While I'm waiting on the all clear at work, I've got to rant about a conversation I had with my mom, who still thinks I am fleeing my career as a musician because of the stigma of addiction. It's just so absurd I don't even really humor it anymore. I was far from the only one tippling on the job (one sadly died of liver failure sometime over New Years - no one's even sure exactly when he died), but there's a ton of potheads, crackheads and those who enjoy hitting the slopes, sometimes on the job. In fact, the ONLY drug I've never heard of a classical musician abusing is meth, but I'm sure that person is out there. No I don't want to be a musician anymore because musicians are among the shittiest people I've met. Since my tenuous toehold into sobriety that was begun by court ordered therapy, the Reducation Comrade therapist continuously hammered at me that I was not a good person with a disease, I was a shitty person that drank. Then it got me to thinking about all the addicts I've known over my years of playing in symphony and opera orchestras. Musicians as a whole (yes even classical ones) tend to be emotionally stunted people with a whole list of possible undesirable character traits: scheming, selling out, etc. I could spend a whole page on this alone. So I've arrived at a location in my mind that it MAKES SENSE that there are a disproportionate number of fucked up people in my former profession. I think it would be counterproductive to everything I'm trying to do with my life now to walk back into that snakepit.
Now that said, unbeknownst to my mother (because the less she knows about my bidness, the better; for Christssakes she's the reason I HAVE PTSD) I bought a "lot" of instruments at a former mentor from Chicago's estate sale, copies of historical instruments. It is my dream, starting small, to put on authentic performances using these historical instruments. Like actually playing Mozart on the kind of violin Mozart might have actually played. What an idea huh? No assholes need apply.