lounge collecting dust? The very thought of answering all of these questions affirmatively made me despair with myself. I’d be lying in bed thinking about it, knowing, perhaps, that buying a bass guitar was, in fact, absolutely pointless and getting very depressed in the process. There was no point. I desired the object, perhaps, but didn’t really want to start a band or perfect my technique to such a degree that I would start attending open mic nights down at the pub. Even going to the pub was not only out of the question because of the pandemic, but out of the question because I gave up drinking three years ago. And that’s where the despair creeps in: knowing it’s pointless wanting a bass guitar, realising it’s a false desire based, perhaps, on little more than being bored or needing something, anything, to stave off some kind of dissatisfaction. It’s what you could call a first world problem, and by that I mean not really a problem at all. I don’t have a 20-minute walk to the nearest water hole, I’m not starving or fleeing war, I’m just sitting at home getting uptight about something that isn’t real. It’s not as if I can play the bass guitar, I can’t, I’d have to learn and how long would that last I wonder? In the end the guitar would be on Ebay and I would be feeling even lower than I do now, wondering why I even bothered in the first place. Something else will come along and what I need to be thinking about is why. Why (or what) am I trying to obliterate or cure or satisfy?

I think the answer is not to have dreams, because dreams are like bubbles falling on rough ground and exploding into nothing. I’ve had many: a house on the beach, a Harley Davidson, the bass guitar, the list goes on, and I think the worst thing is allowing myself to have impossible dreams and then getting annoyed with myself for not being able to fulfill them.