I feel a strange kind of openness, a freedom, a(n) je ne sais quoi. As I grasp on to my old material here, I feel a whole new world opened up before me. Even the term “old material” seems foreign to me; this is my life’s work. This is a life’s work that I still can’t define or explain. At some point I think I stopped trying; I just kept going, even when going on didn’t make any sense. I could apply that to my life as well. That tortured genius who turned out to be an idiot had a plan, much to the confusion of all those who had to deal with him. The plan began at an absurdly young age, when the spectrum or understanding of life, and the beauty that exists therein, was only a dream of expectation.
The plan didn’t pan out; I’m still here. I knew that if I went through with it, my work wouldn’t end up where I had wanted it to. I had no one in my life to write that romanticized memoir of… well….. some guy that no one knew existed, aside from those who seemed to only remember the bad things, in a way that made them far worse than what they actually were. Maybe that was just how I chose to perceive how others perceived, based on what I perceived… dot dot dot. The holographic argument makes me wonder why we, as a species, hate ourselves so much. I really feel like I can ramble in these little “blog” posts, knowing that very few are actually paying attention. What was I talking about?
It used to torture me that no one was paying attention. I hated myself for not having done anything significant enough for people to actually want to pay attention to what I had to say. The five year old blog made it worse, because in order to see any of the good pics you had to scroll through pages and pages and pages of crap because I posted so much. That was an amazing evolutionary process, if you can stomach scrolling through it all. Most can not, in fact I am quite impressed when people actually do, but… but… is it worth the years of sweat and tears so that one person in North Carolina might be moved by your story? I don’t know. I always said that if I could reach one person I would be happy, but I guess I expected…….
I expected. I expected to be dead. That’s what I expected. I expected to leave all these words and images for someone far more brilliant than I to cram into something coherent and interesting. Talk about delusions. When you’ve said or done the same thing enough times……….. I didn’t take into account what people actually pay attention to: generally, they don’t give a shit about who you are or what you’ve been through, because we are all great and have survived a lot in each of our regards; people want what people want, and when you’ve spent your life refusing what people want, people don’t tend to want you.
My drive to shoot nudes was part of my trying to get out of societal expectations and ideals. I was trying to escape the mundane norm. It’s one of those things that people love, but they don’t love to share. It’s one of those things that people appreciate in the privacy of a dark room when no one’s around, but they won’t frame it and put it up on their wall. That seems to seriously reduce everything to something absurdly simple, but I am simple… I am a simple idiot. I expected my unnoticed example to change the way people approached things, when most people feel the same way I do, they just do it… differently, I guess. I don’t even know.
Everyone around me seems to have a beautiful story that I missed out on. I demanded to be surrounded by extraordinary souls who do extraordinary things, so I ended up alone. I found someone who I thought was extraordinary, but she just perpetually feels like she’s not good enough because of my irrational expectations from this mundane life… and there’s this beautiful little tabula rasa soul, who will grow up with some serious issues if I don’t figure my shit out.
I’m sitting in my car on a foggy, cold, autumn night, at my little Southern California mountain town’s “point,” chain smoking, drinking, and writing; I am 16 again. I’ve been 16 this whole time. I wonder if anyone has noticed? The soundtrack to this evening’s blah is Sigur Rós’ Kveikur. We all have shit to figure out, and we all have great stories. The trick is in telling them in a way that people want to hear them. I love my new family. I’ve got a job that I love…mostly. I’m working too much in hopes to support my new family. I’m not shooting in hopes to be “normal.” I’m not writing in hopes to be just another guy with a good job and a beautiful family. That’s the secret to happiness, isn’t it? Fitting into that mold that society tells you you’re supposed to fit into?
So, amongst this collection of images… this life’s work… I am fighting to be mundane while struggling with being mundane. This is a delusion of a delusion. This is everything and nothing.
I’ve abandoned reading for enlightenment for a brief moment in space and time to read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. When I figure out why, I’ll let you know. This music, though……. listen to this music.
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