TO ROCK OR NOT TO ROCK - THAT IS THE QUESTION. (NO, REALLY.)
So I spilled my guts out to Joie Dead Blonde Girlfriend last night after going to some theater preview (actually, it was for a show my housemate's trying to put on some time in the new year), about maybe not going back to work and starving until I can develop the career thing. (I like to call it the career thing - it makes it sound so... fake, eh?)

"If I were you," he blurted out while I was in mid-kvetch, "I'd be on tour all the damn time. You're afraid, is all," he said. "When you first moved to New York, you hid behind getting a job doing sound, and then you hid behind getting into acting, and then you hid behind starting in with the zine, and none of these things are what you came down here to do."

"But the zine is depended on by the scene, and --"

"And nothing. You do it voluntarily. The scene doesn't owe you, you don't owe them, you've been doing a service to the scene that is not in the list of things you moved here to do. You're getting sidetracked. It's because you're scared of something. I know. I'm scared of something too. You just have to be aware of it. And get over it."

Sometimes I have to listen to myself to figure out what the hell it is I'm actually saying.

(An aside: we were at the Fort during this conversation, and at a certain point in this conversation, Howard Stern walks right past us. Really. And neither of us look up. This was pretty late last night, so if he sounded tired this morning, I can vouch for where he was.)

Tonight, I'm having dinner with someone who went through exactly this about six months ago, and has successfully made a go of it. I'm off now to go fix up some questions.