Last night, one of the strangest things happened to me. I grabbed my laptop and sat on the makeshift bed some time after midnight. I opened my macbook air, late 2015 model, opened a text document and began to write, however, I wasn’t able to write anything without speaking it first. It felt as if I was dictating to myself but there was no way I was able to stop the tape and catch up with the rest of my thoughts to write them down. I literally had to speak the words to make my fingers type them.
It’s been quite the roller coaster of new and off balanced emotions this weekend, fueled by a lack of sleep and I guess a poorly timed hit from my glass pipe, but hear me out before you judge me. I plead guilty to the charge of doing my fair share of drugs in the past, but NEVER have I been so incapacitated that I have to speak the sentences before I type them. I usually do that part in my head, or if I’m too fucked up, then the whole blog end up reading like a bunch of mumbled jargon and the incorrect spelling of almost every word…like this sample here.
I don’t care how it happened, I just wanted it to end so I could get my thoughts together, but it’s been hard out here lately while I’m going through this endless cycle of a stressful routine and a tension at home that requires me to tip toe around everything as if it was 2 o’clock in the morning. I can’t really get comfortable enough to live, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I couldn’t get comfortable enough to write about it.
This life I’m living, I know I wanted it. I know I prayed for it, and I know I got what I wanted and I knew the day would come when I would realize that although I always get what I want, I don’t get to choose for how long it lasts, or any of the specific details that come along with it. I just have to know when they’re not working for me anymore. Welcome to yesterday.
I get it now. It’s a sad truth that I wish I could scrub from the internet, but I can’t. If you know me in real life then you know. No matter how courteous or thoughtful I am, no matter if I’m at the bar or in church, people will always look at me like an addict. Always.
They will never say that to my face, but they will think it, and they will base their actions and reactions to me on that fact, and I can’t fucking control what people think of me. I have tried many times to convince myself that I don’t care what they say, and I don’t. But, I care what they think and that is a whole different kind of sickness I’ve had my whole life.
Forget drugs, caring what people think about me is probably the most detrimental thing I could do as an artist. I have to remind myself of that. I never stopped to think maybe I put myself in these bizzare situtations because it gives me good material to write about. That’s why I moved to Hollywood at 27, and that’s why now I’m living in the butt end of a 27 foot trailer in Northern California with no bedroom door, door frame, or divider between me and the rest of the space. Maybe that’s why I work at a private club in the hills where every member spends three times what I make in a week at the bar in one night, and then adds an additional tip on top of the 18% gratuity. I’ve never been here before, and I don’t know how much longer I will.
I might have done a bunch of drugs in my life, but I’m not an addict at heart, I’m an artist. I need a struggle to battle with and I hate that fact, but it’s who I am. And what are the main struggles of an artist? Being misunderstood, and worrying about what people think of your art. Regardless if I were a painter or a sculpter, my life is an artform. What I do, and obviously what I say, or in this case, write. All of it becomes my art. The critics will always have thier opinion, and I guess I better either get used it, or don’t give them the opportunity to be right about what they think. Of course, I’ll never know what they really think.
But the truth is, they are right. And I can no longer act as if.
Complaining Is An Art Form 