Finally found a director-- ~Cole Jennings~, and hearing his name I thought he was going to be yet another British sleazebag who thought of himself as an ~auteur~ (wannabe star movie director), but he was American, from New York (flew out there for him and other business), very understanding about my whole approach to things, and has been quite willing to work with it. None of the three singles are getting a simple concert video treatment, but it's not going to be anything stupid, either. Some storyline, some connecting bits between each video, but no dank caves or Transylvania castles. --So much Gothic these days! But not me!! I feel good about that; it's good that I'll stand out some.
The video for Shann's song is what we got out of the way first-- it's the first single, for one thing, but I don't want Shann to have to stick around for longer than she has to, for her sake (well, honestly, for both of our sakes). The closer things get to the end for us the more obvious it is, to the both of us, just how fucking insane it was that we were stuck together like this to begin with. I still have no idea if that's "normal". Walter told me once that Freddie Mercury had a fake girlfriend or whatever but he could've been talking completely out his ass. Or that could've just been a decision Freddie made for himself, without as much threats from above. Or she was a real girlfriend! I do wish I knew how "normal" that all was, though. --Maybe I just don't like how much Shann still blames me for it. I don't want to say that I don't share ANY blame. I obviously do. But I can't help but feel sometimes that I'm still being punished for making a decision among a set of only bad ones. If I knew this was normal I could just tell her that's how it is, and it's awful, it's terrible, and I didn't know how it was either. If I knew that this isn't normal I could tell her that much of it was Walter's decision and that he's a total freak. Instead it's a limbo where I look like the worst one despite Walt's thumb being quite firmly on the scales. It's like all the legal stuff last year, Nate and the rest of them (god, even BEN) blaming me for Walt stretching things out. Like what I want for myself always has to hurt someone else. Ugh.
Anyway, things aren't going so badly despite that. Far nicer than the first video set Shannon happened to be around. Cole was wary about using her as an actress, and the reasons were VERY sweet (he didn't want "our relationship" to be "ruined" by it), and I had to tell him quietly that the acting didn't stop for us once the cameras were off, but all of this is to hopefully make it so it CAN stop. He was briefly taken aback by that, and I was tempted to ask HIM if this was normal or not, or how normal it was, but he recovered soon enough that I didn't want to bother him with things like that.
PS: NYC clubs? AMAZING, unsurprisingly. Wasn't able to even swing a visit to ONE last year, somehow! And some can get as raunchy and kinky as SF clubs... visited one of those for curiosity's sake. I don't have much leather and didn't think to pack any, so got a jacket n' boots just to fit in enough to check it out. I don't even know what got me so curious... it did smell amazing in there, though. Apparently they don't even allow cologne. Just various kinds of sweat, beer, a little bit of piss; the latter not my thing. Wasn't going to do anything myself, but I saw a guy chained up getting whipped and all of a sudden Nathan popped in my head, that stupid story he told me about how much he loved the adrenaline immediately prior to hitting the ground during his whole bike accident. I saw how horny the guy getting whipped would look between strikes. Long story short, I got whipped eventually, too. I needed to know if it was the same feeling, and if Nate was as much of a moron as I thought. Inconclusive. But interesting... I don't even know if I'd do it again. Maybe it all was just to say I did. Whatever!
Things mostly going well. Video for Shann's song pretty much done. Things got a little snippy by the end-- Shann was impatient, and all this was new to her, so she obviously didn't have any idea it'd take so long or what exactly it entailed. I tried to plan well enough for all those things for her and for the both of us, but no plan is perfect. Still, we only needed to have one bigger argument in a trailer, and it wasn't nearly as awful as the one from last year. I just told her, by the end of it, that we were so close to things being almost normal again, at least for her. Races can sometimes be the hardest when you're close to the finish line-- you see it there in front of you, and seeing it can be exciting, but also exhausting. It can make you realize just how much work you already put in just to reach where you are, and that's not even the end yet. Part of you almost wants to act like you're already there and let off the gas. But you do that, then ALL of your exhaustion hits you at once, everyone passes you, and you don't even fuckin' place. It's when things are at their hardest like that you have to put your nose to the grindstone the most. 'Cause then it's DONE. And in this case you won't have to do it ever again.
She was crying, then, and she pulled me into a sudden, tight embrace. "I love you so much and I hate you so much and I don't think I'm ever going to know what the fuck to do about it." I just sighed, said that I knew, that I deserved whatever I got, and she paused her crying, glared up at me, said "Shut UP!!!!" and buried her face in my chest again. So we rocked there a little while. Put ourselves back together. Walked out hand in hand. On with the show.
PS: Started the MTV interview circuit recently and that's been tedious but mostly in a way I expected. Some dogwhistle type questions that are easy enough to bat away from years of practice. Some bullshit Walter said that I have to continually debunk (and then he just says it again, and he MUST know what he's doing; he can't sabotage the release because it's on him, too, but he can still make it difficult for me)-- this time about how much the band ~trains~ for things, making us sound like we're his adoring pack of circus monkeys again. UGH. Most awkward moment was with Cole, though, during a joint interview about the video making process and yadda yadda. Lady asked a question about how easy it was to work with musicians as actors and he said that they WERE actors, they inherently lived double-lives, they were dual-people, and he might've just been trying to tie things in with the album name and my old stage name and my real name and all that but I still felt the blood drain from my face, had to chug the rest of my coffee to mask it. I didn't say anything to him about it later.
Release day is so close, now, which means that quite a few other things are close, too. So many good things. But there, among them all: Dave on his deathbed, Cryssie sick, Mom less and less lucid. Marv said she's heard the singles and loved them, but I have no idea whether he's just saying that to make me feel better. Visiting Mom has been difficult in a whole new way, these days. Before, whenever she spoke to me it was a dice-roll as to how angry or ugly it would be. I wanted to care for her and there were days I couldn't even do that, me just fucking being there made things worse, sometimes to the point that it made far more sense for me to leave and have Marv or Esther take care of things instead. God I just wanted to fucking prove, for once, that I could be fucking responsible, useful, worthy of being in this fucking family. They say they don't blame me but how could they not? Marv, Anna, and Esther have done SO much of the work with this, Ebi has the farm, and then there's me. It looks so awful, it makes me feel so awful, and I keep trying, but it's so difficult.
But anyway-- these days, it can be difficult for Mom to speak. Sometimes she can't at all, or simply doesn't. She's becoming more and more... incapacitated. Like her soul disappears for awhile and then comes back. It leaves for a longer and longer time and I know one of these days it won't come back. One thing I have been able to do, at least, is pay for a good amount of the nursing care she needs, now, and make sure she only has the best. But I'll see her and sometimes she'll be staring into the middle distance, her mouth slack, and it looks like she's already dead. She isn't able to do herself up anymore, and the poor nurses do try, but they don't really know what they're doing and it's not really their job to know.
Today, I was able to do her face for her. It was something I'd wanted to do for as long as I knew how to do makeup, but I always feared she'd reject it or be disgusted by the very idea of it, at worst. Once she started calling me awful things every time I visited her, my fears seemed justified, so I certainly didn't try then. But I've done her face on myself so many times, and it kills me seeing her in ways I know she'd hate to be seen. She kept her dignity as long as she could. I'm keeping a memory of it alive, I suppose-- in myself, but also for her, now.
Thankfully it was just me around, not Marv, and she was relaxed the whole time, and so I did tell her, as I did her makeup-- unsure she'd comprehend any of it anyway, of course, but that's part of the ease of telling her-- that I'd always wanted to do something like this for her. That I remembered being able to comb her hair when I was young, and even that felt like such an honor. That I knew she never understood why I wanted to take after her beauty and confidence far more than most of my father's... anything, that I knew a boy (and now a man) that values those things like I do is strange, that I knew things would have been so much easier for her and for everyone if I could’ve been a normal boy like Ebi or at least have pretended better. That I hope she knew how much I loved her, how much of everything I did was for her or celebrating some part of her somehow. That I want to keep as much of her alive in myself as I can. And that I also hoped that someday, somehow, she would understand the love-- the dignity-- behind it all.
Other times, I've talked to her about how much I loved her showgirl costumes. How I wish she didn't have to feel so ashamed of herself for having to work in them and how I wish she wasn't judged or mistreated for it, how that didn't make her a bad mother and it wasn’t her fault that I did what I did. How I never quite stopped wanting to be a pretty dancer like her, and that I wished she could see Shann and I dance, now. How well Anna and Eli are doing. Etc. It's often an echo against a cave wall when I do it, I know, but again, that's admittedly almost the point. There's a part of me that hopes she understands every word, and another part that fears she does, and she simply can't do anything to express her disgust or sadness with me, that I could never be what she seemed to want me to be. I don't know.
This still wasn't really a good day for her. She was mostly vacant, again. But she looked like herself again, at least. And I left her with a kiss on the head, another firmer pillow to prop herself up more comfortably, and an old blanket Mamaji had knit for me when I was a kid-- something that had been on my childhood bed up til that point. I wasn't going to use it, and she always liked it, so it's keeping her lap warm, now.
PS: Remember watching Psycho when it released (a bit young-- snuck out of the house, snuck into the theater), feeling my stomach drop more and more at Norman-- shy, deathly anxious, obsessive, mama's boy wearing his mother's clothes, killing in them. Threw up outside later. Looking back now it's a lot easier to not see so much of myself in it all, but at that point I was so sensitive to anything that could possibly reinforce the possibility that I was a hopeless freak (is that what they think I am? Is that ACTUALLY what I am? Is that going to be what I become??), and I was even more terrified of Mom seeing me that way. But it was one of the things that kept me away from anything close to drag 'til I met Cryssie.
PPS: ~Sensitive~. Ugh. Hate it when people call me that and here I am.