It's not because of the tickets. Yes, being able to assemble the energy to launch my TV show would have been nice.
The real issue is that I can't know that anyone is even in my audience.
Let me recap for any who do not know:
My last live performance was in November of 2004. While I was in New York, I would send some emails off now and again to a contact at a paper in Orlando, just to keep in touch. I would read the papers in Orlando. I would see some archaic word I had just used or an odd construction of mine show up in papers across town. So I figured that my emails were being forwarded and that these writers were --flatteringly enough, and I appreciate that-- being influenced by my writing. Perhaps it pleased them to read it. (I can only hope they were laughing with me and not at me.)
Then I started a blog in 2005.
I would see my "flags" show up in Chicago and L.A. and New York. And then some militia leader in Afghanistan. "Please do not tell me that some guy in Afghanistan is reading my stuff. It can't be that entertaining, especially when translated."
It didn't make any sense.
You need to know that at no time since I began writing in 2004 has a single person ever commented on, or responded to, my show. I have not received a single (expected) visit from an FBI agent, I have not received a single ticket receipt, nor have I ever received in the mail a single note of encouragement or even of hate.
I HAVE BEEN CONDUCTING THIS SHOW FOR THE PAST FOUR YEARS IN COMPLETE SOLITARY CONFINEMENT.
You cannot understand the first thing about this undertaking of mine without first understanding that I have no conclusive evidence that I even have an audience.
Maybe it's all in my mind.
Those closet case homosexuals that I play poker with each year at the cabin send out these emails to the group for planning purposes. I never respond to them for the same reason that I do not place phone calls or go anywhere or speak to anyone: I do not wish to involve others in my situation. But I responded to one email and asked that I be removed from the mailing list, lest any of them get roped up in some illegal eavesdropping dragnet directed at me.
One of them wrote back to me and pasted-in a wikipedia entry for "megalomania."
Haw haw. I just love it when people call me crazy. But those who would call me insane should know that I, in turn, regard them as borderline mentally retarded. I really do. It's amazing that the species has lastest this long.
So I wrote back: "My responsibility ends at informing you. My conscience is clear."
But I don't like living like that. I don't like putting my life on hold. Forgoing a proper job or a social life would be easily tolerable if I knew that it was for something. But I refuse to forgo those things any longer if I can't even know if there is anything there.
Maybe I am insane. Maybe my perception of the world is incorrect. Maybe I don't have an audience.
If that is the case, then the entirety of the past five years has been a complete waste. I have been talking to myself.
I am not angry with you --if you exist. I'm angry with myself and I always have been. I understand that I do not perceive things properly. And I miss out on a lot because when I finally have performed the checks and double-checks and the deductive reasoning and the flow-charting, the opportunity is long gone.
I don't wish to waste five more years in some uncertainty zone, some state of unreality where, yes, anything is possible...
...but where nothing is real.
I do not wish to exist in this state any longer.
And this show is now over.
