Art is hard

A profound resignation flows through these veins thicker than blood at any time past 21:00 on most days, this one especially, which will likely stretch until the hours of 3:00 or even 4:00. So many questions continue to be unanswered, so many incremental increases in the uncertainties that beg to be managed and how it pushes the bounds of what it means to be comfortable making difficult decisions and operating within a tight schedule, budget, turnaround, etc. The waiting room has occupied such a large chunk of time spent on this earth as an adult, and even adolescence in retrospect. The actors in our play are going to be angry and sad as the curtain falls, or a positive catharsis will birth in the lungs of our hero and a sense of security and room for growth will finally be reached and it all depends on the results of one day. Anger in this case is mostly relative to a landlord who will inevitably have to be given a strong fuck off by a man grieving a future that could never be his, and the sadness, better disappointment than sadness, one would hope but also not ‘hope’ would come from that man’s friends and the people who cheered him on along the way to his day of potential catharsis. Of course all of this prophesying is not good for the man, but pressure is a primal response that wells up in his chest like a balloon, suffocating him, unable to be ignored. This is not the first time that he’s swallowed a balloon and it almost certainly, with any luck, and if he has any stones, will not be the last. It is important to love the rush, there is no other way that he can live except for making mountains out of molehills, cold sweating and believing that he is gambling with his life, that his deed to love is on the line with god. Loving the game is part of the game, it doesn’t mean you have to love the results, but the custom cocktail of spite and lust and pride that boils somewhere in you is supposed to be fun to experiment with, and experimenting with it is the whole point, or at least a lot of the point. Not through hedonism, which, honestly, if you’re not 16 years old and believe that you are a hedonist then you are my mortal enemy - but through give and take. To totally relish the moments of blissful lucidity, when at the snap of your fingers the lights turn green, you have to love shaking all of those volatile feelings within you. Shake yourself until all of the fragile motivations break and are nothing and keep hold of those that swell you up like a bottle of soda. The kid who works as a prep cook, most typically during the night shift, today confided that no matter what he does at work people still yell at him even when he is just trying to do his best. This comes after months of work, months of proving himself as competent to those around him. It’s hard not to identify with him, having been him for almost all of my life up until about even two years ago. It’s precisely that he lets on that he cares so much about getting yelled at, and learning, and doing a good job that he gets yelled at so much, the lesson invites itself in and is screaming at him to learn. The restaurant does not burn down if he gets yelled at, nor if he decides that he wants to vape in the bathroom all day instead of listen to his angry, divorced manager. The band Cursive talks about this in that one song, something about trying, succeeding, recreating misery, art being hard. Living is an art and you are an artist whether you like it or not!