Please read, Abstention

[Alan Sondheim]

Please read, Abstention

I apologize for this note, but feel it's necessary. I've been carrying around 
too much anger recently; this is also true of most of my offline friends. Anger 
leads to despair, disgust, internal violence. I'm not good at meditating and/or 
drugs; my outlets are my work and of course discourse online. But the latter 
has become increasingly acerbic on my part, for no reason, especially among 
people I respect. I feel I should abstain from discussion at this point; I'm 
too out of control. Unfortunately for those of you who find my work spam, I'll 
continue to send it out. But beyond that, I'll try silence as much as possible.

The election of Bush, our personal lack of money, my own lack of a future in 
the job market (equivalent to a very real lack of a future), all of these 
things weigh - not to mention constant insomnia, headaches, stress, problems 
with my family. I've been going through the roof, getting up in tears in the 
morning. It's not fair to Azure, and not to myself for that matter, although I 
don't know how to stop it. But at least I don't need to inflict myself on 
people here, online.

I try to keep the rage and despair out of my work. I've been looking at
older work over the past few days, and it feels suicidal. It's hard to
face, but I'm trying to put at least some of it on DVDs, out of
deteriorating VHS, 8mm, and Hi8mm tapes. The sound pops out, tracking is
lost, and all the usual shifts are occurring that happen in analog. In any
case, I'm dismayed at the self-loathing within a number of them, and
trying to come to grips with that.

For the rest, I feel my work is on course as usual, whatever that may be.
But I've noted my too-fast responses online - and that serves no useful
purpose, for you or for myself.

I hope to be back in discussion mode soon and please don't take this the
wrong way, whatever that might be.

- Alan