8:10 AM – up at 645, put on the coffee, shower, pills. a sliver of some kind of dream lingers for a moment, then slips away as all dreams do. protein shake, a plum, an apple, a strawberry, a sweet pepper, bag of nuts, out the door. 

on the drive to work i pass a series of great concrete balls, perhaps four feet in diameter, painted with various smiley faces, flags, dollar signs, or other decorations. i imagine briefly a distant future full of unknowable people and new societies, and a young explorer discovering these painted balls buried amid a choke of trees and vines. what religions or rituals would they dream up to associate with these spheres? these cheap attention grabbers stuck lazily outside a crumbling dealership in a small town… 

1030 AM – walking about and noticing the many trees along the sidewalk which have tiny twig sized limbs trying to grow out of the thick base of their trunks. old, tall, well established trees with healthy canopies soaking up light, and yet they still try to grow out these new bits with tiny leaves down in the shade. how helpful can they be? perhaps even trees must constantly be starting new projects that will likely be dead before they go anywhere. but maybe, just maybe, in a few years it could be a strong new branch…

again today i am hounded by the point. i feel a certain kind of emptiness inside, as if i’m reaching always for something that isn’t there, something that perhaps does not even exist. i wonder how much of this dissatisfaction and longing is down to my childhood, and being raised with videogames and adventure books that told me over and over that if i work hard at something i will level up, that life is a ladder that you climb, that moving forward always progresses you up in skill, up in success, up in everything. but real life isn’t like that. working hard doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere. talent doesn’t necessarily get you noticed. no one is guaranteed to ever even get to level 2 (whatever that may be) despite a lifetime of grinding. i have worked at writing for almost 15 years, nearly every day i write or think about writing or read about writing, and it’s gone nowhere. and i’m sure this is the same story for a huge number of people. all of us were taught by video games that if one writes a book (or paints a picture or writes a song etc) it would sell for some amount of money and your skill would go up a bit, then your next book would sell for a little more, and so on. all it takes, in the world of videogames, is the work and determination of writing the book, and the rest is taken for granted to follow. i wonder, if we didn’t live in a world packed so full of games and stories that reinforce this illusion of progress over and over, then maybe we’d be more happy with the normal, stagnant life that almost everyone is destined to live. 

but of course, if games worked like real life they would be completely unfun and no one would play them. 

anais nin says: How to defeat this tragedy concealed within each hour, which chokes us unexpectedly and treacherously, springing at us from a melody, an old letter, a book, the colors of a dress, the walk of a stranger? Make literature. Seek new words in the dictionary. Chisel new phrases, pour the tears into a mold, style, form, eloquence.

perhaps then writing is not a goal to pursue, but a cure to prescribe… 

3PM – i have purchased tickets to a show taking place almost a year from now. anticipation is a necessary spice in life, although more likely i’ll forget i ever bought the tickets until a few weeks  before the date, or whenever ticketmaster starts messaging me about it. 

i have been thinking more on the point, because it seems important to my mental health that i have some kind of purpose. what i settled on (for now/the moment) is that my point is to make art. specifically literature, though any art will do. i find painting and poetry just as satisfying as prose. of course, i’ve known that i want to create these things for a while now, but i have never been able to divorce the need to be seen and appreciated from the need to create. i can paint a dozen paintings in my room over the weekend, and it will feel nice, but if no one sees them does it count as creating art? if i write novels and poems, but no one reads them, does it count as creating art? i think, perhaps, that it does. mainly because the lack of readers/viewers is not reflective of the quality of the creation, it is instead a reflection of the society we live in and its explicit and undisguised objective of crushing artists and preventing art. 

i do believe that this current american society is specifically designed to prevent art. those in power (and large portions of the populace who have been convinced over decades) believe that artists of all kinds should absolutely not have money or power of any kind, and should be prevented from any kind of income or support, wherever possible. and due to decades of smears against modern art and artists, the populace generally has come to the conclusion that artists should not be paid, and perhaps should not even exist. artists should be mocked and told to get a ‘real job’. art is a joke, something for lazy head in the clouds weirdos. art is a fun playtime thing, art is a hobby and you’re naive and childish if you want to get paid for it. the idea of the starving artist is so prevalent because it is true, and it is true by intent. artists are not just starving, they are intentionally starved. the rich and powerful, the string pullers, the leaders, they do not want more artists, they want fewer, as few as possible. artists are, in general, a threat to power. tyrants and dictators will always target artists first, cut funding to arts, ban art and books and music, and so on. but what has happened here in america is a whole society working together to prevent art, due (probably) to decades of subtle propaganda against art and artists. 

knowing that this is a battle (and not just a personal one) gives me a bit more confidence in calling myself an artist even though almost no one has seen or read anything i’ve created. knowing that the structure of society and those in power want artists to fail and are working to prevent them from making art makes it a bit easier to find the motivation to continue. 

830 PM – at home there is much cleaning and emptying of trash. there is so much stuff piled up, and what is it even for? 90% of everything in this house could vanish, and we’d never notice. 

sometimes i want to leave everything, be on foot, a nomad. the huge earthquake in russia is being talked about non stop, and the supposed tsunami waves headed to our coast. what would life be like if water washed it all away, carried my house and all my responsibilities away, all my possessions, everything, reset… rainier is rumbling, too, with a real possibility of eruption. it is an actual possible future, this wiping away of it all. great rivers of mud flowing down, unstoppable, crushing and sluicing through the streets, shaving humanity off earth’s skin like a scab… 

but I would miss my books…