writing until I get bored; April 15, 2022
April 15, 2022
Please give me your hands and tell me how safe you feel in your perfectly defended privacy.
You can’t avoid projecting. You are always projecting. Every single sound you utter is a building block in your vast and glorious kingdom of projections, constructed over the course of your entire deluded lifetime. You are a human projector, and when you die you’ll be broken and covered in dust in some back closet where they keep the fucked up AV equipment that no one has bothered to haul to the dump.
[…] I still want to know what your specific projections happen to be. You know. Before you break and get rolled into a dark closet and start gathering dust.
I’m a mess.
I am (or was, I guess?) most comfortable being an enigma. I like my shell, I value privacy, and the more I hear about people getting doxxed or whatever the kids are doing these days, the more I want to withdraw. I like knowing, more or less, what people know about me. It gives me the sparsest illusion of control in a world I think is fundamentally, at any given moment and by our ever-stringent modern standards, off the fucking shits.
And yet I read that first quote and it gutted me. Do I feel safe at all? Fuck no. I feel, at best, on a precipice, in a bubble, this anomalous state where as soon as the slightest disruption breaches the surface it’ll all explode… and then I’m free.
I graduate in less than a month. I’ve gone through the entirety of graphic design school, on a technicality; had my capstone in covid season, that was fun. I like what I was trying to do. I’m not sure I like the result. Hell if I wanted it, or my name, or anything else, anywhere near the subsequent virtual exhibition, and I got away with it. It’s nice to control the means of my creative output, within reason and file size constraints; and yet, I also tend towards feeling very blasé about the inevitability of, say, art theft and other “oh no people are running amok with ideas I put in some public sphere what do” quirks of the internet, to the point where I’ve landed somewhere in the territory of “for the love of god credit your sources, but also: everything is transformative, nothing is original, do whatever you want.”
How the hell am I supposed to put my portfolio online, all professors and classes given due credit, without waving a “hello, please identify me by name and where I went to school and also my social security number” flag?
What? Use my real name and have no link between it and the a-flyleaf handle whatsoever? Blasphemous. I had too much free time as a kid; I feel like I’ve been there, done that in the whole identity-compartmentalizing department. It’s fun to experiment. It’s less fun when I’m trying to define what those branches are even stemming from. And fuck it, I want to show off.
I have something to prove, I feel. I don’t think I want an industry job; I love learning and experimenting, I don’t love the business. I don’t love the looming dread that getting An Art Job™ means working so far beyond 9–5s that I’m shit out of time to do what I want to do, which is more art, but answering to no one.
But it’s a myth, that idea that I’m wholly detached from the opinion of anyone else ever. First of all because We Live In A Context. Second and more importantly, because I was raised on being The Writer or The Artist and that means I’m supposed to have Standards. I have these neat little Projects™, which I have spent time and effort on, you see, which means they have undergone extensive revision, and are ripe for the public eye, because then it will show everyone that I will get a good grade in story-making, which is a reasonable and sane thing to want to achieve. You know, just because it’s not my job doesn’t mean it’s something I can’t do, I just ~choooooose~ not to.
I’ve been snooty. I’ve been elitist. (What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here. [music note emoji]) I’m not like those kids who write Mary Sues and dun cant do grammar gud. I’m not like those artists who get influenced by annie-mays and skip the fundamentals. I, aherm, think people with 500 toyhou.se characters are #hashtagValid, but you know, I’d never do it myself, that doesn’t count as real characterization, I would never stoop so low, ignore all my own silly little designs and untold stories bursting forth from the seams of the curtain.
That’s not professional. A professional keeps their portfolio (professional persona, wears a suit to Zoom lectures) and their hobbies (slug, draws on the wall with crayon) strictly separate. The latter can invoke the former, for the ironies; the former mustn’t call to mind the latter, oh no, for such is an unholy union between Pop Art* and Fisher-Price (god I love the Memphis style), or a professional artist’s website that is stuffed to the brim with tacky 90s gifs—but it’s okay, you see, for they’ve been to fifty-billion art shows and thus have earned the right to be “unprofessional” (I am not linking an example because that would be mean, but look up old internet-based art, it’s genuinely very fun). Haha, envy? I’m supposed to just… do my thing, zero marketing living under a rock speedrun, and expect the fame to follow? Well, fuck that. This liminal space is my home now, I guess.
*edit/n.b.: I misquoted this when writing; the original talks of Bauhaus and Fisher-Price. That said, I doubt non-art-nerds would get that reference, so I kept the butchered version.
Anyway, I had a very “unproductive” day today—not just by the standard of “had things to do, did not do much of them,” but also by my own personal standards, which meant I spent more time actually no, in the interest of giving myself more credit, I did both some colorscripting and some doodling and some writing, and some of that writing made Progress™ towards working out a climactic sequence that still feels somewhat flat to me but is shaping up a little more clearly with each revision. Sure, that was interspersed between social media scrolling (always a sign I’m in need of Enrichment™ but can’t rein in the focus long enough to commit to anything)—but hey, I also spent some time away from the dang screen, talking and helping and having a swell time with my family, who are so much less terminally online and have Real Actual Lives, bless their souls. I love them dearly.
Anyway 2, I included the second quote at the start of this ramble partially because I thought this might segway (no, no, it is not spelled “segue,” I refuse to accept this) into some kind of character or writing rant. It did touch on that a bit, I guess. But also the metaphor gives me those sweet, sweet Deep Existential Thoughts about what’s left of a life, and by extension things like… you know, I wonder sometimes about the “NPCs” of other people’s biographies, if that random grocer or the rude motherfucker at the gas station know they’ve made it to a book, that that’s possibly (unless they’re famous in their own right) the most they’ll ever be known to anyone outside their immediate area. Fuck me, I like to think the things I write and do might be useful to some hypothetical future anthropologist; I’ve been writing my journals like that for hell knows how many years. And of course the people I talk to in-person don’t know about that for beans. For beeeaaaaannns.
Do they know that I want my funeral to be a party with a bouncy house? (I’m joking. But goddammit the traditional way is stuffy. At least hire a comedian to make some morbid-ass jokes.) Hell, do I know what they want, the things that keep them up at night, everything they’ll wish they’d said when it’s too late? y’know, the deep navel-gazey shit that I think about a lot, but that I haven’t quite scraped up the guts to ask about? Man, I should’a quit while I was ahead about two paragraphs ago.
Anyway (3, the triquel), there’s no thesis. I’m not actually bored of writing yet but I have this Gut Feeling that I’m done writing this particular post, for now, and also it’s around the time I tell myself to get off the dang computer which is more of a deciding factor than anything. Publishing this with no revision**, no rereads, no gods, no masters; I’ll probably reread it on my iPad in a few and find 500 things I’ll want to fix, or reword, or edit out entirely. It’s some real James Joyce shit up in here, y’know?
Just take it, man.
**okay, maybe a little revision. in the process of tweaking some CSS, an immediate reread was inevitable.
and with that, you are free!