“Yes,
but what's my motivation?”
The perfect actor isn't acting. The
perfect actor feels it as intensely as they've ever felt it. They
take on the risks and rewards of their character. They transcend the
self in order to play with and celebrate what underlies and binds.
The perfect actor is raw humanity in its most violent and loving
forms, naked and afraid, vulnerable without end. The act is
exhausting. The nature of the act is to exhaust. To take power and
prose and create and evoke until there's nothing left. It's to
delight and terrify until you beg for reprieve. It's to back your
mind into the darkest corner until it bursts forth into a new
dimension.
The artists that in spire us most speak to our dual selves. They show us not only what we already recognize, but what else we might become. They speak to what we desire of ourselves, or who we've glimpsed at what we're capable of. The poet finding the words we can only discover in the shower weeks or months later. The filmmaker who brings to life the nomad family and pressed luck of their adventures in space. The painter whose drops flow wetter and harder than anything your eyes could muster. The pursuit of art is to poke what's sleeping and to scream what's keeping you awake.
Sometimes, part way, we can know where it's coming from. We can tap into our tragic past. We can flow and flutter on the wings of love. We can point to an injustice and passionately pock and peacock until you're forced to take notice. We can drill. We can memorize and repeat until we lose sight of why we bothered to start in the first place. We can bite our mediums like ravenous dogs and shake them to shreds. It was fun, then we needed to kill time, then we wanted to show off, we became a mockery, now we're desperately appealing to a connection with an old friend.
The picture, the words, they stay the same. A record will spin so fast and will play the same notes the same ways. It's only you that changes. Your understanding can evolve or stagnate. You can always want to say more or let the idea die. You can quote, learn every note, eulogize, and glamorize. Things look and sound the same, but they dance a little different with each pass. They light up different parts of your mind, make you crack new cricks in your smile. Send the shake down your spine through a jagged path.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I've tried to write 3 times over the last 2 weeks. I haven't had a deep and pressing concern barreling down my tongue and through the tips of my fingers. I don't have a line from a song or a book that's been bouncing to and fro begging me to expound or extrapolate. I'm not particularly depressed, angry, or even “dead” to the world around me. I think I've maybe just gotten tired of funerals.
It takes me a long time to change. I'll talk about something in a blog and I can feel the factory in my head rearranging to put out something new over the next few months. I'll linger on a concept or a mode of looking at the world, and then maybe I figure out how to pick it apart. Maybe enough time goes by I get more comfortable saying one thing more often than another. Maybe I get myself into a new habit that helps or hinders my general mood, and I want it to wash over a few more times before I let it launch what I bother to share.
Each new “phase” or blog or attempt to say something is a kind of death. My patience died. My “hope” was exhausted. My fancy new dispositional clothes and decisions were ridden too hard, are torn to shreds, and begging to be put out of their misery. It's hard to genuinely reap joy and memories from a family, chosen, incidental, or otherwise, and then find yourself persuaded it was basically bullshit. It's hard to go from the confidence and self-assurance of youth, and then be scared into a paranoid paralysis at times about all of the things you don't know. It's impossible to juggle too much doubt for anything you're doing, be it by a minute to minute or day by day basis.
I was told recently that I have a lot of power. It's as if “power” is the theme for the last year. I used mine recently to shit all over a friend's underling. I've never found the ability to see through people and list their flaws as particularly powerful. It was the low-hanging fruit style my mom used to pick on me with. Anyone with an ounce of self-reflection can do it to themselves. Everyone loves a comedian who comes right out of the gate comparing themselves to something ugly or ridiculous.
I've had a kind of looming resentment for this underling. He's someone both me and my friend saw potential in immediately. That is, he had a situational awareness and sociability that, properly conditioned and directed, could be powerful. This moment I'm going to refuse to get lost in the woods of too many erroneous details and simply say as a nice enough guy with a similar background to us, my friend took him on. In one fell swoop of what I had to say to the guy, apparently erased months of introspective work.
In this last paragraph on the matter, I came to the conclusion that I was sick of what seemed like another lazy and arrogant example taking advantage of someone like my friend. I can quibble over the guy's word choice or stupid ideas about how government or septic systems work, but to know my friend, or to know me, and desire a drug induced fuck about self-loathing existence is getting fucking unbearable to witness anymore. I have no qualms about the morality of the manipulations or superficiality. I'm just sick of the blindness. I'm sick of nothing feeling real.
It's only going to get worse too. I like to look at the stupid and easy examples first. Yes, of course once me and my ex broke up I stopped getting invited to weddings. Yes, of course when friends visit town, even when I text them, it's not safe to tell me they didn't care to see me until they're safe back in their new state. Yes, I can go out and make a dozen new acquaintances whose names I even have listed in my phone! And I have no idea who they are as I drop off their food at work a week later. I can appeal to the “entrepreneur” forums for something new and exciting to do to find lurking, lucky show boats, and ignored messages after faux invitations and enthusiasm. I can start to get along with a few people at work before they get shipped across the country or find a real job.
I swear, at the level of superficial nothing bullshit, all of the above qualifies. It all speaks to a tepid existence predicated on the machinations of circumstance. College forced us together. The bar is the new watering hole. Work only pays out in cash. And that title you think you want to be involves more sacrifice and chance than you could ever stomach. Then you get older and all the rehearsing you've done no longer sits as resting cliches, but crystallizes as wisdom. If only you had such foresight in youth! Time heals all wounds that you can force yourself to forget. You can forget the conversations, the attractions, and the laughs. They're not who you are now.
Unless you're me. I forget details, but I don't forget certain resonances. I struggle to say feelings because it'd be a lie to say I'm persistently sad, angry, or happy about anything I've done or what's been done to me. Those are the 3 emotions, right? I recognize the perfect party vibe. I know the deepest longing and love in your eye. I see the frozen deer behind your eyes any moment you're afraid of being exposed. I hear the tone of your words when you think I need to be “handled” in the language you perceive in blogs. I felt the thousand deaths years before I would think it appropriate to hold the funerals, and truly, I don't know what to make of that.
The only way I ever seem to get what I want is to force it. Exceedingly rarely, practically never, altogether is it impossible, to get people to just talk, just share, or just even attempt honesty. They won't work with me. They don't care if my questions are polite or pointed. They won't talk. They won't try. They won't listen. They won't trust. You don't want to be friends? Don't pawn blowing me off on the crowd you're with who don't like me. I won't blame you. I'll give you what you want and both of our lives get less awkward. I don't care to hold you down, berate you, or come in holding my hat like I'm perpetually in the wrong. What's my power here? The ability to disregard another broken social connection? Writing about it in “I hope this isn't distractedly whiny” ways?
I'd be made to force it. They have the power, because I'd do their bidding. I'd unfriend and lose the number. Take the load off; this burden I never asked to be. Please, indulge, I don't take responsibility for how you feel. I'm capable of writing about it because I don't feel anything about you. I'm just confused. I like to try and make good decisions and am often left with none. I get no feedback, no honest feedback, and when we're not constrained by the rules of collegiate decency, I spin and spit.
You have the power. You, impersonal “world” who ignores until you see something you want to burn down. You “friend” who's read any or everything I've ever said, and thought so many things you shoved right back up your ass. You who shirk any and all responsibility leaving us lonely begging crybabies fixated on your gaze. Here we stumble into the biggest death and bleakest funeral procession. What do you think happens when I lose the capacity to think it's my fault? You know, for “everything.” How quick could I rise in your world by going Trump? How many facebook friends and social media followers you think I could build into my brand in a year? How many selfies of how I blow my money and oversell my accomplishments do you want to see?
I'm already as wrong as I could ever be right? The people I think I like don't want much if anything to do with me. I don't see myself keeping a long-term relationship that isn't predicated on some kind of overwrought 70 year old's conception of togetherness. I manage to piss off what I consider as literal a mock up of my brain as you can expect in life by undermining his game. I'm only impulsively “moral” with a donation or big tip because there's always a fairly good excuse not to be. Even then, my conception of what matters reduced to money. About the only things I can pull off well anymore are working all the time and refraining from losing the love my dad has for me.
I'm as lost as I could ever be, so I'm free to be anything. I've only been perfectly acting like me for so long, I just forgot. I love mountains! I hate getting into pointless fights about politics or consequences! Last weekend was the most fun I've ever had! I can't hurt you, I'm just doing me, living the dream, got my land, got my goals, got my special shampoo that's got my hair did. You could never kill my vibe. I resonate at a higher frequency that deserves attention and praise and you can consider it my Heath Ledger talent that got lost focusing in so intently on what makes you Jokers. Hell, it even killed him and thought it was killing me! Man, to go out with such a bang. So much love and affection for his work. True artistry.
The artists that in spire us most speak to our dual selves. They show us not only what we already recognize, but what else we might become. They speak to what we desire of ourselves, or who we've glimpsed at what we're capable of. The poet finding the words we can only discover in the shower weeks or months later. The filmmaker who brings to life the nomad family and pressed luck of their adventures in space. The painter whose drops flow wetter and harder than anything your eyes could muster. The pursuit of art is to poke what's sleeping and to scream what's keeping you awake.
Sometimes, part way, we can know where it's coming from. We can tap into our tragic past. We can flow and flutter on the wings of love. We can point to an injustice and passionately pock and peacock until you're forced to take notice. We can drill. We can memorize and repeat until we lose sight of why we bothered to start in the first place. We can bite our mediums like ravenous dogs and shake them to shreds. It was fun, then we needed to kill time, then we wanted to show off, we became a mockery, now we're desperately appealing to a connection with an old friend.
The picture, the words, they stay the same. A record will spin so fast and will play the same notes the same ways. It's only you that changes. Your understanding can evolve or stagnate. You can always want to say more or let the idea die. You can quote, learn every note, eulogize, and glamorize. Things look and sound the same, but they dance a little different with each pass. They light up different parts of your mind, make you crack new cricks in your smile. Send the shake down your spine through a jagged path.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I've tried to write 3 times over the last 2 weeks. I haven't had a deep and pressing concern barreling down my tongue and through the tips of my fingers. I don't have a line from a song or a book that's been bouncing to and fro begging me to expound or extrapolate. I'm not particularly depressed, angry, or even “dead” to the world around me. I think I've maybe just gotten tired of funerals.
It takes me a long time to change. I'll talk about something in a blog and I can feel the factory in my head rearranging to put out something new over the next few months. I'll linger on a concept or a mode of looking at the world, and then maybe I figure out how to pick it apart. Maybe enough time goes by I get more comfortable saying one thing more often than another. Maybe I get myself into a new habit that helps or hinders my general mood, and I want it to wash over a few more times before I let it launch what I bother to share.
Each new “phase” or blog or attempt to say something is a kind of death. My patience died. My “hope” was exhausted. My fancy new dispositional clothes and decisions were ridden too hard, are torn to shreds, and begging to be put out of their misery. It's hard to genuinely reap joy and memories from a family, chosen, incidental, or otherwise, and then find yourself persuaded it was basically bullshit. It's hard to go from the confidence and self-assurance of youth, and then be scared into a paranoid paralysis at times about all of the things you don't know. It's impossible to juggle too much doubt for anything you're doing, be it by a minute to minute or day by day basis.
I was told recently that I have a lot of power. It's as if “power” is the theme for the last year. I used mine recently to shit all over a friend's underling. I've never found the ability to see through people and list their flaws as particularly powerful. It was the low-hanging fruit style my mom used to pick on me with. Anyone with an ounce of self-reflection can do it to themselves. Everyone loves a comedian who comes right out of the gate comparing themselves to something ugly or ridiculous.
I've had a kind of looming resentment for this underling. He's someone both me and my friend saw potential in immediately. That is, he had a situational awareness and sociability that, properly conditioned and directed, could be powerful. This moment I'm going to refuse to get lost in the woods of too many erroneous details and simply say as a nice enough guy with a similar background to us, my friend took him on. In one fell swoop of what I had to say to the guy, apparently erased months of introspective work.
In this last paragraph on the matter, I came to the conclusion that I was sick of what seemed like another lazy and arrogant example taking advantage of someone like my friend. I can quibble over the guy's word choice or stupid ideas about how government or septic systems work, but to know my friend, or to know me, and desire a drug induced fuck about self-loathing existence is getting fucking unbearable to witness anymore. I have no qualms about the morality of the manipulations or superficiality. I'm just sick of the blindness. I'm sick of nothing feeling real.
It's only going to get worse too. I like to look at the stupid and easy examples first. Yes, of course once me and my ex broke up I stopped getting invited to weddings. Yes, of course when friends visit town, even when I text them, it's not safe to tell me they didn't care to see me until they're safe back in their new state. Yes, I can go out and make a dozen new acquaintances whose names I even have listed in my phone! And I have no idea who they are as I drop off their food at work a week later. I can appeal to the “entrepreneur” forums for something new and exciting to do to find lurking, lucky show boats, and ignored messages after faux invitations and enthusiasm. I can start to get along with a few people at work before they get shipped across the country or find a real job.
I swear, at the level of superficial nothing bullshit, all of the above qualifies. It all speaks to a tepid existence predicated on the machinations of circumstance. College forced us together. The bar is the new watering hole. Work only pays out in cash. And that title you think you want to be involves more sacrifice and chance than you could ever stomach. Then you get older and all the rehearsing you've done no longer sits as resting cliches, but crystallizes as wisdom. If only you had such foresight in youth! Time heals all wounds that you can force yourself to forget. You can forget the conversations, the attractions, and the laughs. They're not who you are now.
Unless you're me. I forget details, but I don't forget certain resonances. I struggle to say feelings because it'd be a lie to say I'm persistently sad, angry, or happy about anything I've done or what's been done to me. Those are the 3 emotions, right? I recognize the perfect party vibe. I know the deepest longing and love in your eye. I see the frozen deer behind your eyes any moment you're afraid of being exposed. I hear the tone of your words when you think I need to be “handled” in the language you perceive in blogs. I felt the thousand deaths years before I would think it appropriate to hold the funerals, and truly, I don't know what to make of that.
The only way I ever seem to get what I want is to force it. Exceedingly rarely, practically never, altogether is it impossible, to get people to just talk, just share, or just even attempt honesty. They won't work with me. They don't care if my questions are polite or pointed. They won't talk. They won't try. They won't listen. They won't trust. You don't want to be friends? Don't pawn blowing me off on the crowd you're with who don't like me. I won't blame you. I'll give you what you want and both of our lives get less awkward. I don't care to hold you down, berate you, or come in holding my hat like I'm perpetually in the wrong. What's my power here? The ability to disregard another broken social connection? Writing about it in “I hope this isn't distractedly whiny” ways?
I'd be made to force it. They have the power, because I'd do their bidding. I'd unfriend and lose the number. Take the load off; this burden I never asked to be. Please, indulge, I don't take responsibility for how you feel. I'm capable of writing about it because I don't feel anything about you. I'm just confused. I like to try and make good decisions and am often left with none. I get no feedback, no honest feedback, and when we're not constrained by the rules of collegiate decency, I spin and spit.
You have the power. You, impersonal “world” who ignores until you see something you want to burn down. You “friend” who's read any or everything I've ever said, and thought so many things you shoved right back up your ass. You who shirk any and all responsibility leaving us lonely begging crybabies fixated on your gaze. Here we stumble into the biggest death and bleakest funeral procession. What do you think happens when I lose the capacity to think it's my fault? You know, for “everything.” How quick could I rise in your world by going Trump? How many facebook friends and social media followers you think I could build into my brand in a year? How many selfies of how I blow my money and oversell my accomplishments do you want to see?
I'm already as wrong as I could ever be right? The people I think I like don't want much if anything to do with me. I don't see myself keeping a long-term relationship that isn't predicated on some kind of overwrought 70 year old's conception of togetherness. I manage to piss off what I consider as literal a mock up of my brain as you can expect in life by undermining his game. I'm only impulsively “moral” with a donation or big tip because there's always a fairly good excuse not to be. Even then, my conception of what matters reduced to money. About the only things I can pull off well anymore are working all the time and refraining from losing the love my dad has for me.
I'm as lost as I could ever be, so I'm free to be anything. I've only been perfectly acting like me for so long, I just forgot. I love mountains! I hate getting into pointless fights about politics or consequences! Last weekend was the most fun I've ever had! I can't hurt you, I'm just doing me, living the dream, got my land, got my goals, got my special shampoo that's got my hair did. You could never kill my vibe. I resonate at a higher frequency that deserves attention and praise and you can consider it my Heath Ledger talent that got lost focusing in so intently on what makes you Jokers. Hell, it even killed him and thought it was killing me! Man, to go out with such a bang. So much love and affection for his work. True artistry.
Slowly, there is no more story in the
back of my mind. There's a page or slide, then a line or two. But
it's drying up. I just do. I just exist in whatever way I'm sure the
Buddhists didn't intend. I'm getting paid to act, sure, and I'm no
starving artist. But it doesn't translate. It doesn't mean anything
anymore. It just is. I just work, or hit the gym, or grab lunch, or
read a book, or say words to indefinite ends. God forbid I
accidentally bring a child into this environment. That's right, God
is great! The gloves are off, mother fuckers.
