Someone like me is made foolish in a place like this.

Sure, when I was younger my expectation was high in an immature way. That expectation became tempered with time as is the normal way of things. Additionally, in a place like this to have any kind of raised expectation is actually quite dangerous even in youth. Anything that strays from convention is doomed to failure. It is impossible to make an initiative in a vacuum. Connections and collaborators are needed in order to raise the pitch. Here the possibilities for that are virtually nil.

So I am a fool because I was, and am, unrealistic. My sense of value, my aspiration and style, was and still is a mile off course. I am unsuited to the world in general because my world in particular is unsuited to me. I am foolish because I didn't read the signs and take the cues the way one is meant to in a place like this.

If you were born here in the early 20th century, odds on you went to war in the trenches. If you were born in a mining village you went straight down the pit. Mid century you might have got an education and became part of the new middle class merging seamlessly into the oblivion of consumer society with the wife and kids. If you were a woman your options were determined by feminine attributes only.

Still, there were always a few who could move off the beaten track able to find legitimacy and success. Although I tried valiantly I did not succeed. And although it is easy to blame this place and its people it is probably mostly just me, the foolish me again who didn't roll the dice well enough.

And therein lies another problem of analysis: the dice! To what degree the chance event or lack of it? To what degree me and to what degree not me? Whether the influence of my place in time and circumstance plays the greater part or my personal karma? The answer is a complicated botch of both - and then some. There was the unreality and fantasy of youth; there was my cultural background with its fear of failure and its risk aversion; there was my immediate social context with its absence of connections and suitable partners, with all the available ones tainted by association with the said environment.

I shouldn’t leave out from this list the very nature of what I do. To have evolved as a creative in an art form that is barely recognised as such adds to the difficulty. Producer types are seen as fakers, exploiters of real talent with no talent of their own. They merely manufacture music as opposed to create it. Their ability doesn't fit the standard mythology of music that demands the authenticity of conventional performance. Although time might change that, it isn't now and most certainly not in the place where I am. I have hardly ever connected with anyone in over thirty years who does what I do, here or anywhere else, whose identity is tied up in a similar way. And if all that isn't enough then there are the character deficits lurking, my own lot of innate flaws that are perfectly capable in themselves of fouling up the picture.

So there it is, the foolish me and how my foolish mind works. It sets up a domino effect of collapsing morale and low esteem compounded in a complex web of realities internal and external. One detrimental factor from the pack is enough to bring on an insurmountable wall of negativity. I am then descended to a place where every defect looms large and every flaw can incapacitate. The effect gets more pronounced with time as the foolishness prevails.