A vital lesson I keep unlearning is that you can’t overwrite internal monologues with socially scripted conversation. If there is something that wants to be verbalized for whatever intuitive reason you cannot simply replace those words with alternative talk, but instead you fall silent. Or even worse, you babble.

When other people matter your thoughts begin to look like them, your feelings get attached to them, your mood begins to act on them, and if they matter long enough you inevitably begin to see the world through their eyes. The people you love become the windows on your walls. You measure everything, including yourself, according to the expectations you expect them to have.

There is such a person in my life. I give him credit for my happiness and I blame him for my sadness. In my mind I am his fault. Completely. And this makes me violent. A virtuous part of me tells me to let him be but a hungrier (thus more convincing) part of me finds it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine a world without him. I don’t mean to be dramatic but there is a chaos in my heart. Obviously I am not going to say those things. Instead I am going to practice keeping myself silent or safely confined in oblivious chatter until I master the art of emotional repression. This makes no sense.

I WAKE UP and go insane. Reason is strongly rooted in me and I’m not afraid of losing my mind but each day is different and I will never be able to learn any of them. I don’t want to be happy and I say a lot of depressing things but I don’t think I’m ever depressed and I’m suspicious about psychiatry, that therapy might make me normal and well-adjusted and that would be the end of my painting and I need the painting because I can’t afford a psychiatrist. (Edvard Munch felt this and painted The Scream). I would like to limit myself but I have no boundaries. I would like to face my fears but I have no anxieties. I would like explain myself but I have lied so often it is way passed the point of being intentional.

I WAKE UP with half a memory of something I said, something I did, some things that should summarize a person into a set of predictabilities. Personalities are way more up for grabs than generally considered, but stick to one of them and you won’t be called crazy. Needless to say, I am more than the lie I would like to be and I can prove it. I have a birth certificate stating where I’m from, a passport showing where I’ve been, and neighbours knowing where I live. I have somewhere to be, something to do, and someone who cares. I know where I belong and what belongs to me. My class is manifested in my taste and my background appears in my style. The way I talk gives away my values and the way I listen reveals how I think. My name is a myth. My attitude is circumstantial and my moods don’t believe in each other. (Francis Bacon knew this and painted his portraits in triptychs). The story of my life is written in my skin by the promise of death and the people I feel. My actions determine my future and my reactions demonstrate my past. I know what I’m doing and what it’s doing to me. My self-image is self-made and marked by what the child I used to be would think of the adult I have become. I am able to spot myself in a mirror, in a crowd, and on a screen kept in my pocket. I am capable of intellectually saying simple things in a hard way and artistically saying hard things in a simple way but saying doesn’t matter because I am allowed to speak when I say the right words but not when I have some things to say. I want justice for all the wrong reasons.

I WAKE UP but not really. Before the age of seven I had become addicted to violent dreaming. I got here by sleepwalking and have become comfortably lost within a carefully constructed familiarity - keeping my eyes closed and keeping me from finding myself hesitating in every direction. (Gustav Klimt got this and painted The Virgin). Beyond the boarders of imagination there is a stillness waiting to be discovered, a coded muteness that catches every sound, stalls each movement, stills time. I can’t figure out what’s worse: excessive time or limited time or the possibility of no alternatives. Every outcome is problematic; all plots move deathward. Killing time would be the end of my problems but I need my problems - they’re all I have. Why I spend my time on painting about my problems I do not know, but this desperate pursuit of beauty does make the world a little less ugly. (Picasso agreed and painted Guernica).

The Art Of Being Stupid

I Wake Up And Go Insane